Our Blog

All your friends call you the biggest mood and you were born to be “relatable” to everyone around you — you have the craziest ideas when it comes to putting out stuff that other people and most importantly, you, enjoy — be it experimenting with fashion & makeup or showing your cooking prowess or making videos that strike a chord with the internet.

But is that all of what you need to occupy a virtual seat in this social media-driven game of phones?

To understand this, we need to understand first how does the algorithm decides whether a piece of content is worth showing to a particular person at any given time?

The foremost thing to consider is content which is the crux of it all and quality content is something you can’t do without.
What kind of content do you wish to put out and whom are you looking to appeal to with this content is something you should ask yourself before and during your content-creating journey.

The next question you get when you’re starting out is how do you get your content out to your target audience or in social media fancy lingo — how do you increase your reach organically?

There’re a whole bunch of ways by which Instagram prioritizes your content — comments, likes, re-shares (and lately, even saves) — All this counts as “engagement” and this is not the one involving your fiancé but the one involving your content. Therefore, the more such “engagement”, the more the algorithm works to make such content visible to a larger audience because this is what the algorithm feels — “since a bunch of people liked it, it is likely that more people would like this content too.”

While this is the whole essence behind something going “viral” this is also slightly counter-intuitive and why so?

In order to get engagement, you need a dedicated follower base or a community of your own but in order to get a community, your content should be more visible, so it’s a sort of a paradox. While Instagram has mentioned that the prioritization of content is no popularity contest, it’s also to do mainly with “interests” or basically– to do with you getting you hooked onto the app by tapping into your interests and catering that content to you that is, Posts with less engagement that are more relevant to you can still appear right at the top of your feed.

But as someone who’s looking to expand their reach you can’t rely primarily on this to make a mark on the internet — so what are the other things that matter?

Factors that go behind prioritizing content on a feed

Let’s get down to them:

1) Relationship status: Active
The algorithm focuses on the engagement on your posts and profile, but what it also focuses on is your interaction with followers & other users on the platform. Commenting a lot on posts or being tagged leads to your profile going into a special category where people are more likely to see your posts.

Above all, make sure you’re humanizing the virtual process of interaction on social media — replying to comments, checking up on DMs, interacting with your followers via stories by asking them questions, taking polls — it’s ultimately all these little things that count up to make a big difference.

2) Call your calendar: address your dates (maybe the ones on Tinder too)
Timing & consistency are 2 things Instagram’s always valued:
More recent posts are likely to show up on the feed (and on the explore page as well) than older ones; so make sure you have a content plan/calendar ready to put out consistent content as well as to post in the “peak timings” in a day that appeals to your target audience;

It’s necessary not just to have a posting schedule that’s catered according to your workflow but to optimize it for better reach — the time zone you’re in, the content you’re putting out and your target audience are all factors to consider while planning out your posting schedule

For example, millennials are likely to stay up late scrolling Instagram so if you’re to put out some content that appeals to them, later in the day would be a good time to do so.

With a bit of research and planning on your posting schedule at the start itself, you’d be able to save up on a lot of time later.

Added tip: The key to getting on the explore page is getting that engagement within the first 20 minutes of posting your post.

Besides these there are other things that matter too:

But these factors are largely influenced by the users/followers consuming your content and there is not much you as a creator can do to control these factors — at least, not directly.

So that’s about it — an overview of the algorithm and breaking it down and while there are a lot of other aspects and features that we can specifically talk about — stories, IGTVs, and reels, of course, we’ll save that (pun intended, remember, saves increase engagement!) for a later blog post.