How Instagram’s Algorithm Works

The algorithms behind social media platforms have always been a myth and a controversial topic within social media marketing.

Although, Instagram has recently provided some more insight into how its algorithm works as the platform seeks to provide more transparency to its users.

Last week, the Facebook-owned company brought in a team of tech journalists and went through how their system goes about sorting the vast amount of content on its platform.

Three Main Factors

Interest

One of the first things the algorithm will do is determine how interested you are likely to be in each post that appears in your feed, it does this by first factoring in how much you’ve engaged with similar content in the past.

It then takes into consideration how much you have engaged with image and video posts and the algorithm also assesses the actual contents of the image in the post through it’s ever-evolving image recognition tools.

Timeliness

One of Instagram’s most recent updates addresses the issue of users seeing too much older content. When the algorithm is deciding on what to show the user first, it takes into consideration how recently the post was published.

Therefore, although the platform banished the chronological theme over two years ago, it still considers the timeliness of the post.

Relationship

The last main factor is the relationship the user scrolling through the platform has with the user who posted the content onto the platform. When calculating this, the algorithm takes into consideration common interactions such as likes and comments on each other’s posts, direct messages and post tags.

These elements are all fairly similar to the factors that the Facebook algorithm takes into account although the image-recognition element is something completely new and interesting.

Facebook has been working on its own image-recognition tools too, where you can now search Facebook based on image content.

With Instagram being a visual platform, it seems like the ideal place for an image recognition and search based tool.

Instagram Myths Busted

Lastly, Instagram took the time to clarify that a few common algorithm myths are simply not true. These myths are:

• The algorithm gives no preference to personal or business accounts and all accounts are ranked equally.
• The algorithm does not favour image or video posts. It is based on the user’s past behaviour to each type.
• There is no penalty on reach for posting too often. Although, doing this may see some of your posts interspersed with updates from other users to avoid people seeing streams of your content only.
• A return to the chronological time-line is not happening anytime soon.

To conclude, users may not have been overly pleased with the algorithm changes to the platform since the removal of the chronological timeline, but the user data speaks for itself. Before the introduction of the algorithm, users were spending roughly 21 minutes a day on the app. Since then, that has risen to 24 minutes a day.

To talk with Ronnie about the social media services Click Dealer offers its dealership clients and how we can help improve your engagement, reach, brand recognition and social leads, get in touch today via marketing@clickdealer.co.uk , 01782 478220 or via our contact page.