Marketing hack | Learn Instagram’s new algorithm.

Instagram recently updated its algorithm, and if you don’t pivot and adjust your marketing strategy, you’re going to take a massive hit, both to the number of people that your content is going in front of as well as the number of new followers you are going to be able to attract.

Hello, my name is Stefan, and today we are going to make sure that you are up to date with all the latest marketing news, that way you can give your business that extra edge and push that extra money your way.

One of the biggest reasons that people complain about recently is seeing their reach, engagement, and followers on Instagram plummeting simply because they don’t understand a few simple things.

Things that you are going to discover in this article.

Failing to keep up with these changes makes it nearly impossible to grow or have any kind of success on Instagram at all. So let me talk you through how it’s done, starting by first covering the only two kinds of content you should be posting on Instagram right now.

Reels and Carousels.

Here’s the deal, Instagram has one well-defined goal in mind, and we are not talking about its official mission to “Capture and Share the World’s Moments”, the real goal is far more practical and capitalistic, and that is to make money. Well, no surprises here, Instagram is a business, and at the end of the day, that’s the goal of every business.

Let’s talk about the way Instagram makes money, and that is through advertising. This means they need 2 things to succeed. First, they need advertisers, people willing to pay money to put their ads in front of other people, and next, they need people to show their ads to.

That’s the key to this business model, the better a job that Instagram can do to keep more people on the platform for longer the more ads they can show and the more money they can make.

Therefore Reels and Carousels are the only two kinds of content you should be creating right now because those 2 have the highest engagement time which gives Instagram more time to serve more people with more ads.

That’s why is crucial to understand the business model of social platforms because only then you can take full advantage of them.

On the flip side, the reason that single-image posts on your feed are so difficult to succeed with right now is that they simply don’t take that long for a viewer to consume.

There is one exception to this that just got announced

If you still want to post single images, this may be your golden opportunity, but we’ll talk more about it at the end.

One thing that is important to understand is that Instagram has updated its algorithm and is giving more importance to Reels and Carousels, so by creating this kind of content you are helping them, and in return, they’ll help you by showing it to even more people. Win-win deal.

Now, if I had to pick a winner between Reels and Carousels, I’d have to pick Reels every single time. Not only because they are going to keep people more engaged but also because they’re video, and Instagram has said repeatedly now that they’re no longer a photo-sharing app, the future for Instagram is video.

“I wanna start by saying, we’re no longer a photo-sharing app or a square photo-sharing app”

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram.

Now that we’ve got that settled, let me share with you a few ways to optimize your new Reels content for this updated algorithm. It all starts by first understanding an important metric that Instagram is looking for in your Reels, and how you can perfectly engineer your content to go viral.

The first thing that Instagram wants to see in your Reels is watch time, and specifically 100% watch time. Although it may seem a little bit off-putting it makes sense, what platform wouldn’t want a viewer to watch 100% of the content put in front of them? But what’s interesting is how much weight they appear to be giving this metric, especially when compared to other often equally important video metrics.

Let’s break it down.

You see, when it comes to analyzing a piece of video content, the algorithms typically look at a few different metrics, and among them are views, watch time, and average view duration, or AVD for short.

Now, they all kind of sound the same but they’re pretty different, and they’re important to understand not only today to help you have greater success on the platform but also when things change in the future because they definitely will.  So you can be positioned in the best possible way to capitalize on whatever new metric they’re optimizing for. Here are the basics real quick.

Views are simple, they really are just how many views videos get, sometimes these auto-play, like in the case of Reels when you swipe through them, and sometimes, they require clicking to play like most YouTube videos on the home page.

Watch Time is the total amount of time someone spends watching a video measured in minutes and seconds. So a 10-second Reel can never have more than a 10-second watch time.

Average View Duration (AVD) is the total watch time of your video divided by the total number of video plays, including replays. Essentially, it’s trying to see how much of your video someone watched before scrolling to the next one. 100% means they watched the whole thing and 10% means they skipped off pretty quick which isn’t a good sign.

Keep in mind that this could change in the future, but for now, it appears that Instagram is favoring shorter videos with 100% AVD over longer videos with only 20% or 30% AVD. In other words, this is more of a hack than a long-term strategy because things could and probably will change in the future. But at least for now, it’s worth testing Reels that are shorter in length, around 5 to 10 seconds. The goal with these shorter Reels is to get them to loop, or in other words to have people watch them again and again and again.

If you manage to do that, you struck gold.

So, here’s how you are going to do exactly that. The most important part of any video or post or piece of content is the hook, the Big Idea, the thing that captures their attention and triggers their curiosity. For your Reels, you obviously want to make sure that the video itself is interesting, entertaining, educational, or relevant to the people that you are trying to get it in front of, but you also want to put the hook in the first line of your caption.

One of the biggest goals of your caption is to get them to spend enough time reading it so your video can play and loop automatically in the background.

It’s sneaky, but it works.

After all, as long as you are providing good value and actually helping someone, well… the more time they spend with you the better. In turn, Instagram will see that people are looping your video and watching it again and again and again which is a powerful viral signal that’ll indicate that they need to share it and show it to even more people.

There’s another trick you can do as well if you want to push the limits a little bit, try out longer Reels of 20 seconds, 30 seconds, maybe even 60 seconds. That’s to ramp up a little-known something called the Rate of Revelation.

One of the best ways to hook people fast and to keep them engaged throughout your content, whether it’s a blog post, a podcast, or a video is by increasing the pacing of it and the overall speed at which you’re delivering insights. The fancy term for this is called Rate of Revelation, which is how fast you’re delivering new insights.

Content with a slow rate of revelation takes forever to get into. It seems to drag on for hours and hours without presenting anything new, and it makes you feel like you’re stuck in one of those awkward conversations with one of those people that just doesn’t seem to be getting the hint.

A fast Rate of Revelation, on the other hand, means nonstop value, a constant and steady stream of new and exciting information all delivered at a rate that is almost too fast to keep up with and that requires them to watch it over and over again just to make sure they didn’t miss anything.

And on that note, remember earlier when we talked about the one exception to this that just got announced?

Well, my friend, now we will be talking about the golden rule secret. So here’s what’s going on. Instagram has just announced that they are about to test out a different way of displaying images on their platforms, specifically that they are going to be testing tall images, so 9 by 16, or vertical like a Reel but image form, not video.

“A test where both photos and videos take up more of your screen”

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram.

Now, these are early days so this may stick around or it may not.  But the big takeaway is that anytime a platform like Instagram launches or rolls out a new feature, well, they give that new feature a little extra push or a big extra push.

And they do this to encourage enough new people to actually try it out and to make sure that enough people see it so they can get some relevant and valid feedback, which means that there may be a little opportunity to do a bit of a land grab and to take away some market share from slower people who are yet to figure this out or to adopt it into their strategy.

Of course, the best to make sure that you’re taking advantage of this opportunity as well as all of the other ones that Instagram has to offer is to make sure that you’ve got a solid Instagram marketing strategy in place, and this is why the next you’re gonna want to keep an eye out for our next articles where we are going to talk about the best Instagram marketing strategies, and general social media marketing strategies tips and tricks.

If you liked this article you may also find interesting our article about SEO and its fundamentals, you can read it by clicking here.

For more Instagram news you can always check out their blog here.

Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to keep up with the industry’s latest news.