Zeenat Aman Instagram: The Zeenat Network: How the veteran actor is killing the Instagram game at 71

Whenever Zeenat Aman posts something on Instagram, Usha Pisharody gets an alert on her phone. It’s a framework she has only activated for a handful of people, says the 60-year-old retired academician from Thrissur in Kerala. Pisharody remembers Aman, the 71-year-old Hindi film actress, as the diva she would see in movies in the 1970s. Zeenat [Aman] wasn’t just a glamorous celebrity to me, she looked like a real person even back then, she recalls.

Three months ago, Aman began her Instagram journey with a casual portrait shot and a one-line caption announcing her arrival on the platform. Each subsequent post from her has turned into a digital event that is being discussed on the internet. The veteran actress shares anecdotes from her film career, gives insight into her current life, talks about the people and issues that matter to her, sportily shares memes featuring her and gives insight into how and why she has landed on the gram courtesy of a little nudge and tech support from his sons.

In one of her posts, she even friendly searches most Instagram profiles, comparing them to billboards, while pointing out that she would like hers to retain the essence of the blog and do very few clearly labeled sponsored posts. .

Aman has only a quarter of a million followers so far, but the engagement rate for his Instagram accounts is 16.61%, according to data collected by Qoruz, a creative technology company.

The figure is three to four times what many popular celebrities order on the platform, including global pop culture icons like Taylor Swift and Jennifer Aniston, as well as popular Indian actors from all bands. age, like Alia Bhatt, Ranveer Singh, Kareena Kapoor Khan. , Madhuri Dixit Nene and Jackie Shroff, to name a few. In absolute numbers, most of this celebrity content attracts more eyeballs than Amans due to their significantly higher subscriber counts right now.

For context, engagement rate measures the percentage of your audience that engages with your content. To get the percentage, you divide the total number of likes and comments on all posts by the total number of followers someone has, then multiply the result by 100. Typically, analytics companies refine this formula for best results. Qoruz omits anomalies such as unusually viral posts when calculating the engagement rate to give a more accurate average figure.

Zeenat Aman’s current engagement rate is phenomenal, says Aditya Gurwara, co-founder of Qoruz. Most large accounts (with a few million followers) tend to have an engagement rate of 1-5%, he adds. When his account hits one million, if he’s able to sustain even half that engagement rate, the absolute numbers will be impressive.

Celebrity accounts may have an unusually high engagement rate at first, but it tends to normalize over time, Gurwara notes. It happened in the case of Jennifer Aniston and Kareena Kapoor Khan. Even their arrival on Instagram was talked about at the time, he adds. The surprisingly high engagement rate of the Amans account is remarkable because it does not follow any of the standards that supposedly force the platforms’ algorithm to push content to more people.

For example, most Instagrammers, or IGers, post static images in a reel format for better traction and add a song in the background at minimum volume to ride the trending audio wave. The Amans stream, however, has a grand total of two reels among 31 posts and they don’t align with any audio, meme-centric, or danceable trend.

One is footage from an interview, during the filming of Qurbani’s popular track Laila O Laila (1980), in which Aman talks about gender inequality in terms of opportunities and pay in the film industry in that time. The other reel features an image of her in her son’s music studio while the audio features her narration of a poem by Derek Walcott titled Love After Love.

Aman’s message that there aren’t too many silver-haired women in the public eye resonated with Pisharody. On a platform where people admittedly only show the bright parts of their lives, Aman comes without a mask, says Pisharody. You could say she faded from public memory over time, but now her voice is helping many people in our age group find their own, she adds.

ET reached out to Aman via his instagram account, requesting an interview for this story, but the post did not elicit a response before press time.

While a few influencer marketers believe the majority of Amans fans might be from an older demographic, which may limit its reach on a platform dominated by the Gen Z cohort, the comments under her posts, some of them paragraph long, indicate that she has a growing number of people in their 20s who make it a point to mention their age while leaving a comment.

Anushree Joshi is one such follower. I didn’t grow up with Zeenat Aman or see her captivate audiences in real time, says the 22-year-old researcher and writer. Yet when she sees her posts on people’s Instagram Stories, she finds herself visiting the Amans page to read the caption, which she admittedly wouldn’t do for 95% of the stories that appear on her feed.

I suspect the reason I’m drawn to his posts, Joshi says, is because of their authenticity, unfazed by popularity trends. She’s not even actively trying to buck trends, but gives me a kind of sweet nostalgia for what Instagram was once like, she adds. Aman has brought long captions back into vogue on Insta.

Her post honoring actor Parveen Babi on his birthday spoke to Joshi about how the male gaze likes to limit women’s abilities and their relationships with each other. Aman did not cover the post in any female friendships or girlbossing hashtags, Joshi notes. Instead, she shared a slice of her life and experience in a way you’d hear a real person talking to you if you were just sipping tea with them. It’s not dialogical for the sake of popularity, just thoughtful in how a life often ends up being quietly revisited.

Amans’ Instagram account also spotlighted 27-year-old Tanya Agarwal, who is credited as the photographer for many of the posts featuring the veteran actor. There are definitely more eyes on my work now but, more than anything, I feel more in tune and confident in my abilities as an artist, says the Mumbai-based photographer, who was initially nervous about the idea to photograph a legend, a first for her. Agarwal, who is a friend of Aman’s son, is not surprised by the actors’ popularity on the platform. Her way of expressing her thoughts is powerful enough to tame any algorithmic force, she says.

This may explain why Amans has so far only paid for a partnership on the platform, with jewelry brand Misho Designs, which got twice as many likes (nearly 109,000) as its usual posts. Branded messages have historically been known to get less engagement. The reason it worked so well is that audiences who are otherwise bombarded with branded content on Instagram appreciated the authentic tone in which she spoke about choosing the brand and collaborating with it, says Pankhuri Harikrishnan, founder of Fetch India, a Delhi-based influencer marketing agency.

In her retelling of stories from the 70s showbiz era, Aman reclaims her narrative, which was not a luxury that celebrities, especially women, had at the time, Harikrishnan notes. To that extent, she’s unknowingly surfing Instagram’s POV trend, telling stories from her perspective.