It seems as soon as we have social media figured out – they change it all up on us and make us figure it out again. I guess that’s part of the game we all play – staying ahead of the curve and reinventing ways to connect with our clients.
This week Instagram announced it will be making changes to its algorithm and the way their 400 million users view content. According to Instagram, they will now push content to the top of your feed “based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post.” This is much like Facebook, basically a robot is going to tell us what we should be seeing, instead of viewing it in the order it was posted.
With this in mind, we have had to reassess a few of our Instagram accounts to ensure we are maximizing our potential. We’ve listed a few tips below to get you started.
Assess Your Account
Your Content: What type of images do your users most respond to? Quotes, travel images, personal posts. Dissect what your users want and give it to them.
Time of Day. What time of day do your users most respond? Try experimenting with posting at different times of the day and see what your results are.
User Engagement: Since the algorithm is based on relevant content – getting users to interact is imperative. Do a giveaway, have strong call to actions such as double tap if you agree, tag a friend who loves _____.
Tools to Help: A great tool to help you assess your account is http://iconosquare.com. It will give you tons of stats on basically everything there is to do with your instagram account.
We hope a few of these tips help you avoid the pitfalls of the changes we keep seeing on social media. Ultimately, this change is trying to force us to do paid advertising, but if we do our part on delivering awesome, relevant content, and creatively get our users to interact with us, we may not have to do as much paid advertising.
Comment below with any Instagram tips that you have used and ideas that have worked!