Something we can definitely agree on, is that over the past 15 months, 16 months, even 18 months the world has changed significantly.
And, not only has the world changed significantly, but social media has changed as well, and the way that we use social media has massively, massively changed, and been significantly impacted.
But it’s not actually just been the case over the past 18 months. The way that we use social media, and the platforms themselves have changed consistently month on month, and year or year, and on not just Instagram or Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, and LinkedIn but all these platforms and even more recent platforms such as Clubhouse.
We’re seeing that we don’t necessarily get the reach and the kind of engagement; the number of likes, and the number of comments, and ultimately the amount of interaction from our content that we might expect, or might hope for, and have seen in the past
And this is the reason the conversation and the question about social media algorithms come up again, and again and again.
When social media platforms first get started, they show your post, and whenever you post something, with all of your followers.
Way back when Instagram first started, and when Facebook first started, the way that the platforms would operate is they would share your content to all of your followers and all of your audience.
So you could post pretty much anything, and all of your followers would see it. Sounds great right?
That was great for a long time, but then what does Facebook do? It changes the algorithm. It reduces the reach, and suddenly, only about 66% of your audience sees your content.
What happened next?
Well Instagram and Facebook changed the game again and it went down to about 33%, and then down to 16% and then down to 8%.
Now I think it sits around 4% (this maybe slightly lower on FB and slightly higher on Instagram).
A lot of people say that that’s not fair. That’s not right. That’s not how it should be, and yep that may well be the case. But FB and Instagram are businesses too.
But what does that mean for us?
Suddenly our audience is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
OK, the audience actually stays the same, but the way we can connect with those people , the way that we can reach those people has changed.
Instagram (like every other social media platform) wants to keep us on the platform. They want us to spend more time on the platform, interacting and engaging. So ultimately what they are looking for are ways that it can keep people on the platform.
Instagram shares content that people want to see.
The algorithm identifies the major things that people want to see, the content they engage with, the content they interact with, valuable content that is useful, and good content. What is good content? Content that people are interacting with and engaging with.
If we can get clear on what that is, and if we can create that type of content, and if we understand how the algorithm works, we’re going to get the best results. The best interaction, the best engagement and more followers which of course leads to more leads, sales and clients for our businesses.
We’ve seen months where our clients have got 21,000 followers in a single month, some of them have grown 10,000 followers in just six days. You know that we can do something to help people build their audience and continue to grow and get more followers, again and again and again.
It’s not just simply a coincidence. There are ways that you can do this no matter what happens with the algorithm change.
Wouldn’t it feel great to know that a strategy that you were using was going to be almost bulletproof no matter what happened with these social media platforms?
Instagram Rewards
We need to look at the actions Instagram rewards:
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Instagram rewards higher levels of engagement from your followers.
In other words, when you share a post, when you share a video, when you share a video, when you share a story, these pieces of content get engagement.
Okay, so we need to set the post that we need to set our content, we need to set up rules that we set up our stories, so that they drive interaction and engagement from our followers, they’re not passive. When the posts come up.
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Instagram rewards higher levels of engagement with our followers
That doesn’t mean that we need spent hours and hours and hours, it’s not about creating another job where you’re in there and you engage in interacting engaging interacting all day long, that’s not useful for any business owner or an entrepreneur when we should always be looking at income-generating tasks, but there are ways that you can drastically increase the interaction and engagement in a very very short space of time to help boost your, your credibility, I guess you could say boost your brownie points with the Instagram algorithm.
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Time spent on your profile
The amount of time that people spend on your profile has been consuming your content is another thing that’s why there’s a big shift towards reels at the moment, creating the type of reels that people will see again and again, again, looking at stories video, of course, is very very useful, but it’s not just about creating and sharing videos or stories or reels, they have to be valuable, and we have to look at ways that we can increase the amount of time that people spend on our profile and on our content.
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The speed of engagement
This is another big one and there are ways that you can get people very quickly to interact with one of your posts or interact with your content. Once it goes up to if your post goes out and they take half an hour or an hour or three hours for somebody to like and comment. He’s not going to do a world of good for the argument, however, if within a very short space of time, three minutes, five minutes of that post going out you can get an avalanche of messages and likes and comments and interaction with that post, then it’s going to boost your visibility with the algorithm.
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Use of the Features
Finally, the more consistently that we can use not just all the features, but also the feature that Instagram is favouring at this time, the more the algorithm will favour us.
There’s a reason why, three, four years ago Instagram was favouring stories. There’s a reason why, two, three years ago Instagram was favouring IGTV, and there’s a reason right now that it is favouring reels. These are the newest features of the platform and the ones which they want you to use.
If we can find the best way to leverage and interact and engage with the right features, this will have a massive impact on the reach and interaction you can get.
Of course, this is personal to every business, every brand, every product, every service and it looks slightly different depending on who you’re looking to attract, and how you approach your marketing strategy, but these simple steps will allow you to make the Instagram Algorithm work for you.
Summary:
Remember the Instagram rewards:
- Instagram rewards higher levels of engagement from your followers.
- Instagram rewards higher levels of engagement with our followers
- Instagram rewards more Time spent on your profile
- Instagram rewards faster speeds of engagement
- Instagram rewards use of the Features
If you are looking for more personalised support, or a more personalised plan about how you can do this, then reach out to me and my team. We can support you further to help you build your audience and your brands with Instagram.
