Instagram Algorithm Change – Chronological is Back Baby!
On March 22, Instagram announced major changes to its algorithm. When the Blend360 social team first saw there was an algorithm announcement, it was met with fear and “here we go again.” The expectation was that Instagram was going to follow their parent company Facebook’s lead and make it increasingly difficult for posts to show up in follower feeds.
But low and behold – it’s an early Easter (or Passover) miracle!
Instagram announced a return to a more chronological feed. No more seeing posts that are three or four days old at the top of your feed. To be clear, our headline is a bit misleading in that Instagram is not moving to a strictly chronological algorithm – it is just weighting recency of each post more heavily in the algorithm. This means that how new a post is will play a more dominant factor in what gets shown at the top of users’ feeds.
What does this mean for business? Well for starters, when you post is once again probably the most important consideration in your posting strategy (aside from engagement qualities, of course). Since the algorithm newer posts will appear at the top, posting when most of your followers are on Instagram is once again key. The second thing to now consider is frequency. Since older posts will not appear anywhere close to the top of user feeds, Instagram posts will have shorter shelf lives. A solid content strategy is therefore more important than ever before.
Another announced change is a “New Posts” button that will allow users to manually refresh their feeds. Users were complaining that their feeds were automatically refreshing on them while scrolling, offering a less than optimal user experience. Instagram has added this button in hopes of making the browsing experience more enjoyable.