Should You Turn On Your Instagram Notifications?
You may have heard about the Instagram algorithm. If you haven’t, then lucky you.
For you have missed out on the slew of frantic Instagram posts from users imploring their fans to TURN ON POST NOTIFICATIONS, so followers won’t miss a post when the mysterious algorithm finally lands and we are all confronted with a new-look feed.
A ‘new-look feed’ that suggests that unless you are winning at Instagram like Selena Gomez, the amount of times your posts get viewed may decrease. Emphasis on the word may, as we still don’t know how the algorithm will actually work in practice.
Cue #instagramupdate
But what actually happens if you do turn on notifications?
Put simply, you’ll get a push notification (pop-up notification on your phone) every time one of your chosen users uploads an Instagram post. So unless you keep your ‘follow’ feed nice and curated, you could easily end up with multiple annoying notifications that will tarnish the whole Instagram experience.
So until we really know what’s going on with the Instagram algorithm, we’re playing it cool. Business as normal. Nothing to see here.
Not the we have favourites or anything, but Instagram, with its subtle face-flattering filters and storytelling ways features high up on our ‘top social networking platforms’ list. What? You don’t have one of them? It goes like this: *
- Snapchat
*Subject to change on a daily basis
One of the major plus points about Instagram was that we, as users, were completely in control of the content shown and when we were shown it. A few scattered promoted Land Rover ads aside, we curated our feed based on the unique visual aesthetic we wanted and the amount of Fat Jewish we could handle. Even if that meant waking up and scrolling through a few hundred posts to get back to the place you started from the night before.
Times are a changing however, and the social network has announced that a new algorithm based feed is about to be road-tested.
Basically, the algorithm will ‘predict’ what order photos and videos will show up in your feed, in order of what content the site believes you’ll engage with the most rather than showing your entire feed in reverse-chronological order.
Instagram announced the change on its blog earlier, saying: ‘The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post.’
‘If your favorite musician shares a video from last night’s concert, it will be waiting for you when you wake up, no matter how many accounts you follow or what time zone you live in. And when your best friend posts a photo of her new puppy, you won’t miss it.’
Speaking to* The New York Times*, Kevin Systrom, co-founder and chief executive of Instagram, explained the change: ‘In average, people miss about 70 percent of the posts in their Instagram feed. What this is about is making sure that the 30 percent you see is the best 30 percent possible.
‘If it’s one thing we do really well as a company, it’s that we take big change slowly and deliberately and bring the community along with us,’ he continued, seemingly pre-empting the impending reluctance of Instagram fans to embrace the new algorithm.
‘It’s not like people will wake up tomorrow and have a different Instagram.’ So there you have it. Everything is going to be OK. OK?
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