In an effort to make “Feed the best place to share and connect with the people and interests that matter most to you”, Instagram is testing a feature which will add recommended posts to your content stream from users you don’t already follow.
A similar feature was previously trialled but there are a couple of small differences to how the platform will behave this time around. When you have viewed new posts, you’ll see the familiar “all caught up” indicator and then you be presented with two options, to either view older posts from accounts you follow or to continue viewing posts from accounts you don’t follow “based on the people you follow and the photos and videos you like”.
This type of feature is present across various social platforms, so this won’t feel intrusive to most users. For those that are prolific producers of high-quality content, this could be a great way to get exposure to a new audience. Discovery is always challenging and if the platform’s algorithm is going to serve your content to an individual that has expressed an interest in topics that relate to your brand then everybody wins.
For influencers to benefit from this, they’ll need to consider what interests they want to align their content to, a broad spread will probably make it difficult for the algorithm to determine what is the primary topic your content relates to. Though it would be reasonable to expect a popular post that has a large number of individuals engaging with it to be given greater prominence.
It’s important to underline that this feature is still just being tested, so at this stage, it wouldn’t make sense to completely shift strategy in any way. However, given that this is the second trial, we can all expect this type of recommended post feature to land permanently soon.
