earlier this year Instagram posted a Blog called Instagram ranking explained sharing the most upto-date information that we have on how exactly the algorithm works so what's changed what's different than before this is the only video that you'll need to watch to understand the Instagram algorithm that is until they post another blog in like 2 to 3 years as always time stamps are below because this is a jam-packed one so use them if you're looking for something specific first we're going to make sure you have an understanding of what the algorithm is then we're going to
dive into to how each algorithm works and then we'll wrap it up with the key differences that we need to point out between 202's algorithm and this newest one so let's get into it so what is the algorithm Instagram doesn't have a singular algorithm that oversees what people do and don't see on their App instead they use a variety of algorithms depending on which part of the app you're on feed stories explore reals Etc and all of these places have their own algorithm tailored to how people interact with that feature how often does the algorithm
change all the time and very rarely which makes no sense at all so let me explain if you're on YouTube like at all and you watch videos here you probably notice a new Instagram updated their algorithm video like every two seconds and that's because every algorithm is unique to the person that's interacting with it so if you as a user change how you interact with a part of Instagram you might start noticing new patterns and behaviors from Instagram so that's why you have a bunch of people making these videos like oh my gosh the algorithm
updated again you know your unique algorithm is always changing depending on what posts you like don't like what stories you watch and don't watch and swipe through like the Instagram algorithm is always changing so the next time you see a video like that pop up on your YouTube page don't freak out because the actual foundations of what the algorithms look for doesn't change often okay like Instagram headquarters isn't going in every day like okay let's make sure reals are performing 75% better than infeed posts today oh tomorrow let's change it and let's make sure that
photos perform better than reals and then oh let's not show this person's story like they're not going in every day and changing the basis of what the algorithm is looking for like the last two times we had an update for the algorithm was 2021 when they posted their article shedding light on how Instagram works and then after that Sometime Late 2022 early 2023 when Adam aeri went to Instagram and he was like okay we've gone too far into video we understand that we're going to take a step back and let the user decide what type
of feature is going to be on their feed that was the last big change in update so now that we have this article we have the most upto-date understanding and Foundation of how the algorithm is currently working and will probably continue to be until we get the next big update did that does that make sense like we're probably chilling on this algorithm basis for a good few months to maybe year or two basically to sum up how often the algorithm changes if user Behavior changes the algorithm follows user behavior for example if Instagram users as
a whole all of a sudden start just loving reals reals are going to pop up more because that's what the algorithm's identifying if all of a sudden as a community everybody is ignoring reals and going leaning into like story posts or going live that's what the algorithm is going to push the algorithm identifies a user behavior and then follows it so the four main algorithms we're actually going to break down today are feed stories explore and reals and for all of this information I am going to be using their blog post that I mentioned at
the beginning of the video to describe all of these algorithms and how they work so it's not just me making this up it's literally what Instagram says word for word just breaking it down for you to understand first let's talk about your feed right now there are three feed views you have following favorite and default when you switch to the following feed you will see most recent posts from the people that you follow meaning these posts will show up in chronological order when you switch to the favorite feed you will see the latest from accounts
that you chose to be your favorite Now default is the main view that you see when opening up your Instagram app when you're on the default feed the algorithm will suggest posts that it thinks you will like based on multiple factors so basically Instagram describes your feed as being a place to help you catch up with friends family and interests now how do they know who your friends and families are or who what your interests are they use something called signals there are thousands of signals that Instagram uses for all of their algorithms for example
information about the post itself information about the person who made the post what your preferences are who you follow the content you like the time a post was shared are you using your phone or web browser do you engage more with reals with photos like there's thousands of signals that Instagram uses now when it comes to feed the most important signals roughly an order of importance are your activity information about the post information about the person who posted and your history of interacting with someone with your activity they're looking at posts that you've liked shared
saved or commented on in the past to help them understand what sort of content you might be interested in from there they're looking at information about the post ranges from how the post is doing engagement wise so how many people have liked it how quickly people are liking commenting sharing and saving a post but also more more mundane information like about the content itself what is it about when was it posted what location is attached to it thirdly information about the person who posted this will help them get a sense for how interesting that person
might be to you so they'll look at signals like how many times you've interacted with that person over the last few weeks and which kind of goes into the fourth one being your history of interacting with someone if you have a history of interacting with somebody they'll be able to gauge if you're interested in seeing more regularly from a particular person if you guys are commenting on each other's posts more frequently you'll probably pop up on each other's feeds after analyzing all those signals from there Instagram will try to predict How likely you are to
engage with a post so for in feed the five interactions that they look at most are How likely you are to spend a few seconds on a post comment on it like it share it and tap on that person's profile photo the more likely they think you are to take those action the higher they're going to rank a post in your feed if you see a post on your feed and you're like why did Instagram recommend this to me why is this being pushed on my feed you can see the algorithm in action by pressing
on the three dots on the top right corner of that post and then selecting why you're seeing this post Instagram will be transparent and tell you exactly what triggers they were looking at and why they predicted you to engage with that one before jumping into the stories algorithm I want to say a huge thank you to this video sponsor metri cool if you've been subscribed to me for for Anytime over the past year and a half 2 years you know that metrical holds a dear place in my heart if you don't know what metrial is
they are the allinone social media tool social media scheduler that I highly highly highly recommend for anybody who's trying to post to multiple platforms you can take a short form video schedule it to autopost to Instagram reels YouTube shorts and Tik Tok with just like one click of a button metricool is great for like anyone looking to organize their content content creators entrepreneurs businesses it's of course a great all-in-one tool but they're also a really really great resource for social media studies so recently in September I believe they posted this blog post social media research
study where they studied Instagram for 2023 the study was based on an analysis of over 316,000 professional Instagram accounts over 2 million posts 9 million stories and 1 million reals so they studied a bunch of content types to pull together a bunch of data data whatever you want to call it trying to give you the best information of like okay these posts are performing great right now this is the best time to post and all those other questions that if you're a strategic person or analytical thinker this is a really great blog post for you
to reference so if you're interested in trying out metricool it is completely free for Content creators so you could use the link down below if you're a business and you juggle multiple Instagram accounts multiple Tik Tok accounts or multiple Facebook accounts then you could use my code for a free trial thank you so much metri cool for sponsoring this video and let's jump into the stories algorithm next is ranking for stories Instagram describes stories as a way to share everyday moments and grow closer to the people and interests you care about I feel like I
should like interpretive dance all of these quotes that I'm pulling from the blog maybe the next one I will the most important signals for stories roughly an order of importance are viewing history engagement history and closeness viewing history look at how often you view a specific account's stories so that Instagram can prioritize those stories from accounts they think that you don't want to miss engagement history looks at how often you engage with an account's story such as liking a story or sending them a DM and closeness looks at your relationship with the Creator overall How
likely you are to be connected at as friends or family studying things like are you guys dming often based on those signals Instagram will again make a prediction about what they think the stories you will find more relevant and valuable so How likely you are to tap into someone's Story How likely you are to reply to someone's story or even to skip and move on to the next one next is ranking for explore so Instagram says that explorer was designed to help users discover new things so the explor grid this is made up of recommendations
that Instagram has gone out to find for you meaning that 99.999% of the content you see there probably not from people that you follow so how does Instagram pick which posts show up there they do this in two steps first they have to define the type of content that they want to show and then when they know okay we want to show this type of content they'll rank that content based off of How likely you are to engage with it so the first step to find photos and videos that you're more likely interested in the
important signals that they look at roughly in order of importance are information about the post your activity in explore your history of interacting with the person who posted and information about the person who posted for information about the post here this is where Instagram is looking at how popular a post seems to be so signals like how quickly people are liking on it commenting sharing saving those signals of how quickly engagement is happening on a post matter so much more for pushing something into to explore than it does for your feed and stories next they're
going to look at your activity in Explorer in the past what type of content have you liked saved shared or commented on in explore in the past and if you interact with a specific type of post they try to show you more content similar to the original post that you interacted with third your history of interacting with the person who posted most likely the post that you're seeing might not be from somebody you follow but if you've interacted with them in the past and you haven't followed them yet it'll give them a sense of How
likely you are to be interested in their content and then finally information about the person who posted who are they what kind of content do they post even signals like how many times people from across Instagram have interacted with that person in the past few weeks if it's a lot of people interacting with them that's going to tell Instagram that there might be some compelling content there for them to push to explore this is kind of a lot of information so let me break down two things one thing that's important to understand is because Instagram
has a large number number of Interest focused accounts based on specific themes they've actually built their algorithm to identify account eddings to help them efficiently identify which accounts are topically similar to each other so that was kind of a big mumbo jumbo words but basically Instagram categorizes people's accounts topically and then based off of the topic of the content they're posting it's easier for them to identify oh this person posts about books so I'm going to refer this account who also post about books so they create account embeddings to identify one specific topic of a
Creator's account which is why it's so important to like Niche down on Instagram in the first place let me say an example let's say that you've recently liked photos from Barnes & Noble right their Instagram account you've engaged with a bunch of their content Instagram is then going to go to Barnes & Noble's profile they're going to look at their photos they're going to look at the people who interact with those photos and if Sally has also liked that photo they're going to be like what other photos has Sally liked oh Sally actually liked a
photo from book of the month so the next time you open your explore page there might be book content there from book of the month because somebody who liked similar content as you liked another photo from an account that you didn't follow and D did I explain that okay hopefully that was Full Circle explanation if you're a content creator and you're just like struggling with having the algorithm work for you and you want to hack into the algorithm and get your content to perform better you want to you're like okay I want to take Instagram
seriously I want to grow 10,000 followers make $1,000 in the next 100 days I do have a free training for you completely free 60 Minutes in depth it's called your Instagram 100 day road map this is the exact path that I would follow day by day like day one this is what I would do day two this is what I would do like step by step what I would do if I was starting from zero so I will link free master class and free training down below you can take that if you're like okay I
want to hustle I want to start growing on Instagram what do I need to do how do I work with the algorithm instead of against it it it's a must watch it is a must watch so I'll link that down below next we have ranking for reals Instagram defines the reals feature as designed to help you discover new things with an emphasis on entertainment so much like explore the majority of what you see on your reals tab will be from accounts that you don't follow so they go through a very similar process as explore to
Source reals that they think you will be interested in the predictions though of like okay How likely you are to engage with the post are slightly different from the predictions of your explor page when they're ranking the reels of an order of importance they are trying to predict How likely you are to reshare a reel watch a reel all the way through like it and then go to the audio page if they think you're more likely to go to the audio of a specific real because it's going to inspire you to create they're going to
rank that real pretty high on your reals tab so the other important signals roughly in order of importance are your activity your history of interacting with the person who posted information about the real and information about the person who posted some of this is review but for activity they look at things like which reals you've liked saved shared commented on and engaged with recently those signals will help them understand what content might be relevant to you your history of interacting with the person who posted same thing with explore you probably don't follow this person but
if you've interacted with them they might rank their content a little bit higher this one is interesting so the third one was information about the real these are signals about the content within the video itself such as the audio track the audio the visuals in the video what the video is about what the captions about popup text they look at all of that in addition to popularity and engagement of that reel which leads into the fourth one information about the person who posted they consider popularity signals such as number of followers or level of Engagement
to help find compelling content from a wide group of people and hopefully give everyone a chance to find Their audience now that we understand each individual algorithm let's talk about the differences from the 2021 algorithm blog post to the most recent 2023 algorithm blog post so the first biggest change that we see between these two articles is feed and stories now have their own algorithms so in 2021 the algorithm for feed and stories were the same algorithm but as we can see in the 2023 article feed has their own algorithm and stories have their own
algorithm the next difference was in the most recent blog there are so much more transparent about the predictions that they are trying to make with each feature so before they would just be like we're going to look at these four signals from there we're going to predict the likelihood of you engaging with it but it's like okay but what does that mean with reals they actually say like we're trying to predict How likely you are to tap into an audio because we want you to be inspired to create like there's so much more transparent about
what predictions they're trying to make for each category stories How likely are you to reply to somebody's story like somebody's story and I just love that layered element so now we could understand the most important actions to take on a specific feature and another major shift that caught my eye was in their statement on Shadow Banning so the 202 3 blog post talks a lot about we're building tools to help you understand why your content isn't getting reach and D we're working on it we believe in transparency blah blah blah like it's great love that
they're working on tools hrah but what I found interesting wasn't necessarily about what they said but more so about what they didn't say what they took out I should say because in the 2021 blog post they said we can't promise you that you'll consistently reach the same number of people people when you post the truth is most of your followers won't see what you share because most look at less than half of their feed I am just so curious as to why they took that out and I'm curious because I I don't think they took
it out because it was like oh people are viewing more of their feed now it's it's great the problem solved I think they took it out because reach has been at like an alltime low and that statement just doesn't ring true anymore because I think people view less L than half their feed I think people are hardly scrolling through their feed and spending more time in stories or maybe more time in the reals tab so that's my prediction especially the magical blog post that I mentioned earlier in this video how they studied all the different
types of content they saw like a huge drop in reach this year like comparing last year's average reach to this year's average reach there's been a huge drop of reach on content and so just found that really interesting if you're a content creator or spire content creator don't forget to subscribe to my channel hug the Subscribe button turn on the Bell notification because you don't want to miss when I post my next video I plan to make a how to use the algorithm to your advantage as a content creator in the future so make sure
you're subscribed and I'll see you in the next one follow your joy bye
