Hi, Emily here!
When it comes to deciphering exactly what all the fuss is about when it comes to Instagram’s new content based timeline, I came across an article that asked the question; “Does Social Media Marketing Have an Unavoidable Future in Paid Posts?” which made me think about how small businesses navigate the apparently exponential growth of paid advertising on the platforms.
It also gave me a bit of a wobble when I saw that 2016 is more than a THIRD over, buts that’s another blog (where does life go??).
Instagram users were quite vocal about the change from a chronological timeline to a new interest based algorithm. From their point of view was this move could “harm small businesses ability to remain visible”.
It also means you can no longer start where you left off to “catch up” with your favourite content.
Now if you’re not already on the platform, you should be. Number one, it’s super visual. This makes it perfect for creating your “brandonality”, or what makes your brand stand out on social media and marks your posts as your own against the maelstrom of other companies.
Secondly, the enthusiasm of its users for branded and sponsored content is much higher than on Facebook.
If you’re familiar to Instagram, you might have noticed requests from users with lots of followers to turn on notifications for their posts to make sure they don’t get “lost”. This panic was unnecessary and there was really no need for it; no one wants hundreds of the notifications every hour!
Having said this however I think that the platform is just better suited in terms of its audience to marketing online, so it makes sense. In reality the changes are not that obvious, and perhaps this fear was more brands pushing to get in front of their customers in case the new timeline really was that bad.
From Instagram’s point of view, the changes are aimed to help gather information on user behaviour in order to curate a platform where paid ads become more effective for brands.
So this is a learning process. It seems that the ultimate move is towards a Facebook style model, where (quote) an intentional “automation” of a personalisation curation process for each user”.
After a few chats around the office with fellow Insta lovers, it seems that they do have a lot to learn from how we use it.
It’s one of the most interactive platforms, with users jumping in and out of profiles and their “feed”; the bottom line is, if you want to see output from brand, the likelihood is you’ll be navigating to their profile to check you haven’t missed out, so making sure that you’re creating engaging content and interacting with your followers, you’re not going to drop off the face of the earth!
The post has a few ways that you can tackle non-chronological newsfeeds (which will also help on Facebook, if you’re not on Instagram!) which you can see here!
