Facebook’s dominance over the social media industry, with over a billion daily users, means that it gets to decide pretty much everything in the industry. Usually when Facebook makes a move, all other social media platforms must follow suit or risk becoming obsolete.

Facebook often experiments many of its features on its child platform, Instagram. In a move to make Instagram more like Facebook, an algorithm was rolled out on the photo-sharing app.  Previously, it was in reverse chronological order, meaning that the most recent posts appear at the top and descend based on post time.

The reason behind this was because Instagram alleges that its users miss 70 percent of their feeds. However, there’s no explanation as to how the algorithm works. The only descriptor provided is, “Your feed will soon be ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most.”

Great. Thanks for that explanation, Insta.

No one knows what makes the algorithm tick, but there are a few factors that probably play a part. Take the following factors into account when creating content to get your posts pushed higher up in the feed.

Engagement

If a post is popular, meaning it has many likes, comments, video views and shares, Instagram assumes that more people will like it, too. This factor isn’t likely to be as heavy of a determinant because of scale. Your business could have a post that’s doing extremely well with 100 likes, but it can’t be compared to bigger brands, like Starbucks, that average likes in the hundreds of thousands.

If you want to improve your engagement, though, using hashtags can help. Users often search Instagram for hashtags in order to find accounts they can follow. If you’re using hashtags on your posts, more people will see your content and that can increase each post’s number of likes and comments.

Relevancy

Instagram defines relevancy as, “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.”

It’s possible that Instagram uses “genres” to help identify what you like, such as food, travel, location, sports, etc. Relevancy, too, can be aided by using hashtags and tagged locations.

Relationships

Relationships are probably more likely to be a determining factor in the algorithm, because people typically use Instagram to keep up with friends, family, celebrities, and brands rather than use Instagram to research a topic, like brain cancer or foodie pics. This is not to say that people don’t search on Instagram; just more often than not, people want to see posts about the people and brands they care about and already follow, because there’s already established value in those relationships.

There’s even a feature that sends you a push notification when someone you really want to keep up with posts a picture or video.

To do this, go to the profile of someone you want to follow, click the three dots in the upper right corner, and select to be notified when posts are published. You can even encourage your followers to do this for your page so that they don’t miss any of your posts.

Learn how to use Instagram Stories.

Timeliness

 

Time does have some value. From what I can tell in my personal feed, time has a value but only to a certain extent. Posts tend to show up closer to the top of my feed if they were posted in the previous 24 hours. I’ve seen posts as far back as 3 days show up at the top of my feed.

Time has value, but only for the past 1-3 days.

As for how often you should post, consistency matters more than frequency. However, don’t post more than 2 times a day to avoid saturation. If you have several posts showing up in a user’s feed, they may get annoyed and unfollow all together. Rather, choose which days you will post, which will depend on your audience and when they’re online. Having a content calendar will help with regular posting.

Why The Algorithm?

 

Why won’t Instagram tell us the secret formula to their feed? Frankly, Instagram has a lot of spam accounts, which they used to actively combat by limiting certain features (like not being able to post links in descriptions). Once Facebook took over, the spam accounts and the “buy followers” accounts exploded. Instagram keeps its algorithm hidden to avoid spammers from saturating everyone’s feeds.

People like Instagram to keep up with friends, family, and brands that are close to them. Spam accounts would “hack” the algorithm, and most likely take down the entire platform.

This algorithm hasn’t even been in effect for a year yet. As Instagram perfects its formula, it will be easier to understand what posts and post types perform better. Until then, it’s important to stay relevant.