Instagram just made a fairly big announcement and looks like just soon after they opened up advertising to all businesses they’re about to start forcing you to spend money. Instagram is introducing a new algorithm into play similar to the one Facebook currently uses. This means that posts will no longer be in Chronological order as they used to be. Instagram marketing used to be fairly simple, figure out what the best time to reach your target market would be (through various methods of testing such as A/B testing) and then post at that time. Of course as all good marketers know you have to continue testing no matter what because user habits change, your user base can change and other reasons but nonetheless it was still fairly simple. That is how Facebook was as well once upon a time until Facebook decided to change their algorithm.

Now with Facebook’s current algorithm, you don’t see the most current posts. In fact you may never see the post that was put up only 10 minutes before you can online by your old friend or that business you shop at only once a year during their sale. Instead you’ll see a post that is a day old and already has 50 likes or more importantly an advertisement from a business. Wondering how much of what a business posts you actually see? Well the best way to look at this is through organic reach, this number is usually measured in a percentage. Organic reach is what percent of people that like a page will actually see what the page has posted.

  • In early 2012 the organic reach was 16% (a number provided by Facebook itself on April 23, 2012)
  • By March 2014 this number had dropped nearly 10% to an astoundingly low 6.51%
  • According to a study conducted one year late, by March 2015 these numbers had dropped even further. If your page had under a million likes your average organic reach became 2.6% and if you have over a million likes then you drop even lower to 2.27%

Although numbers for 2016 are not out yet as it is still fairly early in the year, some people are expecting numbers could go as low as 1%! Facebook has many reasons why organic reach is at an all-time low and I’m sure many of them are actually true but the biggest reason that they are not flat out admitting is the money. By making sure pages cannot reach their fans through organic reach they must use paid reach/advertising. All of a sudden you’re spending a lot of money to reach that remaining nearly 98%. Now Instagram claims that they will be (for the time being) only reorganizing the order of posts but all recent posts will be visible. Eventually we will see a full algorithm like Facebook being implemented (especially since Facebook owns Instagram).

Twitter has also decided to begin altering their current News Feed to follow a similar format. Yes it will help bring more popular and sometimes more relevant information to you first as all three of these companies claim but what about those not so popular posts that could potentially be relevant. Relevance is no longer up to you, in fact it isn’t up to any human at all. It is completely up to an algorithm, a piece of code, a set of rules to decide what is important and what is not. I’m not really sure how I feel about that but I know no business whether it is large, small or not for profit is going to be happy with all these changes coming. Well maybe the big businesses will be a little bit because their marketing budgets are going to be significantly larger than a small business.

Source: Instagram; Adweek; Forbes; Facebook