On 15 March, Instagram said the feed would no longer be a simple list of the newest posts. Over the coming months, the photos and videos you see will be arranged by what Instagram thinks you care about, not only by when they were shared.
That is a big change for an app that built its name on showing things in time order. It is also a change we have been expecting, because Facebook, which owns Instagram, has ranked the News Feed this way for years.
For the businesses whose Instagram accounts we look after, it means we are going to post less often and spend more time on each photograph.
What Instagram has actually said
Instagram’s own explanation is fairly plain. The order of posts will be based on three things: how likely you are to be interested in a piece of content, your relationship with the person or account that shared it, and how recent the post is. Instagram also said that, at the start, it is only changing the order. Posts will not vanish from the feed. They will just sit in a different place.
Instagram has said people miss, on average, about 70 percent of their feeds. That figure comes from Instagram, not from us, and it is the reason the company gave for the change. As people follow more accounts, a purely chronological feed buries older posts under a pile of newer ones, even if those older posts would have mattered more to the person scrolling.
The new Instagram algorithm feed is built around showing you the posts you are more likely to stop on. For a personal account, that might mean a close friend’s photo appearing above a brand you barely look at. For a business, it means a weak photo posted just to stay visible has a poorer chance of being seen than it did when everything simply stacked by time.
Why posting more often will not help
The first instinct many page owners have is to post more, so they take up more slots in the feed. We think that is the wrong response.
If Instagram is ranking posts by interest and by how people treat your account, then a string of average photos teaches both your followers and the software to expect average work from you. People start skipping. Once they skip you a few times, the next post is less likely to sit near the top of their feed. Three middling pictures a day can do more harm than one good one.
We have already seen this on Facebook: posting only to fill the calendar rarely helps a page. Frequency works when the posts themselves are worth opening.
What we mean by a better photo
Instagram is still a photo-first app. Video has been there since 2013, first as clips of up to 15 seconds, and at the end of March Instagram began rolling out videos of up to a minute. Even so, most of the accounts we manage are still judged by their still photographs. A sharp picture of a real dish, a classroom or a shop floor will almost always do more than a longer video filmed only because someone felt they should “do video”.
For a restaurant in Delhi, a better photo is not a heavily filtered plate under a yellow tubelight. It is the dish near a window, shot from slightly above, with the actual colour of the food visible, and a caption that says what it is and whether it is on the lunch menu. For a school, it is a clear picture of a real activity, taken with permission, not a blurry shot of the assembly hall from the back row. For a shop, it is one product in decent light, not a collage of twelve items that nobody can read on a phone.
A few practical habits we keep coming back to:
- Wait for better light. Mid-morning near a window beats most overhead lighting in shops and kitchens.
- Give the frame one subject. If you want to show three dishes, take three photos on different days rather than one crowded table.
- Hold the phone steady and tap to focus. A surprising number of weak Instagram photos are simply out of focus.
- Write a caption that adds something useful: the price, the timing, the neighbourhood, or what a first-time visitor should know.
- Do not lift photos from other restaurants or from generic stock libraries and pass them off as yours. People notice, and it damages trust.
None of this requires a studio. It requires slowing down for ten minutes and treating the photograph as something a stranger will judge you by.
How often we plan to post
There is no magic number that suits every business. A cafe that has something new on the counter might share a few times a week. A clinic or a consultancy might share once or twice a week, or even less, if that is what they can do well.
What we are cutting is the empty slot-filling: the good morning graphic, the recycled quote card, the fifth photo of the same corner of the room. Those posts used to at least appear in time order. In a ranked feed they are more likely to be skipped, and that skipping teaches Instagram that your account is easy to pass over.
We would rather a client go quiet for a few days than publish something they would not show a customer standing in front of them.
What not to chase
Please do not ask people to like a post, leave a comment and tag three friends so that it “beats the algorithm”. Instagram, like Facebook, has been moving away from that kind of bait.
Do not buy followers or install apps that promise to push your posts to the top. Those shortcuts have a habit of falling apart, and they do nothing for people who might actually visit you.
Do not panic if your latest post does not appear at the very top of a friend’s feed. That is the point of the change. The same friend may see it later, when they open the app again, if Instagram thinks they will care about it.
What we are changing in our own work
For the Instagram accounts we handle, we are slowing the calendar down and putting more time into the photograph itself. That might mean visiting a restaurant in the morning to shoot three dishes properly, instead of asking the owner to WhatsApp whatever was taken on a busy Saturday night.
We are also looking more carefully at which older posts people actually responded to. If a particular kind of photo keeps earning comments or thoughtful replies, that is a clue about what your followers want to see. If a type of post is regularly ignored, we stop repeating it.
Instagram has said the ranked feed will roll out over the coming months, so not every account will see it on the same day. The useful response is the same either way: treat each post as if it has to earn its place, because soon it will.
A chronological feed rewarded people who posted at the right minute. A ranked feed rewards people who post something worth looking at. We would rather be in the second group.
