Look at a landscape architecture practice on Instagram with 40,000 followers. Two years ago, a typical post landed around 800 likes. The same kind of post, on the same account, now lands around 90. Nothing about the work changed. The platform changed underneath it.
This isn’t one account’s problem. Socialinsider’s analysis of 35 million Instagram posts puts the average engagement rate on still-image posts at 0.35 percent in early 2026, down from around 1.7 percent in 2019. About four-fifths of the engagement on a still image is gone in seven years.
The algorithm now rewards short video and recognisable personalities. Most firm accounts are neither. A studio that built a careful image-led grid over five years is now competing for attention with a reel of a principal walking a site in a hard hat.
For a decade, Instagram organised how design firms presented themselves online. It was the working portfolio. It was where students decided where to apply, where journalists came to find projects. Those audiences haven’t disappeared. They are no longer arriving by the same route.
Why another platform isn’t the answer
Social media has moved on. The audience and the advertising money are going to short-form, personality-led, influencer content. Even if a landscape architecture practice could produce a steady stream of it, that format and that audience are not the people who hire a firm. Procurement officers, council planners, architects and developers are not on TikTok looking for a landscape architect. And if they are on TikTok, they are watching funny videos of dogs. They’re not there to pick a firm for their next project.
Trying to follow Instagram’s decline onto the next platform is chasing the wrong reader.
What the audience that hires you actually does
They read. They read emails from people whose judgement they already trust. They read case studies before they get on a call. They sit with the writing on a firm’s own site, on their own time, often months before they reach out. That is the channel doing the work.
Two things compound for firms that stop chasing the algorithm.
The email newsletter, and why it has lasted
The first is an email newsletter. A short, plain essay every quarter, written by a named partner, sent to procurement officers, council planners, architects, developers and former clients. Email has been outperforming social media for fifteen years. Open rates on a permission-based, segmented business list routinely sit between thirty and fifty percent. A still-image Instagram post sees roughly 0.35 percent of its audience. The newsletter is between eighty and a hundred and forty times more likely to actually reach the person you wanted to reach.
Email also doesn’t get throttled. The newsletter lands in the inbox of every person who asked to receive it. It lands at a quiet moment of the working day, on a screen the reader already trusts, sent by someone they actively chose to hear from. Nobody at Meta can take that distribution away from you. Nobody can change the algorithm next quarter and halve your reach. The list is yours.
The economics are the other reason it has lasted. A firm that writes one good essay a quarter, sent to a list of three thousand engaged readers, will reach roughly the same number of qualified prospects as a daily Instagram account with 40,000 followers spending hundreds of hours a year on content. The newsletter outlasts staff changes. It compounds, because the list gets longer and the reader trust gets deeper, while the social account starts from zero every time the algorithm shifts.
The case study and the essay
The second is the writing on the firm’s own site. A long considered project page that explains the brief, the constraint, the move that unlocked it, and what the place is doing five years on, does more in one visit than a year of posts. A blog post that takes a position on a question the discipline is actually arguing about will be read, forwarded and quoted long after a reel has dropped out of the feed. The work lives at a URL the firm owns, which is the only durable distribution channel left.
Instagram organised how design firms presented themselves online for a decade. It is no longer doing that job, and another platform won’t replace it.
Instagram isn’t dead, and keeping an account isn’t a mistake. But the platform that did the heavy lifting for design firms for ten years is no longer doing the job, and the platforms eating its lunch were built for a different audience entirely. The firms that figure this out first will be the ones who stop waiting for the algorithm to recover and start writing somewhere they own.