Instagram publishes new best practices for creators to follow to increase their eligibility for recommendations.
Recommendations are photos and videos you see on Instagram from users you don’t follow.
Recommended content surfaces in the main Instagram feed, in the research feed and in the tumblr tab.
Instagram determines whether to recommend a piece of content based on signals such as how much and how quickly other people like, comment, share and save a post.
A user’s previous interaction with the content creator is a factor, as well as other posts the person has liked or commented on.
When your content becomes a recommended photo or video, it can positively impact your reach and accelerate audience growth.
Getting content picked up by Instagram’s recommendation algorithm is the goal of all businesses and creators trying to get more subscribers.
To help more people realize this goal, Instagram shares a set of best practices for users.
Instagram Recommendations Best Practices
Acceptability
First, if you want to be eligible for recommendations, you must have a public account. Instagram will not recommend content from private accounts.
Next, you must follow Instagram recommendations.
Instagram has specific recommendations for the types of content it tries to recommend in people’s feeds.
Recommendations are different from community recommendations, which are rules for what can and cannot be on Instagram.
Content that goes against Instagram’s recommendations includes:
Content that may depict violence, such as fights
Content that encourages the use of certain regulated products, such as tobacco or vapor products
Content that may be sexually explicit or suggestive, such as photos of people wearing transparent clothing
Finally, you must follow the recommendations of the Instagram community. You’ll know if you don’t follow the community guidelines because Instagram will send a warning or delete the content.
Now let’s move on to best practices.
Best Practices.
Instagram recommends the following best practices to increase your reach with recommendations:
Post original content: Instagram aims to empower creators creating their own content rather than aggregating other people’s content.
Create reel content: Make Instagram reels part of your content strategy to get more opportunities for recommended content.
Search Engine Optimization: Use descriptive titles and hashtags to get your content to pop up in search results. This also helps optimize your bio and profile name.
Instagram doubles down on recommendations
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, is doubling down on the company’s commitment to showing more recommendations to people.
Mosseri paints it as a positive direction for users, especially those who create original content.
“The idea behind recommendations is to help people discover amazing creators on Instagram that they don’t even know about yet. And we hope that the future of Feed will be largely driven by recommendations, because we’re seeing that friend sharing is moving more and more toward stories and DMs.
If we do our job right, and I want to be clear that we’re not there yet, we will help people discover amazing creators in ways that both mean that people will spend more time on the platform and also that the average creator gets more reach.
And if we’re really thoughtful, we can move more distributions from aggregators, which I think today get more than their fair share of distribution on Instagram, to creators.
Again, especially small creators I think we can do more because we want to be a platform where everyone can grow an audience and make a living in the long run.”
