New Instagram Algorithm: What You’ll See On Your Feed

Facebook’s current algorithm highlights posts that it thinks you’d be interested to see and hides the rest – even the posts that you may want to see.

Now, the sister company, Instagram, is about to implement a similar algorithm. Instagram announced the big news in a blog post last week:

“As Instagram has grown, it’s become harder to keep up with all the photos and videos people share. This means you often don’t see the posts you might care about the most.

To improve your experience, your feed will soon be ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most.”

Instead of displaying photos and videos in a chronological order, it will now “ be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post.”

The announcement has resulted in a backlash, with users furious about the proposed changes and starting an online petition to keep Instagram posts chronological. Many users claim that they like the social media platform because it allows them to interact with posts in real time; they feel that changing the algorithm will just turn it into “another Facebook”.

Users have also stressed that instead of curating posts on their feed, Instagram should allow them to decide for themselves what they want to see.

Unfortunately, this comes as no shock to our team. Following in the footsteps of big brother, Facebook, Instagram is most likely nudging businesses to use their advertising platform to increase user engagement. We’re predicting that “sponsored content” will eventually equate to 40% of everyone’s feed by 2017. The fear that’s now circulating among some Instagram users is that the new changes will make it even harder for them to reach out to their target audiences and that their posts will now be buried beneath content in the feed.

Instagram is not the only social media platform that has changed its algorithm. Earlier this year, Twitter made a similar announcement and introduced its new Home timeline feature:

“Here’s how it works. You flip on the feature in your settings; then when you open Twitter after being away for a while, the Tweets you’re most likely to care about will appear at the top of your timeline – still recent and in reverse chronological order. The rest of the Tweets will be displayed right underneath, also in reverse chronological order, as always. At any point, just pull-to-refresh to see all new Tweets at the top in the live, up-to-the-second experience you already know and love.”

As we are in the very early stages, the full impact of the algorithm change has yet to be seen, so for now, we’re just going to monitor, test, and see how things evolve.

What do you think of Instagram’s algorithm update? Do you love it or hate it? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.