Instagram keeps people coming back. Use it to keep them coming back to you.
Instagram is a business like any other. It seeks to keep people coming back. As such, they are constantly trying to figure out how to bring engaging content to the top of users’ feeds. The more people become “addicted” to the app, the more Instagram benefits. In that light, Instagram has worked hard in developing ways to keep people hooked. Knowing that, there are ways that content creators can “hack” into those ways and ride the wave.
Years ago when Instagram first became a thing, they relied on “reverse chronological order”. That is, whenever a user followed someone’s post, that post would be at top until the next person they followed posted. Eventually this led to people complaining that they never saw content they cared about. And it was true, Instagram figured out that users never saw possibly over half of the content.
This top complaint had people leaving Instagram in droves. The powers that be knew that something had to change. In 2016, they did a massive overhaul to their guiding algorithms. It didn’t come off smoothly—there has been since then great controversy around “Shadowbanning”—but they made something that could constantly be tinkered with and adapted to easily improve.
Note that there isn’t a single algorithm at work here, but lots of them. So when I say, “The Algorithm”, I’m referring to all of them in total.
Here we are going to discuss Instagram’s main factors and how those can affect content creators.
The different factors for the Instagram algorithm
Instagram looks at each of the different products in slightly different ways. Whereas Feed and Stories tend to focus more on content that a user follows, they did make sections for people to find new content: Explore and Reels.
This essentially means that a content creator’s strategy needs to focus on two different flows. On the one hand they have to figure out how to consistently get to the top of their followers’ feeds. On the other hand, creators need to deliver content that helps them get discovered.
The main factors, or what they call “signals”, that are considered regardless of the type of post?
- Engagement: How often do users engage with the post and with the poster.
- Frequency: The frequency a user posts. More frequent users can get more weight (since they’ll have more posts to be weighed).
- Following: This is a double whammy. Not only do users with a great following get weighed more, but users with more followers will naturally have more engagement on their posts.
- Setting: The time and place a post is made. The Algorithm does try to match the time of post with the time of login as much as possible.
- Usage: Users who log into Instagram more often will have their posts boosted more.
- Direct engagement: Posts and followers that the user has directly engaged with get more weight.
Now that you know some of the basic commonalities, let’s look a little closer at each group.
Instagram’s Feed and Stories
Through Instagram’s many years of existence, they’ve learned that what users want most is to see posts from their family and friends, i.e. people they follow. It’s the supposed reason they implemented the Algorithm, but it’s also one of the biggest complaints even today.
Instagram claims to have developed algorithms to try to stress the most relevant posts from those a user follows. It’s what Instagram considers “relevant” that is the key. They look at who a user follows, what is posted, and the preferences that a user has shown over the years. They use metrics, called “signals”, to determine how they use this information.
Various signals include:
- The time of post
- If it was posted using a phone or computer
- How often a user liked that someone’s posts in the past
- The amount of other people who liked the post
- What location the post was tagged in
- How often a user liked videos in general over pictures
- Recent interactions
- Your history of interaction with that poster.
Interaction/engagement is the highest factor that Instagram looks at. It has always been and always will be, since that’s what gets people coming back. Interaction means commenting, saving a post, or tapping on the profile picture. They’ll often change what signals matter most: They add new ones, remove ones that don’t seem to work, and do whatever it takes to fine tune how to get return users.
Developing a strategy for Feed and Stories
Keep in mind that your brand’s Instagram has to engage two kinds of people: returning customers/potential customers who know you already and new customers. The Feed and Stories section are for those customers who are already with you, or for potential customers who have already liked you.
The more interaction you can generate from those two groups though, the more your weight in Explore will grow. I’ll get more into that below.
As for those potential customers, you want to keep the interaction up as high as possible. Users must shape their Stories to entice interaction. Adding links, rewards, questions… all of these things can create engagement. Engaging on others content helps as well, which is why you’ll see brands making comments on other brands and celebrities. But be sure it’s honest: Users can smell a fake.
third_coast_thermal is a brand for instance, leaving a short comment for guerilla_filmmakers
Instagram puts weight on frequency of posts, which is why you see many businesses and influencers posting at least once a day. But if you don’t have the content, don’t sweat it. Even logging in and engaging on other people’s posts can help you get some weight.
Explore and Reels
Instagram intended the exact opposite for Explore and Reels. Whereas those two sections are for the user to check in on their friends and those who they follow, Explore was made to help users find new posters (and posters to find new audiences, also where IGTV displays).
In the same way they search out a user’s interests for the Feed and Stories, they do for Explore as well, except here is a bit more educated guess work (ie fine tuning of the algorithms). They first study all the user’s past likes, saves, and comments. Then they look at all the other people who also liked a post the target user liked. Take for instance if the user liked a post on Smartsound’s Instagram profile, then Instagram would look at other people who liked our post as well. If they found more commonalities, then Instagram might promote the posts that other users have interacted with onto the target user’s Explore feed.
It’s worth mentioning that those people who liked or commented on our post are likely already our followers. And if we get a lot of engagement from our followers, then that will reflect on the Explore and Reels feeds. So lesson here? Do what you can to engage with your followers.
Smartsound’s Explore screen; Instagram shares both from the main Feed and IGTV
How does Instagram weigh Explore and Reels?
After finding all these other photos and videos a user might like, then the Algorithm works to rank them depending on a user’s past behaviors. They rank them according to:
- how popular a post is,
- history of interaction with poster,
- a user’s past signals on the Explore page,
- the behavior of the poster (how many times they’ve recently posted, for instance).
Interaction is important. And it’s not just interaction on your pics that Instagram looks at, but also your interaction on the pics of others. Keep that in mind. Your brand’s login time and interaction elsewhere do matter. Interacting on other pages also allows some level of brand awareness spread as well, as people can always discover your brand that way. That’s why you’ll often see various brands making comments under people’s photos. Though in this it’s generally best to be exposing your brand to target markets.
It should go without saying, that you should also maintain the interaction on your pics. If someone makes a comment, comment back! Try to start a conversation. Build from it and it will give more weight to your pic. But this tip comes as a two-edged sword: It must be honest interaction. People can easily detect when you’re just chatting to them to build up your Instagram. So dig into your powers of empathy.
Reels
There is a slight difference with how they sort Reels. Instagram is searching for things that are “entertaining” or “funny”, and actively surveys people. They use the person’s answers to that, along with if they watch it all the way through, like it, and go to the audio page for it.
Instagram’s Reels feature is intended to be “entertaining” and “funny” (source: Instagram)
They give the most weight to the user’s past activity of liking and engaging with Reels, if a user has interacted with the poster in the past, signals regarding the reel itself (remix, video quality, and popularity), and information about the poster (frequency of posting and popularity, for example).
The remix weight is interesting. This is the likelihood that from your Reel, a user will click to remix your track and maybe make their own Reel. This means a content creator should find music and/or activities that their followers will want to take part in. The same goes for choosing to use the same audio content.
Instagram’s Shadowbanning controversy
When Instagram first introduced their algorithms, people started to claim that they were getting “shadowbanned”. They were saying that because of this or that behavior – anything from buying friends to being of one political shade or another – was getting their posts to rank lower on people’s feeds.
In Instagram’s latest post about the algorithm, they claim that they don’t do shadowbanning, and never have. They can’t necessarily say why an individual user’s specific post might be liked or not liked, but that has more to do with the fact that people don’t even look at half their feed anyway. The other reason people might be blocked or downgraded is for the two big violations of the user agreement: 1. Continuing to post misleading or fake news, according to third-party websites and 2. When someone’s posts might make people unsafe.
They are currently developing better ways to notify users why a post might be taken down or when their post goes against the Community Guidelines. Generally, those aren’t instances of “Shadowbanning” though, since Instagram attempts to be quite clear on what has happened in these regards.
The takeaway for content creators? Follow the user guidelines. You might want to post edgy material, but you need to make sure that the edgy material is still within the boundaries of what’s allowed.
How people can influence their feeds
Despite all these influences that the algorithm has, IG does have ways that allow users to tweak their feeds. In Stories, they allow people to pick their “close friends”, so posts from them will be more likely to show up over others. A user can mute others, which is a way of not getting updates from that other user without unfriending them. And finally, people can mark “not interested” on a post, which is an important signal that the algorithms use to adjust results.
The danger for content creators here is to not get flagged with “not interested”, which will silence your content. Better is to figure out ways to become “close friends” to your followers. Which one chief way here is again, honest engagement.
Create engaging Instagram content that fits your brand
Easier said than done. But what should be kept in mind is that you shouldn’t simply be creating content for content’s sake. Be sure there’s some purpose to it and that it fits your brand. Not everything on Instagram needs to be used, as each product (Feed, Stories, Reels, IGTV) is independent of the other’s algorithms (only the Feed and Explore are meaningfully connected). If you can’t think of anything for Reels for your brand, no worries. No IGTV? No worries. Keep it basic and keep it on brand.
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