Planning on the 'Gram
Open up Instagram, tap over to the #plannergram hashtag, and you’ll be confronted with cleanly styled photos of bullet journals (bujos), ringbound planners, Erin Condren planners, Hobonichi Techos, Passion Planners, and every other planner type you can think of. White pages, leather covers, and Tombow brush pens stand out against wood and cloth backgrounds, or any attractive surface plannergrammers can find around the house. Pages covered in bright stickers and washi tape add pops of color to a feed of pen-only pages with neutral accents.
Larger hashtags like #plannerjunkie, #planneraddict, and #plannerbabe contain much of the same. Aesthetic desks, full-page spreads, dashboards and dividers, luxury planner covers, digital planners on phones and tablets, and even cats and rabbits crop up in photos among the planner community on Instagram.
With over 15 million posts across just five of the biggest planner hashtags (#plannerjunkie, #planneraddict, #plannergirl, #plannercommunity, and #plannerstickers) and another 8 million under the main #planner hashtag, this community of Instagrammers and their planners may not be as large as gamers or nature photographers, but is still a large and active section of the photo-sharing app.
Who are these users with their attractive handwriting, washi tape stacks littering their desks, and a desire to share their journals and planners with the world?
Who’s jammin’ on their planner?
After spending the last few weeks posting to and interacting with the planner community, it appears that most of the users are women in their late twenties to early forties living in North America or Southeast Asia. They hold a variety of jobs, many completely unrelated to planners and stationery, while others run planner sticker and stationery shops online.
Of my 110 followers on Instagram, 95.7% are women and 4.3% are men. The majority of the women are 25-34 years old (44.3%) or 35-44 years old (30.0%), while all of the men (I suspect I only have one or two male followers) are 25-34 years old.
Exactly half of my followers are in the United States, while the other top countries are Australia (8.6%), Malaysia (7.1%), Indonesia (5.7%), and Singapore (2.9%). Most of the 188 people I follow are also in those countries, though I do follow a few people from Canada, Ireland, the UK, Western Europe, Northern Europe, Japan, and South Korea as well.
The professions of #plannergram members vary from students (secondary school, undergraduate university, and graduate university) and teaching assistants to teachers and attorneys to small business owners and even a Chobani employee. Their socioeconomic classes also vary, probably ranging from poor all the way to upper-middle class. I’d guess most of the users who work full time are in the lower-middle and middle classes.
Most people write their captions in English, even if it isn’t their native language. There are of course sub-communities in other languages, like German or Japanese or Korean, but many users post and interact with others in English.
The tone of their posts are often very casual, and the younger users sometimes write in all lowercase (something I’ve tried out in my latest posts) and use emoji or emoticons to express themselves (sometimes in ways that mystify me, like the frequent use of the sneezing emoji 🤧 to mean something like embarrassment I think). Caption content is usually personal, and while many people maintain an overall positive tone, they don’t shy away from addressing the messy and negative aspects of school, work, and life.
Planning, productivity, and pandemics
Two core values of the planner community stand out: being productive and taking time for yourself. At first glance, these two values may seem to be in conflict, but work and rest are important concepts for creating balance in your life. And plannergrammers, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, are striving toward that happy middle ground of being productive and enjoying life.
Obviously, the interest in productivity does go hand-in-hand with the idea of planning, of scheduling out events, managing your to do list, and completing tasks. But for plannergrammers, planners aren’t just tools to write down appointments and lists; they’re also creative outlets, memory keepers, journals, and most importantly, a way to regularly hit pause on the busyness of life and take a few minutes or an hour to sit with your thoughts and create.
While posting to the community, I found myself taking a bit of time every week to reflect on what had happened, how I did on work and school assignments, and how next week could be better. It’s nice to sit down at my desk, select stickers for my mood or events of the day, cross off tasks, and then finish off the week by looking at the story of my life told through my planner.
Despite a desire for rest and balance, the community’s emphasis on productivity isn’t always so healthy. Planning is all about scheduling out events, managing projects, and organizing yourself so you can get things done. Doing all of those things and finishing your tasks feels good and makes you productive, which is great. But productivity isn’t just a nice feeling we get when we accomplish our goals, it’s also too frequently linked to our own self-worth and perceived value in society.
This capitalistic idea that your worth hinges on your productivity permeates the community, creating an underlying pressure to be productive if you’re posting about planning. Some members push back against this idea, but the desire to be productive still guides people in what they write and post.
The pandemic has, in some ways, eased this stress over being productive. It’s difficult to summon the energy to do much when you’re in a mode of chronic traumatic stress. There’s been an understandable dip in energy among plannergrammers, and quite a few stopped posting entirely in the spring and summer of 2020.
Moving work and school to being all online has also affected how people treat their leisure activities, like posting to and scrolling Instagram. It can be less exciting to post about what we’re doing online if we’re stuck inside staring at screens all day.
Pandemic struggles haven’t stopped everyone from posting though. Plannergrammers have adjusted to sharing photos of their work-from-home setups, posting reels with study tips for online school, and taking breaks from being on Instagram when they need to, whether due to busy weeks of work and life or taking care of their mental health.
How to be a popular planner
Plannergrammers, like most users of Instagram, like pretty pictures. The most successful posts have perfectly styled planners and props, gorgeous handwriting, and soft lighting. Popular accounts use filters and Adobe Lightroom presets to maintain cohesive feeds with warm, cool, soft, and pristine aesthetics.
There are, of course, exceptions to the rule (@amandarachlee with her simple doodle bujo aesthetic comes to mind), but for the most part, people only like photos that look good. Dark images with poor lighting, very basic photos of a mess of sticker sheets or a lone planner haphazardly placed on a table, spreads with illegible handwriting or wonky lines: all of these posts generally stay at the bottom of the engagement pile — unless the posters engage frequently and enthusiastically with other accounts.
Liking, commenting, interacting with stories, and participating in share-for-share events are all ways plannergrammers can grow their accounts. If a user is active every day in the community, then they can still gather a decent following despite their amateur photos. And if they improve their photography skills along the way, then they have a good chance at getting big.
Using the right hashtags is also important for growth on Instagram, as well as tagging small businesses if you use their products. Planner shops will share their customers’ posts or stories to their stories, sharing sticker hauls and ways to use their stationery in spreads. Some users also tag aggregate accounts, like @plannerdaily, to hopefully be featured on the account and have their posts shared to a larger audience.
Overall, accounts that come out of the gate running with beautiful spreads and photos and who treat engaging with the community as a part time job are the ones who get big fast. The Instagram algorithm doesn’t like people who infrequently post or open the app. They want your eyes on their app all the time, and if you’re a small creator just starting out with little time to dedicate to making perfect spreads and posting throughout the week, then you’re out of luck.
The results
Over the past few weeks that I’ve been posting to the planner community, I’ve reached 682 accounts and had 99 visits to my profile. I reached the most accounts on February 8-10, likely because I was the most active on Instagram those days and posted on two of them.
Of my 6 posts the best was my first, which garnered 30 likes and 4 comments. The two following it did worse, at 19 and 20 likes and 0 comments. My post on Monday (Feb. 8) has gotten 29 likes and 0 comments, the one on Wednesday (Feb. 10) has 26 likes and 0 comments, and my most recent post on Friday (Feb. 12) has only 12 likes but 2 comments.
My first post likely had more engagement because Instagram sends out a notification to your followers the first time you post in a while. The two that followed did worse because I wasn’t posting frequently (only once a week when it’s best to post at least 3 times a week). Monday and Wednesday’s posts this week may have done better because I’ve been posting consistently for long enough. And my last post on Friday likely has so few likes because I wasn’t active on Instagram at all on Thursday or most of the day Friday before I posted. It was also a change in style from posting weekly spreads.
For every post I included a question in the caption, which is a common technique to increase engagement. It only worked on the first and last posts, maybe due to the questions (“what’s your favorite Zelda game?” and “what’s your zodiac year?”) or perhaps the success of this technique has dropped during the pandemic. I also could just have too few followers; large accounts can ask simple questions like “what’s your favorite drink?” and get a lot of responses in the comments.
With the “like” at the core of Instagram’s platform, other metadata like comments, saves, and shares tend to fall by the wayside. You’ll always get more likes than comments or saves or shares, even though likes may be the least effective metric for making the algorithm happy.
Likes are the easiest way for users to interact with content. It’s passive, communicates simple enjoyment, and lets them quickly move on to the next post in their timeline.
Saving a post requires commitment: to reviewing it again later, using it as inspiration, and liking it enough that they want to keep it longer than the few seconds it shows up for as they scroll.
And sharing a post takes two taps and means all their followers will see the post in their stories, and users probably don’t want to clutter their stories with shared posts, so they limit using that feature to only posts they really like.
I’m not shocked by how little engagement I got on my posts—though I am pleasantly surprised that at least a couple of them have close to the usual number of likes I got on posts when I was active in 2019. Instagram makes it difficult for small accounts to get much engagement without turning the app into a job. I spent over 11 hours in the app this past week: posting, scrolling my timeline and liking or commenting, and watching stories. And most of that activity was only over three days.
For plannergrammers, many of them are active in the app every day. They may post to their feed anywhere from three times a week to daily and to their stories as many as 20 times in one day. Their stories become mini-vlogs as they post snaps of their day, talk to their followers about what they’re doing, and poll their audience when making decisions.
Discussions between users are usually limited to comments or DMs, or in a roundabout way to their stories, via story templates that call for you to tag three friends or story chains asking each other what they’re doing.
The goal of the plannergram community is less to make friends, though some users have formed close friendships, but rather to share your creativity and hold yourself accountable for working or studying or just getting things done. It’s a chance to practice your photography skills, learn from others, and sometimes chat with people who share your interest in planners and stationery.
The community will continue to evolve as trends change and as Instagram adds or removes features, shifting how people use the platform to share their spreads and communicate. And not everyone will stay on Instagram. Many plannergrammers have started YouTube channels to share longer content, like “plan with me” videos and studio tours. But even if the platforms change, they’ll keep on planning.
Works Cited
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