As you may know, after the changes in its algorithm, Instagram would not rank posts on users’ feed just considering the time of their publication. In fact, several factors affect the rank of your posts on Instagram users’ feed. Here, we will review these factors, one of which is the engagement rate of your posts.
The task of Instagram’s ranking algorithm
The main task of the new Instagram algorithm is to show posts in your feed based on your interest. By launching this algorithm, Instagram intends to encourage its users to check their feeds every so often. So Instagram shows the post which it considers as the most attractive one for you on top of your feed.
How Instagram ranks posts
Here, we rank posts from 1 to 10 in an example to make it more understandable. In this method, we explain why posts with higher scores would have a higher rank on the feed of Instagram users.
The Instagram post ranking formula
Here are factors effective in Instagram’s ranking formula:
- Likelihood: It shows how many times a particular person has liked your posts. The higher the percentage of liking, the higher the likelihood would be.
- Engagement Rate: The engagement rate means the number of interactions divided by the number of people who have viewed the post (its reach) multiplied by 8. By interaction, we mean the total number of likes, comments, and shares of a post. We also multiply it by 8 because we need a number from 0 to 8 in this formula.
- Relevancy: Relevancy means how the subject of the post is relevant to the posts you have liked before.
- Timeliness: Timeliness means that a post published later is more likely to be shown on your feed.
- Time Spent: this is the average time users spend on the post.
As shown in the image below, each factor has particular importance in the rank of the post:
This means, a post on a page which users have liked 80% of its contents, would take number 8. The number is the outcome of multiplying 80% in 10.
Finally, the formula for ranking the posts on users’ feed is as follows:
Post Rank = Likelihood + Engagement Rate + Relevancy + Timeliness + Time Spent
Note that this formula is not prepared for you to calculate this number after publishing each post. The purpose of defining this formula is to show what factors affect an Instagram post’s rank on users feed and which one has the most impact. With regarding the formula, Likelihood has the most and Timeliness has the least effects on Instagram posts’ rank.