The word algorithm fills me with dread when trying to navigate the best way to use Instagram as a promotion tool so I thought I would research it a bit further in order to better understand what the platform is looking for when prioritising posts.
The algorithm is designed to present the viewer with the things that will most interest them on their feed. So what does Instagram look at to determine this? According to sproutsocial.com, the top signals are;
- The content itself: How popular is it? How many likes and comments does it have? When was it posted? If it’s a video, how long is it? Is it tagged with a location and, if so, which one?
- Who posted it: How many times has a user interacted with content from the person who posted the content in previous weeks? How interesting do they find the person who posted?
- User activity: How many posts has a user liked, and what were they about?
- Interaction history: How interested is a user in content posted from a particular account? How often do they comment on those posts?
Alongside this, posts can be put down the pecking order for being poor quality images, having no audio or too much writing, or violating any guidelines. It also avoids showing too many consecutive posts from any one user to add variety to the feed of the viewer.
My take on this is that the following things can help with getting posts seen;
- Engage as much as possible with people on Instagram to show increased interaction on the platform. Networking seems to be very important across the site to increase your online presence.
- Avoid posting overly regularly, perhaps set up a social media plan with dates and times to evenly space out posts.
- Make sure images and reels are high resolution and have a good backing track.
- Avoid any political statements.
I have now changed my Instagram artist’s page to a professional profile as this allows me to see statistics from my posts.
