Am I The Girl Who Deleted Instagram?
Please don't try to convince me to re-join Instagram and I won't try to convince you to leave.
In January of this year, I made the ~*shocking*~ announcement that I was deleting the Instagram app from my phone. And while I haven’t deleted my account in its entirety (that’s coming soon, I can feel it), I haven’t logged into it in 7 months.
When I meet someone new, they ask me for my Instagram. I tell them I don’t have it.
When I catch up with a friend, I ask what they’ve been doing since our parasocial relationship via Instagram ended.
When someone asks me if I’ve seen XYZ meme, I say no. Then when they send it to me, I have to tell them, “Sorry I can’t see this since I’m not on Instagram.”
These statements are often met with some rendition (whether IRL or via text) of the head-exploding emoji. 🤯
Then, I get peppered with questions:
🤔 But what about your business?
💥 My business does just fine without Instagram, thanks.
🤔 Don’t you have FOMO?
💥 No, I just talk to the people I want to talk to.
🤔 Do you feel so liberated?
💥 Honestly, I don’t feel much anything toward Instagram or toward the space where it once was in my life.
Seven months have passed since I got off Instagram and these conversations have died down. I often talk about alternate marketing methods and the hellscape that is the internet with other friends who have left Instagram like
. But for the most part, Instagram is just a thing that exists that I’m not involved in—much like TikTok, which I’ve avoided because I know myself and know I would spend hours a day scrolling endlessly, looking for my next laugh.That is until I made the seemingly mundane decision to delete Strange Salt’s account last week.
For the better part of this year, I’ve spent my time relaunching my brand agency, Strange Salt. We’ve gone through a lot of changes since our launch in 2022 and as I reflected on our favorite clients and our best work, I realized we needed a brand overhaul. As part of that work, I put my brand strategy cap on (who would have thought that would be helpful? Me. I would have thought.) to evaluate our marketing efforts and understand what was working and what was just noise.
The things to rise to the top:
👍 Client referrals
👍 Member referrals
👍 LinkedIn content from me as the founder
👍 Webinars
👍 Community contributions in places like
Things that didn’t have much traction:
👎 Our newsletter (it needed a little love and consistency behind it)
👎 Google ads (a failed experiment that may have been better with an expert driving decisions)
👎 Instagram (it looked great but we struggled to connect with buyers)
When I looked at the time spent making Instagram look so good (see a posthumous screenshot below), I realized the return was not worth it. So when it came time to launch the new brand, I decided I’d make an announcement on Instagram (just to “get something out there!” Sound familiar?) and take a set-it-and-forget-it approach. I even designed the graphic that would take over 9 squares on my precious grid.
I logged into my account on my desktop (because hell no, I was not downloading the app again). I realized I needed to update some other items on our account—our bio, highlights, and contact information.
As I started updating these items, I got stuck in an incredibly frustrating, endless loop between Meta Accounts Manager and Instagram, returning to one or the other empty-handed—the features I needed hiding behind layers and layers of buttons and tabs.
I found my finger hovering over the delete account button. I paused and did a quick gut check.