Ok fam, a few days ago, Instagram officially spilled the tea to a group of reporters on how their algorithm works. Coming from the company, this is great news after some confusing rumours had gone viral about the algorithm.
That:
1. The company had decided to go back to its chronological order.
This was quite believable because in 2016, Instagram users went berserk after they had noticed that they were missing some posts of people they followed on the social platform. Just because the platform had changed from the reverse chronological feed to a new algorithm.
2. Editing captions within 24 hours could reduce the visibility of posts on the platform.
Anyone could fall for this especially if your engagement on the gram is quite low.
3. All businesses should use personal accounts to personalise and draw followers.
Really? If personal accounts really draw in more followers, then how come some businesses have 500k followers?
These rumours had driven advertisers, bloggers and users MAD, changing this and changing that to rank highly on Instagram’s algorithm.
But the reality is:
1. Instagram is not at this time considering an option to see the old reverse chronological feed.
2. Instagram does not hide posts in the feed, and you’ll see everything posted by everyone you follow if you keep scrolling.
3. Instagram doesn’t give special feed visibility to personal accounts or business accounts, so switching won’t help your reach.
4. Instagram doesn’t hide people’s content for posting too many hashtags or taking other actions.
Now that all the rumours have been clarified. These are the reasons why you see what you see on your newsfeed and its mostly based on how you interact with those you follow and those who follow you.
1. Interest:
Instagram predicts what and who you care about and includes that to the top of your newsfeed based on your interaction with similar content.
2. Recency:
The gram adds recent posts from your fam and prioritises them to the top of the newsfeed even if some of them may be weeks-old.
3. Relationship:
Instagram can tell how close you are to a follower by the number of times you’ve interacted with the account. So posts from the account would be at the top of your newsfeed.
Via TechCrunch
Other factors that may affect your feed are:
Via TechCrunch
- How often you open Instagram because it would show you the most popular posts since you last visited.
- How many people you follow because if you follow few people, Instagram would be picking from a small breath of posts so you see everything by the people you follow.
- How long you use Instagram will let you see not just the best posts but more posts from those you follow and your followers