Hot off the heels of platform chief Adam Mosseri’s US Senate appearance for improving Instagram’s user safety comes the announcement that the platform is reintroducing the option for chronological feed display. Originally replaced in 2016 by algorithmic feeds, chronological feed functionality will be available as a display option as of early 2022. As a reason for this change, Instagram Comms indicates that the company “wants people to have meaningful control over their experience.” This is great news if you’ve been worried that your posts have fallen victim to algorithmic bias or “shadow bans,” but it may affect your brand’s best practices for being seen on the ‘gram!
What this means going forward:
- Because this feature is optional, a large portion of your followers will continue to see your posts when the algorithm wants them to. It’s still going to be important to create content that encourages engagement, likes, and shares. Keep adding value!
- If you’ve always wanted to double-post but were scared of your content being hobbled because of the algorithm, this update is going to be great for you. The portion of your audience that has the chronological feed enabled will see everything you put out there. If your following is loyal, you’ll be more visible, more of the time.
- WHEN you post content is about to become way more important. You want your content to hit that balance between being seen by your audience but not buried by a flurry of content from other creators. If you’re wondering about prime posting times, take a look at our handy guide here.
- If your audience is distributed across a few time zones, you’ll need to strategize carefully about post timing, or experiment with double posting.
- We don’t know how this feature is going to work yet. Some outlets speculate that this feature won’t have a “default” option, and users may need to enable it every time they enter the app. If this is the case, chronological feeds may not make that much of a difference, as fewer users will be likely to enable the functionality every time they log in. We’ll keep you updated as soon as we know more!
If you’re at the end of your tether when it comes to Instagram switching up on us, we totally get it. It can be challenging to keep changing your strategy every time the platform makes a new decision. One way to bypass this switch and ensure that your content gets seen is with Instagram ads. The Dawning Digital team can help you create, target, and launch ads that get your brand in front of the people you want to see it. Take a look at our digital marketing services to see how we can help!