Dive Brief:
- Instagram announced it will discontinue the practice of ordering posts in user feeds chronologically, instead delivering content “curated” to suit each user’s interests and relationships.
- Instagram parent Facebook has long employed an algorithm to curate user feeds, and Twitter similarly abandoned its reverse-chronological order last month.
- The photo-sharing site has promised to respond to user feedback in rolling out the change in order to maintain a positive user experience.
Dive Insight:
Instagram posts will be presented based upon the individual user’s likelihood of interest, relationship to the event or posting person, and timeliness, similar to the curatorial presentation used by parent company Facebook.
In other words, if a person likes photos from a particular contributor, that contributor’s photos will be more likely to appear at the top of the feed. Instagram users currently miss about 70% of the posts that might interest them, an official says, and a curated feed will help ensure that the 30% viewed is the most intriguing.
The algorithm-enabled feed will roll out over the next few months, and Instagram has promised to exercise care to keep its user experience responsive. The most avid Instagram users will likely feel left out of the arrangement, however, since it may make it difficult to view every photo from every feed followed.
This and a similar move by Twitter will virtually eliminate real-time sharing among major social media platforms except for the largely person-to-person Snapchat. But the move may make Instagram more attractive to advertisers, since a feed weighted to suit user interests can deliver sponsored content more reliably.
