In recent months this social network is making many changes, such as the introduction of business accounts with statistics or buy real instagram likes buyiglikes.com.
Before each change, it is best to be well informed with official communications, adapt testing and analyze data to know how to better perform your management.
How the Instagram algorithm works
Since Facebook bought Instagram has been gradually implanting characteristics of its social network, starting with ads in an environment that was virgin in advertising, until the arrival of the algorithm.
As always, all changes are made in favor of the user, or so they say … although behind are evidently economic issues, encouraging brands to invest more in advertising so that their communications are more visible.
In itself, because of the information they have been making, the functioning of the Instagram algorithm bears a certain resemblance to that of Facebook . In their official statement, they said that the purpose of this change is for users to see the content that really interests them .
This is so because before the entry of the algorithm the user saw the publications of the accounts that followed in chronological order and therefore had options to lose publications of their friends or more related brands.
With the algorithm in operation, the user sees mainly those account publications with which they perform more interactions (see likes, comments, and clicks on the profile …) and that Instagram understands that they are more relevant to him.
Therefore, change the display in chronological order, so you can see followed content that was published 2 minutes ago as 5 hours ago, it will depend on the times you connect and the frequency of publications of those accounts.
Instagram algorithm effects
From what I’ve been reading in other blogs or social networks, the Instagram account managers complain that this algorithm entry has affected them with less likes, but my experience is not so negative for several reasons:
- That the growth of likes is lower than other times or that it falls partly I see it normal because the “competition” that there is in Instagram is increasing , more brands and users are involved in this social network, which is the one that is growing , so users follow more accounts and your power of attention tends to decrease.
- The likes are a vanity metric, to complain or not the algorithm is having negative effects must be based more on impressions with publications. If each time your publications see fewer people, that’s a problem.
- We cannot rely on whether the impressions have decreased or not because the statistics of Instagram were activated after the entry of the algorithm, so there is no previous data.
- The ad also directly affects the overall engagement of an account, because the ads are inserted as a publication more, which makes is therefore more competition.
Having said that, my experience has been:
- Positive in the sense that accounts that already had good engagement have improved and they have more and more interactions.
- Neutral for accounts that had a normal engagement, they have not had many variations for better or for worse.
- Negative on the part that you say had a low engagement, this has decreased.
The only correlation I see among the best or not, is that those that have had a positive effect with the change of the algorithm have a high quality community and loyal, and the rest the community is smaller and more achieved by guerrilla than by brand.
In line with this, it is interesting the study they did from Pirendo comparing 3 accounts, although we must not take it literally because the official change took just a month and are accounts with a high community.
Tips to have more visibility on Instagram
As I said at the beginning, before each change it is best to perform tests and then analyze data.
Based on what Instagram has been communicating, in principle one of the fundamental premises is engagement, therefore management must be focused on it if you want to get more visibility.
The visibility should be your goal, do not get likes. The likes and comments are the means by which to get your publications to have more impressions.
One of the great advantages of the Instagram algorithm over Facebook is that brands and people are at the same height, brands do not have a barrier of organic reach as is the case with Facebook pages, so this must be exploited.
Some of the actions that you can apply to your daily management to have more visibility on Instagram are:
- Quality before quantity: Before the algorithm many accounts were based on the premise of making many publications to appear as many times chronologically, now is not a highly recommended practice. Better to publish more worked with which users interact than many with low level of interest that will negatively affect the long term.
- Regular frequency of publications: Regularity and medium / long term is one of the keys to success in Instagram. This is not going to be 2 months full of publications and then forget. Better to go little by little, create an editorial calendar and work on it.
- Do not overwhelm your followers: At the middle point is virtue. Within that regular frequency you have to know how many times a day / week / month you can publish. Basically this depends on 2 conditioning factors: content you have and the number of times your followers are willing to see you . There are brands that publish too much and become overwhelming, thus lowering the level of interactions and affecting impressions. Test at different times to see what your threshold of updates is.
- Publish in the best hours: The algorithm gives visibility to the publications that have more interest for each user, but in addition to the interest there is a factor that also counts as the schedule. Fortunately, now with the statistics you know what are the days and times where your followers are most connected , so those hours (in theory) are more conducive to work.
- Do not buy followers: As in Facebook, buy followers a practice not recommended because the algorithm is based on the interactions made by your followers, and if they are false they will not do anything, which will negatively affect visibility. Neither buy likes, prealgoritmo could be a guarrera action that helped to get more “authority”, now would be “manipulate” the engagement with bad consequences.
- Better images than videos: Because of the experience I have, at the engagement level, images produce more likes than videos. The reason to which I attribute this is simple, the user when he is not with Wi-Fi is less likely to consume video because of what happens, and depending on the connection they do not load well. With this I am not saying that you do not use videos, but that you give more priority to the images.
- Use hashtags related to your account: This is not about putting as many hashtags in English and waiting for the likes to rain. Use terms that are related to what you are publishing, in the language of the target audience you are looking for and to be able to be without millions of publications to be visible. The most used hashtags will give you likes of bots and few impressions, the hashtags of your sector with fewer publications, will give you likes of people and more impressions.
- Come out of your own account: If you want to be seen you have to leave your own cave. The engagement is the basis of this algorithm so you have to build relationships with your followers, make likes in your photos, comments … loyalty.
- Instagram Stories: There are many brands that are using this functionality. My results with her are positive, considering that it is something ephemeral and that you have less visualization than your community, but it helps to generate more fresh and close content.
In conclusion, the Instagram algorithm is not as bad as they have tried to sell, it is a natural evolution of this social network and you have to know how to adapt to your changes. If you have been doing a good management of your account, you should not worry because they should not have affected you very much.