Instagram Algorithm Change/Reveal 2018

Instagram Marketing
#1

So Insta recently announced specifics about their feed algorithm (that they updated in March) and I just had a couple of points I wanted to talk about:

1. Recency
We’ve gone back to a chronological feed… ish. While engagement is still very important to getting your post seen, recency is making a comeback as a factor when Insta decides what posts to show up at the top of the feed.

Have seen the effect of this, mostly on my business profiles rather than my personal ones, with engagement really varying depending on the time of posts. With a business profile, the followers section of your insights page will have day- and hour-wise data about your followers - helpful when you want to schedule posts!

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If you’re posting multiple times a day, it becomes important to space these posts out to reach the maximum number of people you can, while still being engaging.

2. Relationship
With the new info that the relationship between two people is an important factor, it would be excellent if you can get your followers to tag you in pictures, DM you stuff and in general interact more with you than just comments or likes.

I will be trying to run some experiments to see if my engagement goes up by running contests or promotions that get followers to tag me or message me - you should too! Whether you are using a business profile or a personal profile could possibly also make a difference here, with personal profiles getting a slight boost here!

If you’re using follow/unfollow, another thing to try would be continue to drip-comment on profiles that are following you, just to keep your “relationship” metric high.

The official TechCrunch blog about the announcement: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/01/how-instagram-feed-works/

What other experiments are you guys gonna try with this new info?

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#2

I don’t see any new info there to be honest (for us as Internet Marketers)

Yes the attributes may play a bigger role

‘is_bestie’, ‘has_unseen_besties_media’

But what as a marketer do you want to do? Exposure is removed from you. That’s it.

The bigger your account gets the less influence your interactions have.

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#3

The fact that DMs and tags in posts will be seen as a “relationship” was definitely new for me, I think. the way that it’s phrased makes me think these are much bigger indicators than your average like and comment. I was only focused on getting people to like/comment/save till now - which is going to change. Definitely worthwhile experimenting on the hypothesis at least!

Of course! If you have accounts with 200k+ followers, then there’s not really anything much you can do with the reveal.

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#4

I don’t think you can be “besties” with everyone. Also besties is for connected accounts. Check out how many of your likes come from followers and how many from explore.

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#5

That’s exactly it. How would Instagram differenciate between two different meme pages vying for the top spot on the feed of a single user? Do DMs and tags improve your chance of being shown in the top 5, or are they worth the same as a like and a comment? [Assuming recency and interest factors are the same for these two accounts]

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