Instagram not performing at all while TikTok is slowly getting traction

Hi,

I’m about one month into growing an Instagram account for my luxury concierge business.

My content focuses on luxury travel and lifestyle services such as:

  • Restaurant reservations
  • Luxury hotel bookings
  • Chauffeur services
  • Exclusive experiences in Paris

I’ve been posting roughly once per day and I’m starting to see decent traction on TikTok, but Instagram is much slower.

A few questions:

  1. I edit all my videos in CapCut. Does Instagram actually reduce reach for content edited outside of its ecosystem, or is that mostly a myth? Would I see any meaningful difference if I switched to Edits?
  2. Since my account is still new (around one month old), how much time does Instagram typically need to understand an account and identify the right audience?
  3. My content covers different aspects of luxury concierge services. One day I might post a luxury hotel, the next day a restaurant, then a chauffeur service or an experience. While all of these fall under the same business, could this variety make it harder for Instagram to categorize my content and distribute it to the right audience?
  4. Has anyone here grown an account in a similar “luxury travel / concierge / city guide” niche? If so, what content types performed best for you?

Would appreciate any insights from people who have experienced similar differences between TikTok and Instagram.

Thanks!

Comments

AutoModerator•26 days ago•1

If this post doesn't follow the rules, please report it to the mods.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

gptbuilder_marc•26 days ago•1

Instagram and TikTok reward completely different content structures for service businesses. TikTok cold discovery runs on entertainment value. Instagram account growth for a new service brand lives almost entirely in outbound engagement on location-tagged posts from the venues and clients you already work with.

wesdacar•26 days ago•1

I would not make CapCut vs Edits the main variable yet. If the video is exported cleanly and does not have a TikTok watermark, the bigger issue is usually positioning and early audience signals.

For a luxury concierge account, I would tighten the Instagram feed around one clear promise for a while: "Paris luxury concierge for visitors who want the best tables, stays, drivers, and experiences." The variety is fine, but the packaging should feel consistent.

A few things I would test:

  1. Make each Reel answer one specific high-intent question, like "where to stay in Paris for a first luxury trip" or "how to get a hard restaurant reservation without wasting a night."
  2. Use the first 1 to 2 seconds to show the outcome, not the service category.
  3. Mix in carousels that save well: mini itineraries, concierge mistakes, best areas to stay, what to book before arriving.
  4. Treat TikTok as reach and Instagram as trust. On IG, profile clarity, highlights, pinned posts, and proof matter more.

One month is still very early. I would give each content pillar 10 to 15 posts before judging it, but keep the visual style and audience promise much more consistent than the individual topics.

Altruistic-Relief347•26 days ago•1

But ticktock is banned in some countries and I'm living in 1

Vidhmo•26 days ago•1

capcut vs instagram's own editor making a meaningful difference is mostly overstated at this point, instagram has denied penalizing third-party edited content and most testing doesn't show a consistent gap. it's more myth than confirmed pattern.

one month is genuinely too early to draw conclusions on instagram specifically, the platform tends to need longer than tiktok to establish audience signals, often 2-3 months of consistent posting before the algorithm settles on who to show your content to.

the content variety question is the more interesting one. hotels, restaurants, chauffeurs, and experiences are different enough that instagram might be struggling to find one consistent audience. tiktok's fyp is more forgiving of topic variety within a broader theme, instagram reels seems to reward tighter topical consistency for distribution.

for luxury concierge specifically, content that shows the "behind the access" feel, how you get a table at an impossible restaurant, what a chauffeur day actually looks like, tends to outperform straightforward showcases of the locations themselves. the exclusivity/access angle is the actual hook for this niche, not the destinations.

merthopia•25 days ago•1

I wouldn't worry about the capcut thing, it's definitely a myth. My girlfriend reached 90k, and we edit her videos with CapCut mostly. Regarding your content mix, it might help to group your posts into specific themes or days of the week so the algorithm gets a clearer signal on what you are sharing. 1 month is still early, so keep at it and see if focusing on one type of service for a week at a time changes anything.

More like this

EVERYTHING ABOUT THE INSTAGRAM ALGORITHM IN 2026

When you post, Instagram doesn't evaluate your content all at once. Distribution is continuous and adaptive. The system is constantly re-ranking your post based on signals it collects over time. Early engagement matters a lot, but posts can pick up hours or even days later, especially Reels. It's not a single batch test. It's an ongoing one. What you need to understand is that the algorithm is always watching the same core signals, and most people are optimizing for the wrong ones. **What actually moves the needle** Instagram's CEO confirmed this year that three signals are driving distribution more than anything else right now. Watch time is number one by a significant margin. Viewers decide within about 1.7 seconds whether to keep watching. If people are dropping off in the first 3 seconds, your post dies. If they make it past 50%, that's a strong signal. If they rewatch, that's explosive. Your retention curve is more important than your like count, full stop. Second is likes per reach, meaning the percentage of people who actually liked your post out of everyone who saw it. This matters more for reaching your existing followers than for growing to new audiences. Third, and this is the one most people are underestimating, is DM shares. When someone sends your post to a friend, Instagram treats it as a stronger endorsement than a like or even a comment. It signals that your content is worth recommending to strangers. Every post should have a built-in "send this to someone who needs it" moment, intentionally. If you're still optimizing primarily for likes in 2026, you're behind. **The format breakdown** Reels are for reaching new people. Carousels and photos are for your existing followers. Stories are for keeping those followers from leaving. They're not interchangeable. They serve completely different purposes in the algorithm. Carousels are underrated right now. Instagram does re-rank posts over time, which means a carousel that didn't land on the first impression can get another shot. The takeaway: make every slide worth stopping on, not just the first. Stories aren't optional if retention matters to you. Accounts that post consistently to Stories see meaningfully fewer unfollows. Stories keep your existing audience warm while your Reels pull new people in. **What you should actually be doing** Forget posting volume targets. Quality is the prerequisite. High frequency with low quality lowers your retention metrics and actively hurts your distribution. Run this instead: Every day: one high-quality Reel with a hook in the first 2 seconds and a clear share trigger built in, plus 3 to 5 Story frames to stay visible and keep your audience connected. Three to four times a week: a carousel optimized for saves and shares, something educational, useful, or worth returning to. Every single post should pass three checks before it goes out. Does the hook land in under 2 seconds? Is there one clear idea? Is there a reason someone would send this to a friend? **On niche consistency** Your last 9 to 12 posts define how Instagram categorizes your account. The algorithm rewards tight topic focus and punishes accounts that drift between unrelated content. Whatever angle you've built your account around, stay in it consistently. It's not about being in a broad niche. It's about having a distinct point of view within one. A hundred fitness creators exist. Only a few have a perspective that's immediately recognizable. That's the real differentiator. **Where I've seen this work** I grew from 100 followers to 360k using these principles. Grew 10+ accounts from 0 to 10k and sold most of them. The process was the same every time: understand what the algorithm is currently rewarding, make content that earns retention and shares, stay consistent for months not weeks, and adjust based on what the data tells you. It's not exciting. It's a system. Systems win. **TLDR** This post blew up last time so I'm bringing it back with answers to the most common questions I got. Before anything else, few things I wish someone told me earlier: 1. **Consistency** is the only thing that actually matters. I know everyone says this and everyone ignores it. That's literally why most people fail. The people winning are not smarter than you, they just didn't quit. 2. Video quality matters more than most people admit. Drop CapCut, get Adobe Premiere or hire an editor. Skip Fiverr, find editors in **Discord communities** instead, way cheaper and actually good. 3. Stop wasting hours on scripts, hooks, and hunting for content ideas manually. I use **SocialHunt** for all of that. You can train it on viral content in your niche and it handles the research and scripting side so you can just focus on filming. 4. Use **Superflow** to handle distribution, workflows, and repetitive ops. If you’re doing things manually, you’re capping growth.

3 months ago
255

Any people that runs 100 to 10k followers pages (any social media)?

Hey all, I own a business that involves many clients that promote their product, art or website with TikTok (also Instagram, Youtube and Facebook). I want to offer them a way to post their content, or to get content created and posted for them on existing TikTok pages. Basically you got pages in a specific theme (sport, anime, cinema, culture, memes...) and you rent it for a specific period of time. You get paid every month, and all you have to do is basically connecting the account once to our system. You can opt-out anytime you want, you keep the full ownership of the account. That's basically a way to monetize your pages passively. For now I'm doing it myself with my own pages (3 tiktok pages with 500 to 3k followers, and 1 6k subscribers Youtube channel), I made around $800 renting these for less than a month. If someone is interested, please comment or DM!

3 months ago
222

Everything dying at 300 views for so long before I finally caught the problem

I've been absolutely obsessed with short form content for the last two years. Like people have staged actual interventions about my health level of obsessed. I'm talking 11-14 hour days breaking down what separates successful videos from failures, experimenting with different hook variations, rewriting scripts until my brain hurts, testing every editing approach I could possibly get my hands on. Why this level of obsession? Because I'm absolutely certain short form video is the backbone of everything right now. Growing followers, selling anything, generating opportunities, creating brands from nothing. Every part of it depends on whether you can hold someone's attention for 30 seconds. But here's what nearly made me quit entirely: despite the constant daily grind, nothing was hitting. I'd pour 7-8 hours into crafting one video only to watch it crash at 300 views. Tried every tactic from every person claiming to have figured it out. Bought their courses. Applied their "proven" methods. Still going nowhere. I seriously started thinking maybe I'm just not the type of person who can make this work. Like maybe there's some fundamental ability I'm completely lacking. Then something clicked. I'm grinding constantly, but I'm operating completely blind. I don't actually know what's broken. I'm essentially just trying random things hoping something eventually works. So I stopped hunting for some mythical viral code and started analyzing actual data. Analyzed my last 50 videos second by second, documented every retention drop, and discovered 5 consistent patterns that were systematically killing my performance: 1. **Vague mysterious hooks are totally invisible** "This will transform you..." gets scrolled past every time. But "I used resistance bands for 55 days and my shoulder mobility actually decreased" stops people mid scroll. Specific concrete details destroy vague teasing without exception. 2. **Seconds 5-7 are where everything gets decided** Most viewers leave between 4-7 seconds if you haven't proven it's worth watching. I was creating slow buildups like a complete amateur. Now my strongest visual or most compelling number arrives exactly at second 5. That's where the hook that genuinely holds people. 3. **Any gap beyond 1 second absolutely kills your retention** Tracked this obsessively, anything past 1.2 seconds makes people think the video stopped. What feels like natural comfortable pacing to you reads as complete dead time to someone scrolling. Cut significantly tighter than feels normal. 4. **Visual variety is absolutely critical** If nothing changes on screen for more than 3 seconds, attention vanishes without warning. I started constantly rotating camera angles, cutting to b-roll, moving text placement, literally anything to maintain constant visual movement. Went from losing 50% at the halfway mark to keeping 70%. 5. **Rewatch rate is dramatically more important than most people realize** Videos people watch more than once get pushed exponentially harder by the algorithm. Started planting subtle details that aren't obvious first viewing, editing faster, adding elements worth discovering on rewatch. Rewatch percentage jumped from 8% to 31% and reach went completely through the roof. Honestly the biggest shift was abandoning all guesswork and actually measuring what was happening at every second. Came across this one app that goes way beyond showing where people drop off, it literally tells you why and exactly how to correct it. That's when everything transformed. Went from averaging 300 views to hitting 18k in about 4 weeks. Regular analytics show you people are leaving. This one shows the exact second, the actual reason, and what to adjust before your next post. If you're uploading consistently but stuck below 1k views, your content isn't the problem. You just don't know what's genuinely working versus what you assume is working. Listen, I'm sharing this because breaking through was honestly one of the hardest things I've tackled. I really wish someone had just explained exactly what needed fixing when I was stuck there. Would have saved months of confusion and doubt. So that's what I'm doing now for anyone who needs it.

4 months ago
221