The archive feature on Instagram was rolled out a few years ago and is a handy tool for anyone who would like to tidy up the aesthetic of their timeline.
Sometimes as you work your way through Instagram you realise that you have ended up posting pictures that you aren’t entirely happy with the look of, or that don’t fit your brand perfectly. When you look back on your timeline as a whole grid and you feel you need a tidy up, then archiving is the technique to use.
The archive feature is great for removing certain posts from your grid so that no one else can see them anymore, and allows you to have a spring clean. The advantage of archiving is that you don’t end up deleting them entirely. This will enable you to put the post back onto your timeline if you wanted to at the click of a button, but it also means you don’t lose any of the likes and traffic statistics that were associated with that post.
This feature is also a handy tool for customer service issues if you are looking after a consumer-facing brand online. Sometimes you find on social media that you come across a curmudgeon, a troll or someone out to pick a fight with your brand or your customers because they were having a bad day. Social media can be a hot bed for people who like to argue, and if you weren’t out to pick a fight in the first place, seeing this play out on your timeline is can be quite dismaying.
In these cases you can quickly find that a post you’ve put out in good faith gets hijacked entirely, taking the original post way off-topic, and that you’d rather just remove it for further commenting to draw a line under it.
A word of caution though, before choosing to archive a post because of negative comments levelled at you, think about a secondary reaction to this kind of action. Censoring negativity and just deleting criticism that is aimed at you without trying to engage with people to repair a genuine issue can cause a bigger problem than just leaving negative comments there in the first place.
If, for instance, somebody is complaining about your customer service or the quality of your product, then you should seek to address it as transparently as possible on your social timelines. This can often turn around the opinions of the person making the complaint in the first place, but it also shows the other people watching your brand that you are prepared to answer for your brand and resolve any issues that people raise about it.
If you nurture a habit of deleting negative comments and archiving off posts when things go wrong, you can quite often find that people will have taken a screenshot of the posts and will come back at you accusing you of censoring them. This then takes the argument away from whatever the original complaint was about in the first place, and re-focuses on the way you deal with poor feedback. This can be even more damaging for your brand than dealing with the complaint in the first place.
Archiving a post on Instagram is actually really very simple.
To put the post back onto your timeline:
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