A recent blog post on the official Instagram Blog caused quite a stir amongst the tech media this week when Instagram announced a change to the way images will display in your feed. In an effort to “improve your experience, your feed will soon be ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most.” (via Instagram) Sharing this important stat: “people miss on average 70 percent of their feeds,” Instagram explained that means there’s a pretty good chance you’re missing the posts that you’d actually like to see the most. As the social media channel has grown over the years, it’s been harder and “harder to keep up with all the photos and videos people share.”
Here’s what TechCrunch had to say:
“On the one hand, the relevancy-optimized Instagram feed will make sure you don’t miss great content even if you don’t neurotically check it all the time. You’ll be able to follow more accounts without worrying about them drowning out your favorites. And it will be easier to keep up with international friends who might normally post while you’re asleep.
At the same time, remixing the feed will make Instagram less useful as a real-time content feed because the most recent posts won’t necessarily be at the top. Users will have to worry about making their posts good enough to be chosen by the algorithm or their posts could be de-prioritized. And brands might lose the reach of a previously reliable marketing channel, the same way they did with Facebook Pages.”
So, in a nutshell (according to Instagram), “all the posts will still be there, just in a different order.” But here’s the downside – especially when you’re diligently working to use social media for business – “With Instagram and Twitter both moving to algorithmically sorted feeds, getting seen on social media will become more of a competition than ever.” (via TechCrunch)
You can expect to see this change happening in the upcoming months. What do you think? Is this a positive or negative adjustment? Or will we all just have to wait and see?
