For months, we’ve been looking at Locowise’s monthly Instagram engagement and growth reports, and things haven’t looked good for quite a while. This week, they released their look at March finding follower growth to be down 83.59% year-over-year, though it did increase by 50% compared to February.

According to the firm, post engagement in March was 1.1% of the total followers, which is a 30.95% increase from February, but still a 60.71% decline from April 2015.

It found that 91.23% of all posts in March were images and that images engaged 1.13% of the total followers. Videos engaged 0.91%, it found.

“You get a 24.18% boost in engagement by posting images rather than videos,” says Locowise’s Marko Saric (via SocialTimes).

His report references Instagram’s proposed algorithmic feed changes that have had so many people in a panic.

“Algorithm should be a good move for the platform. It will hopefully bring new life, and more growth and engagement for those that publish great content that people want,” he says. “We can expect something like the Facebook algorithm. Some factors that will impact it would be the format of the post, the organic engagement on the post and the amount of time people spend on the post.”

The whole point of the changes is to increase engagement, so those who are able to cut through should benefit greatly. Make no mistake though. You’re going to have to spend money to really get ahead.

Image via Instagram