29 Pros And Cons Of Instagram

Instagram is one of the most beloved apps in the world. It has come a long way from its humble origins as a platform solely for photo sharing to being one of the most used and versatile social media platforms around.

Since the company was started in 2010, it has continued to upgrade and expand its offerings to better serve the needs of its users and keep up with content trends.

Instagram has also added several new capabilities to support businesses and marketers in their quest to build trust, raise awareness, drive engagement, and make sales.

Although Instagram is the go-to app for when people want to express their creativity or romanticize their lives, the platform is not without flaws.

This post is going to walk you through the pros and cons of Instagram to help you decide once and for all whether it’s time to sign up for the app or move on from it.

Pros of Instagram

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1. Home to two billion users

As of January 2023, Instagram was ranked the fourth most popular social media app in the world based on the number of active users who use the platform monthly. Instagram had about 2 billion monthly active users, trailing behind Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp.

With this many people using Instagram, the app’s networking potential is immense. You are pretty much guaranteed to find people who share your interests or an audience for whatever you’re selling.

With the right kind of content, you have a good chance of going viral on Instagram. And even if virality is not your goal, you can still connect with lots of people and create significant awareness for yourself or your brand.

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2. It’s free to use

One of the main reasons for Instagram’s growing popularity is the fact that you don’t have to pay to use it. You can download the app from Google Play Store or the Apple App Store for free, create an account, and use it how you like without ever paying a dime.

However, if you choose to subscribe to your favorite Instagram celebrity or creator’s account, you might need to cough up a few bucks for the privilege.

You will also need to pay certain costs if you decide to create a sponsored post (paid ads) to get more reach, engagements, or conversions.

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Photo by cottonbro studio

3. Highly visual platform

The beauty of Instagram is that it allows people to communicate and tell stories through photos and videos rather than text. Not only does this give you more room to flex your creativity, it also engages your audience and makes your posts more memorable.

With Instagram, you don’t have to think so much about what to say. You can just take a picture or make a video and let it do the talking for you.

Want to show how much fun you’re having on vacation? Feel like sharing advice on how you navigate your career? Instagram is there to bear witness to your life, thoughts, feelings, and journey.

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4. Offers direct messaging

Instagram allows you to take relationships beyond the timeline and out of public view by messaging people privately.

If you come across someone you know or admire or you find a business that’s selling something you want, you can click the message button on their profile to reach out to them.

The great thing about Instagram’s direct messaging feature is that you don’t necessarily have to follow someone to be able to message them. However, accounts can also change the settings to grant DM access to only the people they follow and who follow them.

Photo by Los Muertos Crew

5. Supports filters, stickers, and GIFs

Instagram offers a variety of filters that you can use to beautify your posts and make them more captivating. The platform reserves most of its filters for pictures or videos you create within the app.

However, it also has a limited set of filters you can apply to pictures uploaded from your camera roll. When swapping direct messages, Instagram gives you a wide range of stickers and GIFs to choose from to spice up your chats.

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6. Allows for profile customization

When you create an Instagram account, you can customize it by adding a picture of yourself along with a bio describing who you are and what you do.

You can add links to your profile to direct people to your website, store page, portfolio, or even your WhatsApp profile.

Also, you can include contact information like your phone number, email address, and location. Instagram provides a highlight feature for uploading additional content or organizing your posts into categories or topics without crowding your page.

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Photo by Brian Ramirez

7. Feature-rich business accounts

Instagram allows you to convert your personal account to a business account to enjoy business-focused features like a professional dashboard for tracking how your page is performing.

A business account will enable you to add contact information such as location, email address, and phone number to your profile. You’ll receive a category label, a secondary inbox for organizing your messages, and access to Instagram Insights.

Insights will allow you to track relevant marketing information for your account like who your followers are and the level of engagement you’re getting from specific posts.

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8. Provides diverse video content options

Video is one of the most engaging and effective mediums you can use to transmit information. Instagram understands the power of this content format and gives users multiple ways to take advantage of it.

If you want to share static images or short 15-second videos that will disappear after 24 hours, you can make use of Instagram’s Stories feature.

For something more permanent, you can create in-feed videos that are between 3-60 seconds long or reel videos between 15-30 seconds long.

Photo by cottonbro studio

9. It has a live-streaming function

Another video content format that the social network offers is Instagram Live. This allows you to broadcast your video live so other people can watch it and leave comments in real time.

The Live feature is great for hosting webinars, interviews, announcements, product launches, live podcasts, and more. You can promote your upcoming live event to get people excited about tuning in.

At the end of your live session, you can share the video to your story or download it to your camera roll so you can post it on other platforms or repurpose it in the future.

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10. Excellent geotagging feature

Geotags allow users to pin their location or the place where a picture was taken to their posts.

This means that if someone shares a picture of a gorgeous meal that they had and includes a geotag, you’ll be able to see the name and location of the establishment where they ate the meal.

This saves you the trouble of having to message the person to find out the name of the restaurant.

What’s more, you can search for the name of the establishment to discover other geotagged pictures and videos of the location to give you a better idea of what the place is like.

11. Allows for easy cross-platform sharing of content

Instagram’s content requirements are versatile which makes it super easy for you to share the same content you post on Instagram on other platforms without needing to edit it first.

Is one of your Instagram reels getting a lot of buzz? You can post it to TikTok so a whole new audience can appreciate it. Recorded a long video to share on your feed? Share it on your YouTube Channel so your subscribers can benefit from it too.

No need to spend time creating separate content for each platform, just take your Instagram posts and distribute them on other sites.

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12. Promotes ease of online shopping

One of the pros of Instagram is that it serves as more than just a social networking platform. Lots of small, medium, and large businesses sell their goods and services on it so you can easily shop for a wide variety of items from the comfort of your house.

You get to see pictures and videos of what you intend to buy and even view comments and user-generated content from other customers.

This way, you can better judge whether the brand is trustworthy or if the product is of good quality before handing over your money.

13. It has dedicated creator profiles

If you’re a content creator or thinking about becoming one, Instagram offers special creator profiles that you can take advantage of. All you have to do is switch to a professional account from your personal account.

The benefits of moving to a creator account include seamless management of multiple accounts, and access to insights and analytics. Additionally, you’ll be able to add contact information to your page and create custom links for your Instagram Stories.

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14. Fully customizable ads

If you want to give your posts more exposure, Instagram enables you to run advertising campaigns via Facebook Ads Manager. Creating ads will get your posts in front of people beyond your organic reach.

With Instagram Ads, you can customize everything from how long you want the campaign to run to what you want to achieve with the ad. Your ads can take different formats including video, photos, carousel, and collections.

Instagram also provides multiple advertisement placement options so you can choose to display your ads on the regular feed, in stories, in reels, or even in the explore feed.

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Photo by TANIA

15. Supports archiving of posts

There may be posts that you no longer want to appear on your Instagram feed for whatever reason but you don’t want to delete them permanently.

In this case, Instagram lets you archive the posts or stories by moving them to a separate section of your page where only you can view them.

You can archive individual posts and stories or archive multiple posts at once. You’ll still be able to see the comments and likes on the archived posts and you can unarchive them to return them to your feed any time you want.

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16. It’s the most popular influencer marketing platform

An analysis of over 1800 influencer campaigns involving social media revealed that Instagram is the most popular choice for such activities. It was used in 94% of analyzed campaigns, whereas the second most popular platform, Facebook was only used in 43%.

Whether you’re a business looking to leverage influencer marketing to grow your brand or you’re thinking about becoming an influencer, Instagram is the best platform to do it on.

Regardless of the niche you’re in, you’re guaranteed to find a diverse range of big-name and micro-influencers who can help promote your business to their doting community.

17. Provides analytics and reporting tools

If you’re using a professional account—business or creator profile—Instagram provides you with analytics features for tracking important metrics. From your analytics reports, you’ll be able to see how each of the content you post performs.

You’ll learn who your most active followers are, how old they are, and what locations they are spread across. Instagram will help you detect their behavior patterns, as well as the number of interactions your posts get.

These insights will allow you to create more effective content for your brand.

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18. Supports various content preferences

Whether your business or brand is targeting a single demographic or multiple audiences, you won’t be forced to leave anyone behind when marketing on Instagram.

This is because Instagram is a flexible tool that you can tweak to satisfy whatever demographic you’re speaking to at the time. If your target audience is Gen Z, you can captivate them by creating stunning videos and photos with brief captions, which they tend to respond better to.

And if you’re trying to reach millennials who love comprehensive information, you can lead with long descriptions buttressed with statistics where possible.

Photo by ready made

19. Customizable privacy settings

A lot of people use Instagram to connect with friends, family, and close acquaintances. They don’t really want some random person to be able to view what they post.

If you belong to this group, you don’t have to worry about your posts being out in public and accessible to every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Instagram provides privacy settings that you can activate to prevent people who don’t follow you from seeing your photos and videos.

Also, with a private account, anyone who wants to follow you will have to send a follow request which you can accept or reject.

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20. Provides in-app editing tools

One great thing about Instagram is that you can create all your content from right within the app. You can take photos or make reels in the app and edit them without ever leaving Instagram.

The platform’s impressive editing capabilities can be used to add filters to your photos, add text, effects, and music, or even trim and speed up your videos. It will serve you well as long as you’re not looking to make any complicated edits.

Photo by iJseven Misha Pavchuk

21. Supports search and exploration

On Instagram, you’re not restricted to only viewing the content of people you follow. The app has an explore page that offers an endless stream of content based on the photos and videos you’ve liked or watched recently.

You can take advantage of Instagram’s search function to find accounts of celebrities, friends, and other people you may like so you can follow them or scroll through their posts.

You can also search for hashtags or locations to view content that has been shared using those tags.

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22. Allows content to be saved for later

One of the pros of using Instagram that not many people are aware of is that it allows you to save any content you come across to your profile.

Let’s say you’re scrolling through the app and you see a workout you want to try the next time you’re in the gym, you can just tap the bookmark icon above the caption and it’ll be added to your saved collection.

You can even create multiple collections and group your saved posts into different categories to keep them organized and make it easy for you to find specific posts in the future.

Cons of Instagram

1. The platform is crawling with advertisements

Yes, Instagram is great for spreading the word about your brand or your company. But for the average user who’s just there to have a good time, the amount of ads they have to put up with can be a tad overwhelming.

Whether you’re scrolling through your timeline, watching stories, or jumping from one reel to another, you are going to be shown several sponsored posts along the way.

Nowadays, the app even pushes organic posts of content creators you’ve never interacted with before to your timeline.

2. Posts do not support closable links

Unlike other social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn where you can easily add links to your posts for audiences to click on, clickable URLs are not supported on Instagram posts.

So if you want people to visit a website or take any kind of action requiring them to first click on a link, you have to add the link to your bio first. Then you can use your caption to tell them to click on the link in your bio.

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Photo by Nino Souza

These extra steps can make people lose interest and keep on scrolling instead of going to your profile to click through as directed.

3. Paid advertising can be pricey

Although running ads on Instagram will probably get you more clicks on average than Facebook, it will also cost you more on average. This is because Instagram’s cost per click is higher than other social media platforms.

It’s crucial to note that a high cost per click doesn’t necessarily translate to a higher cost per conversion.

It just means that you’re likely to pay more for the clicks your ads get when running your campaign on Instagram, especially if you’re advertising in a popular or competitive industry.

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4. Requires a lot more effort to use

Instagram is an effort-intensive platform. If you want to grow your following to several (hundred) thousands, you have to be prepared to put in the work.

You have to capture quality images or produce interesting videos and post multiple times a day on both your feed and stories to give your brand adequate exposure.

Simply editing the content you want to post on Instagram can take hours, not to mention the time you spent planning and creating the content. You need to consider this time and financial cost if you’re considering building and marketing your brand on Instagram.

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Photo by Kristina Paukshtite

5. Instagram’s algorithm is constantly changing

One of the cons of Instagram that you need to be prepared for if you’re thinking of using the app is that its algorithm can change at any time.

By the time you think you’ve finally mastered how the platform’s mysterious algorithm works, the company can wake up and decide to tweak things.

These constant changes make it hard for people to keep up and stay one step ahead when it comes to gathering engagements and maximizing the reach of their accounts.

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6. Privacy settings are a bit restrictive

Instagram forces you to choose between making your entire account private or leaving it to be accessible to the general public. You can’t choose to make one post or video private and keep the others public or vice versa.

They are either all public or all private. There’s no middle ground. To get around this, you can create another account, make one private, and use the other as your public profile.

Alternatively, instead of turning your entire account private when you only want to share a single post privately, you can use the close friends feature to share it on your Instagram Stories.

7. Instagram can use your content how they want

Under Instagram’s terms and conditions that you agree to when you sign up for the app, you are granting the app the license to use any content you upload to the platform. Instagram is free to use your content however they like including for promotional purposes.

So even if you don’t like the way and manner in which the platform might decide to use your posts, there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it because you agreed to their usage terms.

Conclusion

Instagram’s popularity is only going to increase in the coming years. So you have little to lose and plenty to gain by deciding to promote yourself or your organization via the platform.

Sure, the app has a few kinks that it needs to work out but for the most part, it’s an amazing app for sharing visual content and connecting with a large network of people.

Or for just entertaining yourself with snippets of other people’s lives.