There are some things that Instagram is very clear about, and that is that the feed and the stories are spaces where all users use to see content from the closest people or family. So the working of this algorithm can be divided into different parts, let’s see it together.
To begin, defining the set of elements that will be classified. In this case of the stories and the feed, the classification is relatively simple: all the recent publications that have been shared by the accounts you follow are shown. Obviously we also tend to see ads in the middle of things that are of interest to us.
After collecting all the information about what was published, such as the people who made the publications, their preferences… We call this information “signals”, and you will find thousands of them, which include data such as: What time it was shared, if you use phone or web, how often you like other posts.
IMPORTANT!. From the Official Instagram account they have determined that the most important signals within the Feed and Stories, in order of importance, are the following:
Post Information: Evaluate the popularity signals of a post. Like for example with information like: how many people liked it. It also monitors data like post date, video length, and location.
Information about the posting account: Includes signals such as how many times users have interacted with a person in the past few weeks. This teaches the app whether or not the account’s posts are of interest to you.
Your Activity: Signals like the number of posts you’ve liked help Instagram understand what content you find interesting to watch. To then suggest more.
Your history of interaction with someone: If you comment or not on an account’s posts, you will be showing the app how interested you are.
From this data, IG can make a series of predictions. These are estimates of how likely they are to interact with a post in different ways.
To make it clearer, in the Feed, the five interactions we pay the most attention to are the ones Instagram thinks might appeal to you. Either to leave a comment, to save it in your saved post reel or to enter the IG profile of said account.
The more likely you are to take this action, the higher up the post you’ll see. Over time, the same app will add or remove some signals so that you can always find what interests you.
Although, in some cases they may have other types of considerations. For example, it would be repetitive if I always showed you a post from the same accounts.
Another example was given earlier when we wanted to share the post in stories. Despite the fact that the platform heard from users that they wanted to see more original stories, there are special situations in which having a higher number of views is beneficial for user interaction.
Instagram also highlights that it takes misinformation very seriously. As soon as you post something that their third-party fact-checkers deem to be misinformation, but they don’t remove it, they add a label to it, and the feed or story post is given less importance.
It is important not to repeatedly post misinformation, as the app will make it more difficult to display your content.
