The Instagram Algorithm Part 1: How It Works

The Instagram Algorithm Part 1: How it Works

The Instagram algorithm doesn’t take much to understand. It’s actually quite easy to grasp. It’s taking what you know about the algorithm and applying it. I’ve decided to start a blog series about Instagram after seeing that so many small businesses, creators, authors, are struggling to grow on Instagram. As for myself, it took 3 years of going through plenty of fluff webinars, YouTube videos, and blogs to figure it out. No one creator told me how it really worked. Instead, it was more of them throwing baseline information out there to get me to buy products. Anyway, here we go. Straight to the Juice.

How It Works

When you upload a post, the Instagram algorithm starts by showing your post to 10% of your followers. It measures the amount of activity within the first 30 minutes of a post. Those 30 minutes are crucial for engagement, but it doesn’t always determine whether or not your post will be successful. If the first 10% engage with it, like, comment, etc. then it will promote your post to 20% of your audience and so on. Whether they engage with it, and how they engage with it will determine if it gets promoted to the explore page.

The first thing you need to know is that there are different types of engagement activities. Think of it as a score board. Each “engagement activity” has a certain amount of points, now this isn’t golf, so the more points you score, the higher and longer your post will be boosted on Instagram. The order goes like so, ranking from lowest scoring to highest: likes, in which there are two different types. A single tap on the heart gives one point but a double tap on the photo signals to the algorithm that it was 6% more enjoyable towards the audience so it gets ½ a point more.) Of course, the amount of time a viewer spends looking at your post is taken into account.

The second activity is comments. On the scale comments score 2 points as opposed to a like. Along with that, length of the comment does not matter to the algorithm, engagement is engagement, hence why you sometimes see niche pages commenting random emojis under their own posts. Following comments is shares. Shares on the scale give 3 points. Shares are a good way to measure whether your content is sparking inspiration or not and you can see the amount of times a post was shared in your post insights. To do so, click a post and navigate to “View Insights”. Note: One can only do so if they have a creator or business account. You can switch to one in settings under “Account”.

The last engagement activity is saves. When someone saves your post, all I can say is, you’re doing something right! A save means you have inspired someone and made a lasting impression, and these have a score of 4 on the scale. One last thing, I’m not entirely sure if the engagement scale resets to 0 for every 10% of your audience the post is boosted to, but I like to think so. That way if it isn’t, then I will have a leg up. That’ all for today. Thanks for reading and part 2 will be out soon! - Meyer