Session time: If your followers spend a lot of quality time with their feed, they’re also more likely to see every post available.Following: This logic is similar to the above: people who follow 1000 accounts miss more posts than those who follow 100 accounts.People who don’t open the app frequently end up with a backlog of content built up, and therefore rely more heavily on the algorithm to select what they see. Frequency of use: If you have followers who open their feeds 12 times a day, they’re more likely to see your post than people who check Instagram twice a day.Instagram has also mentioned three other factors that will affect your organic reach, but they have more to do with your audience’s behavior than yours: There’s just no shortcut to defining your niche, developing a consistent voice, and telling a story that matters to people.
By tracking user affinity and being very good at understanding what is in a given photo or video, Instagram knows how to get basketball highlight videos to basketball fans, astrology memes to millennials, and really-scary-but-weirdly-cute shark videos to me.įor brands, a system that caters to people’s preferences means your organic content has to be truly appealing to your target audience in order for the algorithm to show it to them. The algorithm’s job is to give the people what they want (or, you know, a healthy mix of what they want and also perhaps some diverse and preference-broadening content). (We have some more details on that below.) Interest While Instagram insists that all posts do, at some point, show up in a user’s feed, newer posts are often ranked higher in the newsfeed than older ones.įor brands, that means one of the easiest ways to improve your Instagram reach is posting when your audience is online.
The Instagram algorithm also assumes that the most recent posts are most important to people. In other words, rest assured that engaging with your followers does genuinely help increase your organic reach (on top of making your monthly analytics reports look nice). But if you have an audience who is loyally and consistently engaging with your content, the algorithm will recognize that. If you’re running a brand account, you’re probably not actually best friends with your thousands of followers.
Which posts are featured on the Explore tab.Which posts go to the top of the newsfeed, and in what order.Every single time a person opens the app, the algorithm instantly combs through all available content, and decides: The Instagram algorithm decides which content gets seen.
How the Instagram algorithm works in 2021
Bonus: Download a free checklist that reveals the exact steps a lifestyle photographer used to grow from 0 to 600,000 followers on Instagram with no budget and no expensive gear.