The majority of the social media savvy population will have heard or partaken in the collective groan of Instagram users last week. Rumour had it the social media giants were rolling out major updates this week. Hold your horses though grammers, Instagram aren’t making changes to your feed yet – but the social media platform has confirmed they will follow in the footsteps of its owner Facebook by stepping away from a reverse chronological feed in the near future.
If you aren’t one the social media savvy, Instagram are planning to change the user feed of their platform to a more Facebook-like channel, whereby users will see the posts they are most likely to be in interested in at the top of the feed. There’s an inherent irony about users of social media being petrified of change – a leading brand in the user centric, innovation fuelled industry of social media trying to make their platform better for their users, oh no…
However, users could be right to be scared. A move towards an organic, algorithmic feed arguably paves the way for a bigger pay-to-play stage of advertising. Brands and businesses alike will no longer be guaranteed visibility on their followers’ feeds. It will be up to Instagram what you see first on your feed and for businesses the need to advertise will be greater than ever before.