Instagram's Algorithm Change - What It Means For Businesses

[Mikkel]

For those of you that have been using Instagram as a platform as a jumping point for Affiliate Marketing, Lead Generation and a multitude of other business ventures, Instagram threw us a bit of a curve ball.

According to Instagram's Blog Post, they will be rearranging posts around, "[improving] your experience[.] Your feed will soon be ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most."

This means, the current Chronological Timeline posting will now be changed to a more optimized timeline, of what will be more likely to intrigue a specific person.

So what does that mean for us smaller people, working to make a name out of our small to medium range followings?

Probably a bit more work. Rather than spamming photos so our followers will constantly see our photos, we should strive to increase our engagement per photo. I would assume then, that the recommended 2-3 photos a day, will be even more heavily recommended.

Spam is great... if you don't care about your followers and just want to put your links out there for Affiliate marketing. Spamming is not so great if you want people to engage on each photo. Who would want to comment on those 6 photos that you posted in the last 2 hours?

Although these changes have only arrived to a few accounts, the full algorithm change will be coming in the near future. I believe it is important to start changing your game plan to marketing on Instagram to increase your engagement to others, so you don't fall off the Instagram Timeline.

Suggestions:

1. Don't Spam. Your engagement will be lower, and so will your placement on other peoples timelines.
2. Make your pictures engaging. This includes commenting back on your own photos, to keep the conversation going.
3. Targeted Hashtags. Although I previously thought you could get away without using hashtags, I think it is all the more important now. That extra traffic could potentially bring in much more engagement.
4. Liking technique (A personal favorite of mine) I think this technique, liking photos of people who have liked niche related photos, will still be very powerful. You will still be placing your account right in front of people, because people can click on your page. This way, new people will constantly be liking your photos because they will be directly on your page rather than scrolling through their timeline. This can also increase engagement.

As of right now, I am only going off of what Instagram has announced and other blog posts have written and putting my own interpretation on this. I'd like to see what other people think about this new algorithm change.

 

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[AllenCrawley]

Great post and I agree with everything you've laid out.

Here's a great article by Jon Loomer regarding the IG changes and how it's actually a good thing. Well worth the read...

http://www.jonloomer.com/2016/03/24/the-death-of-brands/

 

[Mikkel]

That's a great article, @AllenCrawley . It sounds like, from this article, that brands need to start acting more like brands. I know for myself, I was thinking of buying a automated bot called FollowLiker. The plan was to have like 20 accounts and try to accumulate as many followers as I could. With these new changes, I think it would be smarter to have only 1 account in a single niche, maybe two if you are not working on a bunch of other niches. I know for myself, I will want to be replying back to comments rather than just leaving them there.

Also, I appreciate the rep transation, Allen.