OPINION – If Meghan Markle wants to succeed on Instagram, she must overcome her biggest problem

Before she became a duchess, Meghan Markle had a lifestyle blog and an active Instagram page. Her posts were classics of the genre: holiday snaps, pictures of dogs, and recipe ideas abounded. But Markle wiped her online presence in 2018, the year she and Harry married.

Now, the duchess is back on Instagram. She has re-entered the social media arena with a fresh Instagram page and a shiny new username, @meghan. Perhaps she is hoping people will start referring to her mononymously like Beyonce or Oprah.

@Meghan shared her first post on New Year’s Day, a video in which she runs barefoot down a California beach before bending over to write “2025” in the wet sand. It’s a bona fide Archewell production: Prince Harry is the cameraman and he artfully pans up from the beach to the sky just as Meghan gives a little laugh and pirouettes out of shot, brimming with joie de vivre.

It’s the kind of video you watch and know required multiple takes. I can almost picture them moving to different sections of the beach to avoid getting the draft 2025s in the shot. It’s also the kind of video that was clearly posted by someone who has had a seven year hiatus from Instagram.

Commentators reckon that Meghan’s return to the ‘gram signals that her lifestyle brand is finally going to get off the ground this year. Markle appears set to follow the Goop playbook with an accompanying Netflix series celebrating “the joys of cooking, gardening, entertaining, and friendship” and a podcast. With the success of female hosted podcasts like Call Her Daddy where no topic is off limits, Meghan’s new series will need a little more spice than the deathly Archetypes.

All the groundwork is in place for Markle to become an influencer, but a lot has changed since the days of lifestyle blogging. If she is to succeed on Instagram there will need to be confessional pieces to camera, personality, and a look-in at the life that she and Harry lead.

Gwyneth Paltrow has a video series where she films the various things she makes her boyfriend for breakfast (presumably to then watch him eat it while sipping a mug of tea with both hands). It works: people like knowing that Gwyneth Paltrow’s boyfriend is eating blueberry pancakes. The Sussexes are not unreasonably cagey about their private lives and I wonder if that will stop Markle from giving the people what they want (Harry eating eggs, et cetera).

Followers would like to be let into the personal lives of influencers and told about the minutiae of their days. We are in the age of the parasocial relationship, and it won’t simply do to post wordless, faceless videos on beaches.

Claudia Cockerell is a lifestyle writer

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