Instagram users were missing 70% of all posts and 50% of their friends’ posts before the app ditched reverse chronological feed for an algorithm in July 2016. Despite backlash about confusing orders, Instagram now says relevancy sorting has led to its 800 million-plus users seing 90% of their friends’ posts and spending more time on the app.
Yet Instagram has never explained exactly how the algorithm chooses what to show you until today. The Facebook-onwed company assembled a group of reporters at its under-construction new San Francisco office to take lid off the Instagram feed ranking algorithm.
Instagram product lead Julian Gutman explains the algorithm
Instagram’s Feed Ranking Criteria
Instagram relies on machine learning based on your past behavior to create a unique feed for everyone. Even if you follow the exact same accounts as someone else, you’ll get a personalized feed based on how you interact with those accounts.
Three main factors determine what you see in your Instagram feed:
- Interest: How much Instagram predicts you’ll care about a post, with higher ranking for what matters to you
- Recency: How recently the post was shared, with priortization for timely posts
- Relationship: How close you are to the person who shared it, with higher ranking for people you’ve interacted with a lot in the past on Instagram, such as commenting on their posts or being tagged together in photos.
Then three additional factors that influence rankings are:
- Frequency: How often you open Instagram, as it will try to show you the best posts since your last visit
- Following: If you follow a lot of people, Instagram will be picking from a wider breadth of authors so you might see less of any specific person
- Usage: How long you spend on Instagram determines if you’re just seeing the best posts during short sessions, or it’s digging deeper into its catalog if you spend more time browsing.
Instagram Mythbusting
Instagram’s team also responded to many of the most common questions and conspiracy theories about how its feed works:
- Instagram is not at this time considering an option to see the old reverse chronological feed because it doesn’t want to add more complexity but it is listening to users who dislike the algorithm
- Instagram does not hide posts in the feed, and you’ll see everything posted by everyone you follow if you keep scrolling
- Feed ranking does not favor the photo or video format universally, but people’s feeds are tuned based on what kind of content they engage with, so if you never stop to watch videos you might see fewer of them
- Instagram’s feed doesn’t favor users who use Stories, Live, or other special features of the app
- Instagram doesn’t downrank users for posting too frequently or other specific behavior, but it might swap in other content in between theirs if they rapid-fire separate posts
- Instagram doesn’t give extra feed presence to personal accounts or business accounts, so switching won’t help your reach.
- Shadowbanning is not a real thing, and Instagram doesn’t hide people’s content for posting too many hashtags or taking other behavior
We’ll have more details shortly