photo: Jakob Owens
A viral post on Instagram claiming that the site limits posts to just 7% of a person’s followers has prompted the company to respond.
The post was shared across social media sites on Pinterest and Facebook, claiming Instagram severely limits posts.
The original post with the 7% claim has been around since the beginning of 2018. Instagram finally officially addressed the claims in a Twitter thread discussing the viral post.
Instagram’s feed shows posts in the order of accounts that the user interacts with most. Scrolling through the entire feed would show posts from all accounts a person is following, according to Instagram. But that means the user needs to have the patience to scroll all the way to the bottom to see everything.
“We have not made any recent changes to feed ranking, and we never hide posts from people you’re following – if you keep scrolling, you will see them all. Again, your feed is personalized to you and evolves over time based on how you use Instagram.â€
In response to this explanation of how Instagram’s Feed algorithm works, many users said they preferred chronological order.
Facebook’s algorithm has been tuned to display content it thinks the user would prefer to see over chronological order, too. Twitter faced scrutiny after it made similar changes to how tweets appear on users’ timelines. However, chronological order has returned to Twitter as of September 2018.
While the viral post’s claim of only 7% of audience reach is false, the claim that interacting with posts boosts accounts is true.
Following several highly active Instagram accounts that you interact with on a daily basis will soon begin to drown out small-time accounts that only post once or twice a week.
As of now, there’s no way to show Instagram posts in chronological order. Since the feature was removed from Facebook, it hasn’t returned there, either.
Source: Digital Music News
