If your influencer marketing strategy relies on Instagram Pods, you might be in some trouble as Facebook begins to crack down.

What are Instagram Pods?

If you're not aware of what Instagram Pods are, they're groups of influencers who get together and like each other's content. So if you were to join a Pod, and I have a piece of content I need some likes and shares on, I post in the Pod, ask you for help, and you and the other members of the Pod go and hit Like on my content. Ultimately, it's a way of artificially boosting engagement numbers.

And now, Facebook's cracking down on this by shutting down some of the larger Pods. I don't think it's particularly difficult for them to write a technology that will flag more of these Pods as they get deeper and deeper. So to me, it's a little bit like search engine optimization and what Google has been doing to monitor their content. Over the years, there have been dozens, or even hundreds, of tricks that SEO people use to rank their pages ahead of others. If you remember, way back, you would take all of your keywords, you would turn the font white so nobody could see it but Google, and you would rank really well. Well as soon as Google caught onto this, they shut it down.

What You Should Be Focused On

That kind of thing is now happening here on Facebook and Instagram with influencer marketing. So don't focus on the tricks, don't focus on the gimmicks that are gonna give you five minutes advantage. Focus on how do I get quality content created in the first place, and then what do I do with that high-performing content? If you do that, Instagram and Facebook are never gonna mess with you.

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