Instagram publishes new best practices for creators to follow to increase their eligibility for recommendations.
Recommendations are the photos and videos you see on Instagram from accounts you don’t follow.
Recommended content surfaces in the Instagram main feed, Explore feed, and Reels tab.
Instagram determines whether to recommend a piece of content based on signals such as how many other people have and how quickly they like, comment, share and save the post.
Previous user interactions with the creator are a factor, as well as other posts the person has liked or commented on.
When your content appears as a recommended image or video, it can positively impact your reach and accelerate audience growth.
Getting content picked up by the Instagram recommendation algorithm is a goal for all businesses and creators trying to gain more followers.
To help more people achieve this goal, Instagram is sharing a set of best practices for users to follow.
Best practices for Instagram recommendations
eligibility
First, if you want to be eligible for recommendations, you must have a public account. Instagram will not recommend content from private accounts.
After that, you need to follow Instagram Recommendation guidelines.
Instagram has specific guidelines that cover the types of content it tries to recommend to people’s feeds.
Recommendation guidelines are different from Community Guidelines, which are rules for what can and cannot be on Instagram.
Content that goes against Instagram’s recommendation guidelines includes:
- Content that may depict violence, such as people fighting
- Content that promotes the use of certain controlled products, such as tobacco or vaping products
- Content that may be sexually explicit or suggestive, such as pictures of people in transparent clothing
Finally, you need to follow the Instagram Community Guidelines. You will know if you are not following our Community Guidelines because Instagram will send a warning or remove the content.
With that said, let’s get into the best practices.
best practices
Instagram recommends best practices to increase reach through recommendations:
- Post the original contentInstagram aims to expand the reach of creators who create their own content rather than aggregating other people’s content.
- Create content reelsMake Instagram reels part of your content strategy for more chances to get your content recommended.
- Refine your search: Use descriptive comments and hashtags to show your content in search results. It also helps to improve your bio and profile name.
Instagram double the recommendations
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, is doubling down on the company’s commitment to providing more recommendations on people’s feeds.
Mosseri paints it as a positive trend for users, especially those who create original content.
📣 Recommendations 📣
To create more opportunities for discovery, we’ve added recommendations to more places. Here are ways to be eligible for registrations:
Recommendation guidelines
Community Guidelines
Public accounts onlyMore info here 👉 https://t.co/zx4GaWYiBW pic.twitter.com/1uwTJKfSLG
– Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) August 30, 2022
In the video above, Mosseri says (emphasis mine):
The idea behind the recommendations is to help people discover great creators on Instagram that they don’t even know about yet. Our hope is that The future of forage will be largely driven by recommendationsbecause we’re increasingly seeing friend sharing move to Stories and Direct Messages.
If we do our job right, and I want to point out that we’re not quite there yet, we’ll help people discover great creators in a way that both means people will spend more time on the platform, but also that the average creator gets more reach.
And if we’re really thoughtful, we can divert more distribution from the aggregators, who I think today get more than their fair share of distribution on Instagram, to the creators.
Again, especially the young creators who I think we can do more with because we want to be a platform where anyone can grow their audience and make a living in the long term.”
Source: Instagram
Featured image: Worawee Meepian / Shutterstock
