What Has Changed About Your Instagram Feed?
Does Instagram look different to anyone else? Meta have made a few big changes to the Instagram feed that we’re really excited about, with more coming down the line.
We all know that social media is a fast-paced industry–as soon as you get used to a platform feature it changes. But don’t worry,we’re here to give you an overview of the updates and to help you figure out your next steps.
Chronological feed
Anyone who used Instagram back in the early days will probably remember a time when we were shown the most recently posted content at the top of our feed. Can you believe our lives weren’t always run by the algorithm? Since the feed changed years ago, some dedicated users have been campaigning Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri, to return to this formula, and we hope they’re now celebrating this victory in style. Of course, it’s possible that Meta is hoping we will miss the personalised algorithm and demand its return. We’ll all have to wait and see!
Favourites feed
You can now set up a ‘Favourites’ feed to view content from the people and brands you’re most interested in. This will be useful for those who prefer to keep up with friends and family, dipping their toes into branded content less often. Here are a few issues we’ve noticed so far:
- You have to swap to this view from your ‘Following’ feed every time you want to use – there is no option to make ‘Favourites’ your default choice.
- ‘Favourites’ is the only alternate feed when it might be handy to have several options for different groups, like ‘Friends & Family’, ‘Travel Inspo’, ‘Recipes’, etc.
How could these updates affect brands?
Posting times may become more relevant again, something that has slipped down the list of priorities while we all depended on the algorithm to show our content to the right people. Now, if we want to reach our target audience at a particular time of day, it makes sense to set up a posting schedule that matches their online activity. Brands might also want to encourage users to add them to their ‘Favourites’ so they don’t lose out in the feed switch.
Full screen feed
TikTok users might not be surprised to hear Instagram is interested in copying the popular immersive, full screen format. Example demonstrations show a combined feed of regular posts, Stories and Reels. So far this is just in the development stage, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see it get implemented in the near future as Meta continues to compete with the Gen Z giant.
What could the full screen feed mean for brands?
Brands that already create portrait videos for TikTok, Stories and Reels won’t need to change much, although they might be better able to measure viewer metrics going forward. Also, as more traditional brands get used to promoting content through the full screen experience on Instagram, they might start to consider setting up a TikTok account (if they haven’t already). Video will continue its upward trajectory and those brands with more of a focus on static imagery should look to platforms like Pinterest to showcase their photography. For similar reasons, brands can put less effort into perfecting the aesthetic of their profile grid on Instagram.
Now and forever, our advice is to keep track of social media platform and feature updates if you want to stay ahead of the game. Even the smallest changes can make a huge difference to your brand’s strategy. We’d also suggest you avoid pinning all your content goals and metrics onto one feature that could disappear at any moment!
Written by our copywriter Katie Dennison