As Instagram previously announced on their blog, the social network has decided to change how its main feed displays the posts of users. Instead of showing you a list of your friends’ posts in chronological order, Instagram will now order posts by how much they *think* you would like to see them. The change is designed to help users who follow a lot of accounts, and according to the blog, miss “up to 70%” of posts because of the constant flood to their feeds.
Basically, it’s what Facebook did to its newsfeed back in 2011. And Instagrammers are not happy about it. As avid Instagrammers, we feel that pain, but we also know how we can help.
That’s why all week we’ll be sharing our top #IGSurvivalTips on our Instagram account (@TytaniumIdeas). Be sure to follow us and select “get updates” so you’ll never miss a post. Here’s where to find that:
1. First, click on the three vertical dots on the top right of our Instagram page. A white box of options will pop up (as seen in the image below).
2. Next select “Turn on Notifications” in order to be notified whenever we share a new Instagram tip this week! You can turn off these notifications anytime by going through the same process.
Survive the Instagram Algorithm Change
Here are five of our top tips for how you can make sure your Instagram posts don’t become hidden by the new algorithm, and how you can continue to see the posts that matter most to you.
1. Turn on Notifications from your Top 10 favorite accounts. We’ve already covered how to do this above, but if you have friends who don’t Instagram daily, their posts may become a lot harder to find after today’s changes. To make sure you don’t miss their updates, be sure to take this step. We recommend against turning on notifications for every account you follow, however, because it will wind up flooding your feed with notifications, making them a lot less useful to you!
2. Hashtag when you post. Along with the algorithm change, Instagram has also changed how hashtags show up in searches. Now when users search for posts with certain hashtags, the posts only show up in the order they were originally posted, not when the hashtags were added. This means it’s better for you to add hashtags to your posts at the time of posting, rather than going back and adding them because they will earn higher search results based on how new the post actually is.
3. Develop a Hashtag Strategy. Since you’ll need to add hashtags when you are creating a post, it’ll be helpful to develop a hashtag strategy. To identify the hashtags to use around topics you’re posting about, try out the search function on Top Hashtags to generate lists of popular tags related to your topic.
This is great if you don’t know where to start, however, if you have lists of hashtags in mind for the different topics you post about, save time by adding that list to a note-taking app on your phone like Evernote or Google Keep. That way it’s an easy copy/paste to make sure your posts are always tagged the way you want them to be. You can test the popularity of certain tags by using the Ritetag Hashtag Checker in order to make sure your lists are all top-notch.
How many hashtags are too many? It depends. Instagram allows as many as 30 hashtags on a post but suggests using no more than 3. Recent data suggests that on Instagram it’s fine to add more than 11 hashtags, but you’ll have to test this yourself to find out. We would suggest that no matter how many hashtags you choose, you make sure the first two are the most relevant to your post, in case it gets shared on Twitter.
4. Engage with your favorite followers whenever you’re on Instagram. Instagram’s new algorithm is designed to show you posts from the accounts you’ve interacted with recently, or have interacted with you recently. That means it’s important to actively engage with your followers to make sure they still stay connected to you and your posts. Be sure to double-tap (or “heart”) their posts whenever you pull up Instagram and add thoughtful comments. With these new changes, if you’re a lurker, you will lose.
5. Create posts that encourage your followers to engage with you. It will also really help you if you make it easy for your followers to heart, comment, and re-gram your posts. Don’t forget to tag them if they’re in your posts, too! If you need help figuring out how to make your posts more engaging, check out our blog post on Social Media Engagement 101: Why We Share.
And if you’d like even more training on how to leverage social media for business, sign up for our next semester of Tytanium University by subscribing to the interest list from the link below: