Unpacking Instagram’s algorithm

Instagram recently announced that it will be shedding light on how its technology works and how it impacts people’s experiences.

First up, the Instagram algorithm.

The algorithm

Instagram doesn’t have one algorithm that manages what people do and don’t see on the app. In fact, it uses a variety of algorithms, classifiers, and processes to personalise your experience and make the most of your time on the app.

When it first launched in 2010, Instagram was a single stream of photos in chronological order. But as more people joined, it became impossible for people to see everything, least of all the posts they cared about. Five years ago, it was estimated that people were missing about 70% of all their posts in Feed, including almost 50% of posts from their close connections. This led to the development of a Feed that ranked posts based on what people care about most.

Each part of the app – Feed, Explore, Reels – uses its own Instagram algorithm tailored to how people use it. People tend to look for their closest friends in Stories, but they want to discover something new in Explore. So, the Instagram algorithm ranks things differently in different parts of the app, based on how people use them.

Feed and Stories ranked

Through the years, Instagram learned that Feed and Stories are places where people want to see content from their friends, family, and those closest to them. With any ranking algorithm, how it works can be broken down into steps.

First, Instagram defines the set of things it planned to rank in the first place. With Feed and Stories, this is relatively simple – all the recent posts shared by the people you follow. There are a few exceptions, like ads.

Next, it takes all the information it has about what was posted, the people who made those posts, and your preferences. These are called “signals”, and there are thousands of them. They include everything from when a post was shared to whether you’re using a phone or the web to how often you like videos. The most important signals across Feed and Stories, roughly in order of importance, are:

• Information about the post. These are signals include how popular a post is and more ordinary information about the content itself, like when it was posted, how long it is if it’s a video, and what location, if any, was attached to it.
• Information about the person who posted. This helps Instagram get a sense of how interesting the person might be to you and includes signals like how many times people have interacted with that person in the recent past.
• Your activity. Instagram wants to understand what you might be interested in and includes signals such as how many posts you’ve liked.
• Your history of interacting with someone. This gives Instagram a sense of how interested you are generally in seeing posts from a particular person.

Finally, Instagram makes a set of about 12 predictions that many consider to be the Instagram algorithm. These are educated guesses at how likely you are to interact with a post in different ways. In Feed, the five interactions with the highest considerations are how likely you are 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 any action, and the more heavily Instagram weighs that action, the higher up you’ll see the post. The Instagram algorithm has signals, and predictions added and removed all the time to get better at determining what you’re interested in.

There are a few cases where Instagram takes other considerations into account. For example, it tries to avoid showing too many posts from the same person in a row. Another is Stories that were “reshared” from Feed that used to be valued less because Instagram heard that people are more interested in seeing original Stories. But it saw a swell of reshared posts in big moments that people were expecting their Stories to reach more people than they did, so it relooked the value.

Another major consideration is misinformation. If you post something that third-party fact-checkers label as misinformation, Instagram doesn’t take it down, but a label is applied, and the Instagram algorithm shows the post lower in Feed and Stories. If you’ve posted misinformation multiple times, the Instagram algorithm may make all of your content harder to find.

Explore ranked

Explore was designed to help you discover new things. The grid is made up of recommendations – photos and videos the Instagram algorithm finds for you, which is different from Feed and Stories, where most of what you see is from the accounts you follow.

To find photos and videos you might be interested in, Instagram looks at signals like what posts you’ve liked, saved, and commented on in the past. Once it’s found a group of photos and videos you might be interested in, it then orders them by how interested it thinks you are in each one. The most important signals the Instagram algorithm looks at, in order of importance, are:

• Information about the post, like how popular it seems to be. These are signals like how many and how quickly other people are liking, commenting, sharing, and saving a post. These signals matter much more in Explore than they do in Feed or Stories.
• Your history of interacting with the person who posted. It’s likely the poster is someone you’ve never heard of, but if you have interacted with them, that gives the Instagram algorithm a sense of how interested you might be in what they shared.
• Your activity – signals like what posts you’ve liked, saved or commented on and how you’ve interacted with posts in Explore in the past.
• Information about the person who posted, like how many times people have interacted with that person in the past few weeks.

Reels ranked

Reels is designed to entertain you, and much like Explore, most of what you see is from accounts you don’t follow. Instagram goes through a similar process in ranking Reels as it does Explore.

With Reels, though, it’s specifically focused on what might entertain you. The most important predictions it makes are how likely you are to watch a reel all the way through, like it, and say it was entertaining or funny. The most important signals are:

Your activity – which reels you’ve liked, commented on and engaged with recently.

Your history of interacting with the person who posted

Information about the reel. These are signals about the content within the video like the audio track, video understanding based on pixels and whole frames, and popularity.

Information about the person who posted. Instagram’s algorithm considers their popularity to help find compelling content from a wide array of people and give everyone a chance to find their audience.

Contact Right Click Media today

So, while there is no single Instagram algorithm, there are a few tricks that can improve your post’s reach and engagement. Contact our team of social media experts and let us help build your Instagram presence and community.

Tik Tok is a video sharing, a social networking platform that has become increasingly popular over the past two years. Social media has become a growing industry with billions of users. This industry has grown tremendously and opened doors for opportunity. The growth of Snap Chat, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp is phenomenal and now we get to witness the growth of a brand-new social media platform known as TikTok.

About TikTok.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance which is a company that is based in Beijing, China. The company was founded in 2012 by a man by the name of Zhang Yiming. TikTok is a platform that is used to create videos that showcase lip-syncing, talent and comedy. I am sure that you have come across a video with the TikTok watermark on, on other social platforms. The application known as TikTok was launched in 2017 and was conveniently created for both iOS and Android Operating systems. This was not the first app which was launched by the tech company, the company has also launched another app (Douyin) in 2016 which was built specifically for the Chinese market. TikTok and Douyin are very similar to one another, although TikTok is not available in China and both applications are hosted on different servers around the world.

Did you know that TikTok was the most downloaded app in the United States of America, in the year 2018? It was the first app made by the Chinese to achieve this amount of success. The social networking platform is available worldwide and is available in a number of different languages. The application has reached a global market and as statistics show, it is the seventh most downloaded mobile app for this decade.   

Five reasons to add TikTok to your marketing strategy.

1. There is an insane amount of users on the app already!

Majority of TikTok users are between the ages of 18 and 35, this age group makes up a huge percentage of the number of users on the mobile application. As we have seen with the launch of almost every social media platform, the youth dominate this space and later share it with the older generations. The application now boasts more than 1.5 billion users, why wouldn’t you take advantage of this platform?

• The users on the mobile application are not passive.

Users know what they are signing up for when they download the application. They are committing to an immersive experience. The only type of content which is allowed on TikTok is video. If you are creating an account for the benefit of your business ensure that you are offering value; users use the mobile application for entertainment purposes so ensure that they are engaging with your video and that they will be entertained by what you are showcasing.

• Grabbing the attention of your audience is easy.

TikTok has a number of features but its most valuable feature is the way in which the content is laid out. As you may know, on other platforms, often impressions are counted even if only a portion of the post is visible. When you are using the TikTok platform for marketing, you will have a split second to engage with the user and entice them to watch more if your content is relevant and well thought out.  

• There is a considerable chunk of the population who are already using this social media platform.

Brands that target the younger people are already taking full advantage of it, stay ahead of the game and get your account started too. TikTok offers organic posting as well as paid advertising campaigns. In terms of paid campaigns, TikTok allows people to place ads in the form of hashtags, in-feed ads, brand takeovers or branded effects.

• Just do it, it’s fun!

Consumers want to connect with brands on an emotional and personal level and social media platforms have become a great medium for businesses to connect with their consumers.

As a business, you can monetize trending hashtags.

Having social media platforms in place for marketing businesses has become a must as it helps businesses reach their target audience and potential consumers. As a marketer, you know that you will need to implement marketing strategies across a variety of channels to reach the relevant market. For example, if you are looking to target the everyday consumer you may consider marketing on Facebook, however, if you are targeting a company or CEO you would consider a platform such as LinkedIn.

The mobile application known as TikTok grew popular due to the influence of celebrities. Jimmy Fallon started the #tumbleweed challenge which gained a lot of traction and yielded a lot of entries. TikTok challenges is a great way to promote brands due to the fact that they showcase the relevancy of the product or service and get the businesses potential share of the market engaging with their content. An example of a business using hashtags to promote their business is McDonald’s that created the #bigmactiktok challenge which not only helped promote the business but got a lot of engagement and traffic on all social media platforms.

Promote your brand through TikTok.

There are five different methods of marketing on TikTok namely:

• In-feed native ad: These ad types are similar to Instagram stories in full-screen mode. With in-feed native ads, you can add website links, and “order now” buttons to the ad which will help users land on the page. In-feed native ads are skippable and have multiple options when designing the overall advert. TikTok offers analytics on click-through rates, impressions, total views, the video viewing time, and the amount of engagement that the business received through the ad campaign.
• Hashtag challenge ads: As mentioned before this is a great way to market your business and receive engagement from your audience. With this type of ad, the user will get to see a specific banner ad that will take the user to a page that gives them instructions, and rules and regulations regarding the challenge. The hashtag challenge ad can give insights on banner views, clicks, number of user-generated content, stats on engagement, the number of views that the hashtag challenge has received and the trending slot.
• Brand takeover ads: Brand takeover ads are exclusive to a category, meaning that only one brand can take up a particular category per day. The impact that this ad type can be measured by impressions, click rates and unique reaches.
• Hashtag challenges. This is a good method to organically market your brand. The hashtag challenge ad types are generally ads that are organic and not sponsored, although, with content that is well thought through, they have the potential of trending and driving your marketing strategy. Usually, hashtag challenges work well when brands involve celebrities or influences because of their following. Ads that are put out by celebrities and influencers are generally more easily accepted by the potential market therefore, increasing the impact of your organic following and number of organic engagements. How would you execute this kind of campaign? You will need contacts of bloggers and influencers, ideas for challenges that will engage your potential audience, and a relevant message that is being portrayed by the campaign.
• Participation by the user. This is the most engaging and accessible of the ad types; the marketing strategy that is used here is user participation. User-generated content is used to engage with the TikTok user. The content will aim to promote the cause or the brand with tools and features that make it easy and enable the users to post content and ideas themselves by tagging the trending topic.

Seven things you need to know as a marketer.

1. TikTok is no longer just for ‘kids’. TikTok started off as a regular topic of discussion amongst teenagers. Statistics show that TikTok has the youngest user base when compared to all of the other popular social media platforms; two-thirds of the user base is under the age of thirty. With TikTok’s increase in popularity, the user base has now grown and includes a large number of adult users as well. If we look into the statistics of other social platforms, we recognize a similar pattern, for example, Facebook’s initial user base was made up of college students and Snapchat was initially mostly popular amongst teenagers.
2. Comical content does well on this social media platform. TikTok started off as an application that focused on musical content, music is still the heart of this application but TikTok is no longer restricted to music-related content. If you scroll through the feed, you will notice a trend in the video content and that is that each video has a comical element. The videos that have a reputable number of comments, the videos with the most views and the most liked videos are the ones that are going viral and the ones that make you giggle. From a psychological perspective, laughter is a great way to connect with your audience on an emotional level and help you connect with your audience. Creating comical content that your potential market can relate to will help you build cultural relevance, cognitive salience and consumer trust.
3. You don’t need to ‘cover-up’ with a filter. TikTok embraces reality and frowns upon the Instagram “photo perfect” look. Influencers of TikTok are ordinary teenagers who have built their following from the comfort of their bedrooms. Overall TikTok has built a very positive influence for itself and amongst its user base, many describing it as pleasant, with comments based on words of encouragement, a platform that embraces cross-cultural exchange, and offers a diversity of thought.
4. It is a platform that does not limit your creativity. TikTok offers you free range when you are creating your own content, it offers you a suite of video editing tools that assist you with creating unique content. An important aspect about videos to note is that easily produced, short-form, crowdsourced video content looks like the future of interactive media which is pretty much what TikTok stands for.
5. Insight into the youth culture. TikTok is an effective way for marketers to stay up to date with what is hip and happening. Most of the memes that you now see on the internet were first posted on TikTok.
6. Local tribes and global reach. TikTok offers the best of global reach and local engagement. Due to the impact that TikTok has on a global scale offers a unique opportunity for ambitious brands to penetrate the market.
7. TikTok cannot be judged this early in its lifetime as it is still early days for this rapidly growing social platform. TikTok offers a lot of potential for organic advertising at this stage but still needs to be developed to be a fully-fledged advertising platform.

In conclusion.

In conclusion, TikTok marketing has become a must for businesses due to its popularity, it has sets trends and reach capabilities that are increasing rapidly so make sure to set your account up today and start creating content!

Are you looking for a digital agency that will equip you with the services that you will need to market your business in order to succeed? Contact Right Click Media International today to upgrade your marketing strategy to include TikTok.

TikTok is becoming an increasingly popular social media platform, don’t get left behind! Contact Right Click Media International today to get your TikTok profile and marketing strategy sorted.  For more information visit their website to view the services that they offer https://rightclickmediaint.com/.

Our consumers today strongly rely on search engines to assist them in finding everything from business to business software to restaurant recommendations.

What this means is that regardless of what your business has to offer, the audiences you are targeting are most likely searching for products and services like your own on search engines like Google. And if your goal is to attract these consumers to your website, then you will definitely need search engine optimisation.

But if you have done your research about what your digital marketing options are then you’ve probably heard that before.

Once you have made peace with this, though, your next question is probably going to be, how do I do search engine optimisation?

Below we will explain what exactly it is that makes SEO so important, as well as share some search engine optimisation tools and techniques that you can make use of to increase your online visibility.

Introducing you to SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a digital marketing strategy for improving your website’s rankings in the search engine’s results.

SEO involves identifying certain keywords and phrases your target audience used when they are searching for products and services like yours, then you work towards ranking better for those searches.

Reasons Why Your Website Would Benefit From Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a very important part of any effective marketing strategy.

But for us to fully illustrate its importance, we will need to go over some of the reasons you should optimise your website.

It can help you build your brand

Often, branding is considered a more traditional marketing strategy, while search engine optimization falls into the digital category, these two often have very similar steps.

Your brand is built will require considering both what you or your business provides and what others have to say about it.

The factors are also quite similar when it comes to the steps involved in optimizing a website. You will need to have content created that falls in line with your audience’s interests and needs and then find ways to earn links to your content via other websites.

Provided you keep this relationship in mind when developing your SEO strategy, you can then choose keywords and create good content that is in line with the image you would like your brand to have.

This way, your online presence will reflect your ideal branding and assist in establishing it with your target audience.

A website that has been optimized will earn more traffic

On the surface, the goal of doing search engine optimization is for your website to gain a higher ranking on search results.

But apart from that, the reason we want those higher rankings is to attract more traffic and ideally, to convert those who visit the website into leads and customers. And yes, it does work.

Below is an example of an organic traffic report from a case study:

As the months go by you can see that the website’s traffic increased from nothing to 10- 000 visitors, and this was entirely from SEO.

SEO is definitely the best option if your goal is to bring more visitors to your website.

You do not have to pay for ad space with SEO

The fact that you do not have to pay for ad space when it comes to SEO is one of the biggest advantages.

Think about how the more traditional ad campaigns operate.

You decide on the location where your brand needs to appear, whether that is on a particular radio station, TV channel or in the pages of a newspaper or magazine.

You then need to pay the media company for the placement of your ad. You may pay for your ad to run within a certain number of issues or for a certain amount of time, and as soon as your time is up, your ad will stop appearing and so will your results.

Now, take into consideration, the many different pages that appear in search engine results.

Google Ads appear in your search results and have a small “Ad” tag next to them.

Much like your more traditional ad campaigns, getting and keeping one of those spots will have ongoing costs involved.

And like many who work with Google Ads know, you will only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad. This definitely gives Google Ads an edge over traditional ad campaign methods.

Nevertheless, each visitor will involve a cost, and the minute your Google Ads campaign is paused or you run out of budget, your ad will stop showing.

But those websites that organically appear below or above the Goggle Ads, are not paying a cent to be there.

Granted, they most probably invested their time and money into creating the website and pages that are ranking on the search engine, they are on page one because Google’s algorithm thinks they provide a great value to the users. And because of this, they are gaining more and more traffic and not having to pay for it.

SEO allows your target audience to find your website

SEO gives you the ability to appear in front of your target audience as they are actively searching for information.

This is a great opportunity, based on how common it is for consumers to make use of search engines to find helpful information about products and services.

In fact, more or less, 62% of consumers will make use of search engines before any other platform if they are looking to learn more about a new business, product or service.

So basically, if you would like your business to be part of a user’s online research process, you will need to ensure that it shows up in the search results for keywords that relate to the products and services that you have to offer.

In addition, according to the same survey, there are more or less 48% of consumers who prefer to visit a company’s official website in order to learn more about them.

By ensuring that your company has s strong online presence, you will not only be bettering your chances at reaching your marketing goals but you will also be enabling your target audience to research and purchase in a way that works for them.

SEO boosts your authority and credibility

For many businesses, the sales process has drastically changed because of the internet.

This is because today, many consumers have access to many different resources, which allow them to learn about their options even before speaking to a sales representative.

SEO allows you to become part of this process. 

This is especially true when your SEO efforts are combined with content marketing. When you have valuable and informative content, you have an opportunity to build your company’s credibility and trust with potential customers.

Below is some more information and a general overview of how this works:

First, a person will come across your website, by searching for information that is relevant to what your business has to offer and seeing one of your resources pop up in the search results.

Then, after reading that resource, if that is what they are interested in, they may share it with family and friends and often subscribe to your email list.

Now the process starts to take a bit longer.

The user may decide to return to your website more than once and read your email content for a couple of months without doing anything about it.

This can become a bit frustrating if you are used to the more traditional sales process.

But with each time they read through some of your content, you are still establishing your brand as an authority and credible source of information.

Then, once they are ready to purchase something or sit down with a salesperson, they should know exactly which company to turn to and they should be completely comfortable doing do after reading all of the information previously provided at no cost.

SEO can assist in keeping you ahead of your competitors

When your website is being optimised, you are not just improving where your website is ranking, but also having it rank above your competitors.

Keep in mind that the first result on the search results page will get on average 20.5% of the clicks. The second result will get 13.32%, and the third result will get 13.14%.

This means that as your website moves higher up the search results, you will be earning a bigger percentage of the available clicks for your target keywords and therefore, your competitors will be earning less of them.

SEO can improve user experience

Google’s goal is to give its users the best possible results.

As a result, many of Google’s algorithm updates focus on ensuring that the users are being directed to websites that not only offer the most relevant content, but also good user experience.

That is why technical factors like usability, mobile-friendliness and site speed play a much bigger role than before. 

While this does mean that the optimization of your website may require some assistance from professionals, it also means that your business will continuously be improving the user experience that your website provides.

When it comes to the impact that user experience has on your conversions, this could also have a big impact on your company’s sales and revenue in the long term.

SEO is easily measured

Finally, one of the very best advantages of SEO is that you are able to measure almost every aspect of your results.

Unlike the more traditional methods, which can very often rely on looking for correlations between the ad campaign and the sales, it is quite simple to see all of the return you are getting from SEO.

There are many different tools like Google Analytics, which allows you to monitor your referral sources, traffic, conversions and many other metrics that are important to your business.

By doing it this way, you are able to accurately evaluate what is working for you and what is not. You can also be confident that you are allocating your marketing budget to certain strategies which have the best and biggest impact on your most important marketing goals.

How do you do SEO?

The very basic premise of SEO is to improve your rankings in the search results.

However, Google continuously updates its algorithm, and the same steps that are required to achieve your goals, do change over time.

So even though the general idea stays the same, there are certain things that you will want to consider as you optimize your website.

Focusing on the user

It is almost impossible to predict Google’s algorithm updates. 

Google is very secretive when it comes to the changes in the algorithm, often, even after the changes have happened, which is why it is so difficult to keep up with them.

Still, each of these updates all has one thing in common, they are all designed to assist the search engine in providing the very best possible results for the searchers.

So as you are making improvements on your website, keep in mind that your focus needs to stay on the user.

Pick topics that are most relevant to their needs, have your content written in a way that is helpful and very straightforward and ensures that your website is simple enough to engage with and navigate.

Even though there is no way to know what Google’s next move will be, this way, you will be working with the same goals in mind and this is only going to work in your favour. 

Make use of keyword optimization

From the very beginning, search engines have been using keywords as a consideration in how pages are ranked, and today they are still just as important.

Ensure that your website is optimized for the mobile-first index

Over the past couple of years, one of the biggest changes in how users browse the internet is the device they choose to access online content.

Back in the day, the only way you could access a search engine was on a desktop computer.

Nowadays, the number of users who browse on tablets, smartphones and other devices continues to grow. In fact, in 2016, mobile internet usage surpassed desktop internet usage for the very first time.

This explains why Google would take the necessary steps to ensure that their results prioritized those pages that were accessible on mobile devices.

The first one of these steps were taken in April 2015, they started boosting mobile-friendly pages in the search results.

Then in 2016 Google decided to take it a step further and they announced that it would be switching over to a mobile-first index.

Google has always ranked and indexed pages based on how they appeared on the desktop. This made sense at the time as these users were making up the majority of their audience.

At Right Click Media International, we specialise in a wide range of digital marketing services including SEO. For more information about our SEO packages visit our website on www.rightclickmediaint.com.