Soon, your Instagram feed is going to be changing whether you like it or not.
Back in March, Instagram announced that they would be testing an algorithm that would sort people’s feeds based on what they’re most likely to be interested in, instead of what’s most recently posted. Now, the test seems to be over, as Instagram will officially roll out their algorithmic feed over the next month. The announcement was made n Thursday.
When the announcement was first made, a number of people understandably freaked out a bit. This reaction came mainly from influencers and brands. This makes sense as followers may not see as many of their posts. But, it’s possible that the opposite could happen instead.
Instagram has said that people miss 70 percent of the posts from those people and brands that they follow. This is the reason why the company decided to adopt an algorithmic feed.
The idea behind this algorithmic feed is to help show people the photos and videos that they’ll more than likely be most interested in seeing every time they check their Instagram feed. This could be a better idea than scrolling though the current timeline of posts to sift out what they want to see. With this new algorithm in place, there’s a better chance of interacting with these posts.
“We found that people are liking photos more, commenting more and generally engaging with the community in a more active way,” Instagram wrote in a company blog post announcing the official rollout.
It seems that there’s more than just one reason to adopt this new type of feed than the Instagram user. There’s also the financial incentive as well. There are those (brands and publishers in particular) who would be scared about Instagram’s algorithm not showing their posts to enough people. They are afraid that they’ll opt to pay Instagram to promost those posts as ads in order to attract more views.