Breaking news! Instagram’s chronological feed is coming back.
For those of you who have been on Instagram since the beginning, you’ll remember that you were able to view posts in your Instagram feed in the order of their posting time. Instagram scrapped that in favour of an algorithm-based feed, which shows users content that Instagram feels they’ll respond to best
During the first half of 2022, you’ll be getting the option to view your Instagram feed in chronological order again by choosing the “Following” tab option. You’ll also get the option of choosing the “Home” and “Favourites” tab.
The difference between “Home” “Favourites” and “Following”
Instagram is bringing in the option of viewing your feed in three different ways. Here is an overview of the Instagram feed tabs you can expect:
Home: similar to the current experience Instagram offers now with suggested content. Although it isn’t confirmed yet, we can expect to see more suggested content populating this feed option over time.
Favourites: populated by a curated list of accounts that the user chooses.
Following: the chronological option. You’ll be able to see all the posts from users you follow in a chronological list, based on posting time.
What does this update mean for Instagram’s future?
This update to Instagram feeds will be a huge change!
Users will be able to customize their feeds more than they’ve been able to in the past. It’ll create more opportunities to optimize the user experience, but will also change the way content is being shared on the platform.
With the option of choosing how users view their content, content creators will have to accommodate that change.
For the “Home” option, there will be more suggested content Instagram shares to users which means that content creators may have to find ways to create captions, content and hashtags that help them appear as “suggested content” for certain topics. Since this option is similar to how Instagram feeds work currently, the engagement strategy may be able to stay the same except a large audience could prefer to choose the “Favourites” option.
If more users opt to use the “Favourites” option, content creators may have to encourage their followers to add them to their favourites list.
If users choose to use the “Following” option content creators may have to post more often to show up on the Following feed.
Whichever option users choose to optimize, content creators may have to create a strategy that works for all three options or focus on one option.
With this update coming to Instagram, there will be more options to optimize the user experience and different creative strategies for social media managers to use.
Are you excited about Instagram’s feed changes?
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