Instagram is bringing the algorithm to its feed, but don’t panic yet

What you’ve been hearing is true; Instagram will soon be adopting the algorithmic newsfeed. In a blog post, the social network mentions that users miss almost 70% of the content on their feeds and to improve user experience, the new curated feed is being brought in. While this might be good news for users, brands aren’t too thrilled about this. Of course, this is hardly surprising, brands that built up loyal followings with guaranteed inclusion in newsfeeds are now facing the prospect of shelling out more money from their digital budget to reach their own audience.

However, we can’t say that this came out of the blue? About 6 months ago when Instagram rolled out ads globally, it was almost certain that the social network would follow the path of its parent company, Facebook, and you can’t expect to have free lunch for ever. If you still can’t digest what’s going to happen, I’ll spell it out for you, organic reach WILL fall. This isn’t the ideal scenario but this has been the path most social networks have taken and it means people who are more invested in you will receive your content.  

With fans now seeing only certain posts on their feed, brands will have to compete (read: pay up) to get their content delivered to more people. Boosting doesn’t have to be the only way to increase your reach. As always, good content can do so much for your brand that promoting never can. Though Instagram doesn’t have a share button as such, good content has its way of being found.

Take Cartoon Network for example.

By talking about a trending topic and adding their own personality to it, the brand was able to engage 2x better than the industry average On Unmetic’s scale, this post has an engagement score of 872 while the Audio/Visual industry only has an average score of 420 in the period of Feb 15th  – March 15th , 2016.

 

TacoBell was able to beat their own benchmark with quirky content.

This post with its humorous tagline was able to get 2x as many Likes as any other post from them in a 30 day time period.

Don’t forget, Instagram also gives users the option of ‘turning on post notifications’ – which means they’ll see your posts in their feed for sure.  With great content, you can have your followers double opt into your content which will ensure they don’t miss anything and in-turn increase reach.

If you haven’t already, now’s the time to invest in a serious Instagram analytics tool that will let you track competitors and unearth the content that’s generating large amounts of engagement and apply these insights to your own strategy.

Use the form below to take a free trial of Unmetric’s Instagram analytics capabilities.