You might notice something different and maybe a little annoying in your Instagram feed. In a recent blog post, the social network announced it would begin using an algorithm to sort what you see. Up until now, the photo sharing network arranged everything in simple reverse chronological order. Now, the accounts that you spend the most time liking and commenting on will appear prominently. The feeds that you follow as a courtesy, and typically scroll past, will appear less frequently.
This may sound familiar. Facebook did something similar earlier this year. And while these small changes usually cause an uproar at the time (remember when the company announced that Timeline was happening? made it clear that a user’s face was fair game for ads? or OH MY GOODNESS, hashtags became a thing? ), we tend to adjust and fall back into our normal social media routines. Also, Twitter did this too, with a lot less backlash.
What’s this mean for you as a consumer? Nothing really. Want to continue to see things you like? Be sure to interact with posts via likes and comments and apparently even lingering will do the trick. So, what’s with the arrow? Instagram, which by the way, is a unit of Facebook, is allowing users to turn on post notifications. If you don’t want to miss out on a single post from an account. You turn on notifications and BOOM. The arrow pictures are accounts pleading for users to do this. People are annoyed. I get it. But that didn’t stop me from doing it for my Bows and Branches account. Because why not? If one person turns them on, that’s good for me. In other words, calm down people, it will die down. (I have since taken it down. After reading more and more about it, I felt weird having it on there.)
Right now, the media is kinda all over the place with this, so who knows what will happen. But if it does, what should brands be focusing on rather than making arrow pictures? Like anything else we do online, we need to analyze and now is the time. Photographer Jasmine Star did an amazing blog post explaining how a small business can better understand what their audience enjoys.
So, what do you think? Honestly, we have no say so we might as well just deal. Me? I will be running numbers all day.
