Instagram is currently among the top social media platforms that there is.
What started out as a simple photo-sharing platform has today transformed into something much bigger and complex and therefore hard for people to understand how it works.
Addressing this concern, Instagram head Adam Mosseri in a blog post has answered some of the most widely asked questions about the platform, its algorithm and how it ranks posts in Feed.
Mosseri says that the main “misconception” about the Instagram algorithm, is that there is one single algorithm making people see some posts and hiding some.
However, in reality, it is actually “a variety of algorithms, classifiers, and processes, each with its own purpose.” In fact, Mosseri reveals that each part of the app – Feed, Explore, Reels – uses its own algorithm tailored to how people use it.
He said that while looking at Feed and Stories, users tend to look for their closest friends, however, in Explore they are looking to discover something new.
How Instagram ranks Feed and Stories When it comes to Feed and Stories, Mosseri says that these include “all the recent posts shared by the people you follow.” After this, the app takes in all the information — which it calls signals — in order to derive the algorithm.
The most important signals across Feed and Stories are how many people have liked a post, when it was posted, the length of the content, location and more.
Then it includes information about the person who posted such as how many times people have interacted with that person in the past few weeks.
It also considers a user’s activity such as how many posts they have liked and the history of interacting with someone.
Specifically for feed, the five interactions Instagram looks at most closely are how likely a user is to spend a few seconds on a post, comment on it, like it, save it, and tap on the profile photo.
“The more likely you are to take an action, and the more heavily we weigh that action, the higher up you’ll see the post.
We add and remove signals and predictions over time, working to get better at surfacing what you’re interested in,” added Mosseri.