Instagram’s New Curated Feed

I guess it was inevitable.  According to Instagram, people miss on average 70 percent of their feeds. That’s 70% of your friends, and favorite posters, celebrities not being seen by you every day. Instagram aims to make sure that you see those posts first. Yesterday Instagram announced :

“To improve your experience, your feed will soon be ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most.The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post. As we begin, we’re focusing on optimizing the order — all the posts will still be there, just in a different order.”

The beauty of Instagram has always been it’s chronological feed with no algorithm..basically all posts are created equal.  If I wanted to see a specific person’s post, I searched for them or turned on post notifications so that I got notified when they posted.  If I was curious about a specific event, I followed a hashtag. And I discovered new and interesting people everyday.  But now, based on whatever algorithm that Instagram is setting up, it will be a popularity contest…unless you want to pay to play with Instagram ads.

Now, instead of a real time feed showing events and moments as they happen, you will see posts that Instagram deems “popular” or “relevant” to your personal user experience.

This is how Facebook’s feed works and how Twitter’s feed works. But what does that mean for us as content creators?

Time will tell as Instagram rolls out this new curated feed. But for now, this means that as content creators, you will have to work harder to make your content relevant to your followers. It won’t be just about how many followers you have, or what hashtags you use. Just because you post it to your 10,000 followers doesn’t mean that most of them will see your posts.  We will have to work harder and share more relevant visual content that keeps our Instagram audiences engaged. That means that like Facebook, you will have to engage with your audience, not just post a photo and leave. Social media as a whole is moving towards a more personalized experience. Facebook, Twitter and now Instagram believe that personalizing the users feed, showing the user exactly what they want to see, is the way to go. 

Instagram has promised to “take time to get this right and listen to your feedback along the way. “.

So in the coming months, we will watch and see.

Stay tuned…..