Instagram Has Changed! Here’s What We’re Doing About It.
Three Feed Options
2022 has changed and with it comes new updates from Instagram. Recently, they announced the return of the chronological feed, as well as the option to choose from two other feed styles. This gives users the option to use the algorithmically sorted feed, a chronological feed and a favorites feed. While the feature is still rolling out, Instagram says they expect it to be fully available by mid-year.
Along with this, Instagram stated that the Home feed will begin to feature more and more recommendations, making it a discovery hub for new accounts and content. I’m of the opinion that we may see the Explore page disappear over time.
What this means strategically is that we have an incredible opportunity to capitalize on discoverability. Using strategic hashtags, post times and story-based content is more important than ever as users will begin to experience the feed differently. These changes may also bring back the ability to create booms in followership by cross-posting with strategic partners and maximizing the core content of each post. This should hypothetically reduce the throttled likes and engagement many posts currently have, meaning each post can work harder for your brand.
Likes on Stories
Beyond the feed option, Instagram is also now testing the likes features on Stories. Likely it will appear with the current tap back response options. While these likes won’t be public, they will be seen by the account owner. This is an incredible tool for measuring engagement and optimizing our content creation process.
Changes to the Algorithm
There’s been a lot of talk about the algorithms that work across the Instagram ecosystem over the last couple of years, but with 2022 Instagram has announced some new changes.
From Later “There are four key factors that influence the Instagram algorithm for feed posts — confirmed by Instagram themselves:
Information about the post: Is it a photo or a video? When was it posted? How many likes does it have?
Information about the poster: How interesting are they to you? Are they your friend? How often do people engage with their content?
Your activity: Do you tend to watch a lot of videos? What type of content do you typically engage with?
Your interaction history: Do you typically like or comment on the poster’s posts?
Based on this information, Instagram’s algorithm calculates how likely someone is to interact with a post, known as a score of interest, which ultimately determines the order in which posts are displayed in their feed.”
In addition, the algorithm also factors time spent on posts, likes, comments, saves, and taps on profile. In a nutshell, the more action a post sees, the higher it ranks in display order.
From a strategic perspective, this is pretty similar to how we’ve been working for the last year. The rules are the same, work to drive engagement, post consistently, post striking content, tell a story, provide value, tell the truth. All of the content I create for your brand holds these principles in mind. By reviewing analytics, we’re able to quantitatively measure this performance and adjust what we’re creating as needed.