Capybara The Instagram Conqueror

Id Eco Super-Eco

6 years ago

My social media game, much like everything I do in my life, is half-assed.

I post on Instagram every other day or so. On my FaceBook page much less so. On my Twitter virtually never.

After 1.5 years of having an IG account (@IdEcoSuperEco) I have 188 followers as of this post. Not much by the social media game standards, but I consider those 188 followers to be real fans of either me as a human-ish being or of the content that I produce.

Look at that handsome young man. Yes, I am wearing an Id Eco Super-Eco shirt. That shirt was produced as a limited edition merchandise item. And by limited edition I mean an instance of 1.

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With a limited number of Instagram followers I have fairly modest metrics for my posts. For those of you that don’t have analytics on your IG accounts those metrics are impressions (the number of people that have seen your picture), engagement (the number of likes or comments your picture generates), and a few other metrics.

When I post a picture, regardless of how good I think it is, it will perform within a certain range of metrics. My top performing pics and my poorly performing pics are never true outliers – they fall within a standard predictable range.

Then, a true statistical outlier happened. It came in the form of this dude:

This is a capybara that I encountered on the banks of the Tambopata river in the Peruvian Amazon. In a very short amount of time it became my all-time leader in almost every metric on Instagram…by a huge margin.

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I have posted capybara pictures before and they did okay from a metrics standpoint. I felt that this picture was decent, but nothing incredibly great or even good. Certainly not a record-breaking post.

I posted the picture in the morning and there was nothing strange about the metrics for a couple of hours. Then, it exploded.

Within 4 hours of posting I started to get tons of engagement notifications. I looked at the impressions and they were skyrocketing. Something statistically unusual was happening with this sexy capybara.

The metrics rampage for Capybara The Conqueror continued for a couple of days. By the time this picture started to decline in metrics it had doubled my previous highest ranking picture for impressions (a video of a leopard licking a dead baby zebra that I shot in Kenya).

When I look at the analytics it is no surprise that the shark content does well. Why the pictures of me do well I’ll never know.

It also had 32 more engagements than my previous record post (the profile picture on my IG account).

Pictures of me do well for engagement. It’s mostly people leaving comments saying things like, “Can you put a bag over your head or something?”

To this day I don’t know why this picture, of all the pictures that I have posted, became an outlier. My only clue is the “From Other” category Instagram gives to indicate how impressions are generated.

Just the “From Other” impressions alone would make this my all-time highest impression picture

I don’t know what “From Other” means. If I had to guess I would think that the IG algorithm gods favored this post and displayed it heavily in the Pictures You Might Like search feature.

Of course, maybe people really just dig capybara. Ya know, they are pretty cool being the world’s largest rodent and all. Oh, and they look like giant guinea pigs, but mainly because they are.

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Trust that my subsequent pictures on Instagram have performed back to the standard predictable metrics range. I am back to being statistically mediocre again, but, damn it was good to be favored by the algorithm gods just one time.

Guess that I will just have to keep posting wildlife pictures to see what happens. Yes, there will be more pictures of me as well. Sorry, but not sorry for those!