Instagram is becoming one of the most promising social media platforms to date, reaching a billion active users in 2019, and see 500 million daily Stories users. An ongoing concern among businesses looking to tap into that growth, and build their on-platform audience, is that Instagram may follow Facebook’s model of reducing business page reach and pushing brands toward paid ads.

Over time, Facebook’s main app went from enabling businesses to reach every user who Liked their Page, to reducing that capacity, bit-by-bit. Facebook’s motivation, it said, was to improve the user experience – as more brands came on board, users were getting flooded with brand content, drowning out updates from their friends and family, and reducing the utility of the app.

That makes sense; if you’re not seeing updates from the people you care about, you’ll likely care less about the app itself as a result. But it also, conveniently, plays into Facebook’s broader business strategy, reducing organic reach after many businesses had built a reliance on Facebook traffic. That forced a lot of them into paying for reach, essentially trapping them into Facebook’s business ecosystem.

These days, most Pages are lucky to be reaching single-digit percentages of their Facebook Page fans. Is that how it will play out on Instagram as well?  If so, it’s more important now than ever to create a solid strategy, for both paid and organic reach.