Should I archive Instagram posts that don’t perform well?

I get this question very often:

Should I delete/archive my older posts that didn’t get a lot of likes and comments?

For the most part, this is my answer:

What I mean is… no. I don’t believe we should get rid of posts (whether you delete or archive them) just because they didn’t do well.

On the contrary. If they are relevant posts for our audience, not only you should keep it so profile visitors can see it, but also share it to stories with some text to give people more information, which usually helps.

If the post didn’t do well because you posted at a really bad time, like a holiday weekend, you should post it again at a later date so more people can see it.

Now if you think it didn’t perform because your image didn’t do the job to make people stop the scroll, reuse the copy with a different image.

If the first line of your caption didn’t make people click ‘more’ and read your whole caption, fix the captions and post it again!

Now is there ever a situation where I think you should archive an Instagram post? Sure.

1) When the post is time sensitive and keeping it doesn’t help your business.

Ex: you own a restaurant and you will be closed for a private event that day. You post about it, so people don’t come in. After the event, archive it.

No one needs to know you were closed yesterday. In fact that could discourage someone to visit or confuse someone seeing that post the next day.

2) If you’re an influencer and do brand partnerships.

If your last post performed really poorly and that doesn’t represent the average performance of your posts, I’d say go ahead and archive it.

Some possible brand partners could look at that latest post instead of looking at the average engagement of several of your posts.

3) Your products or services have changed.

If you have recent posts about a product or service you don’t offer anymore, I would go ahead and archive those.

But…

How about when my aesthetic changes?

While many people would delete all their posts and start over, I do not recommend this.

First because your old posts would most likely add value to new visitors that may only have a few new posts to look at.

But also because when you see a brand new account with a few posts and thousands of followers, people assume you bought followers.

So in that case, you could do a few posts dividing the new and old content and talking about the changed and go from there.

My friends at @Switchyards did this well a little while ago when they changed their model and content. They added a row of posts with the word OLD with an arrow down and a row with the word NEW with an arrow up.

Most of all, we only have so much time and resources to put into our social. That’s why Instead of looking back and overthinking older posts, I recommend we move forward and put all our effort into improving from where we are.

xoxo

Manu