Decipher the Instagram Ranking Algorithm
Just as Google utilizes its famous ranking algorithm, PageRank, to decide the order in which the search results are displayed, many social media have their own unique ranking algorithms that are critical in showing the best content to users. One of Instagram’s version updates last year changed the way posts are ranked from solely based on the chronological order to a new mysterious way. Listed by the Instagram Spokesman, such new mysterious algorithm takes numerous additional factors into posts ranking, including engagement (popularity of a post), relevancy (user’s interest in a post), relationships (user’s relation with an account), and many more.
In class we discussed how PageRank assigns webpages authority scores and updates them according to the connection among webpages. Instagram’s new ranking algorithm works in a similar fashion in which every account becomes a node in the network and the interactions between nodes updates the authority scores. According to Instagram, engagement is the most important influential factor in ranking posts, in which the views, likes, shares and comments that a single post receives will grant such post a higher “authority score”, which reflect that the post has higher quality. In addition, the cited article also mentions that how quickly a post receives engagement plays an important role in deciding its rank. Apart from the engagement a post receives, posts from accounts that interact with you regularly will receive higher “authority scores”, as you likely want to be updated when your friends or family post new content. Another influential factor, relevancy, relates to the genres of content that a user is interested in. Posts that belong to genres that the you show more interests in will receive higher priority in ranking. Ultimately, the content with highest “score” will be displayed at the top of your feed in Instagram. The mysterious ranking algorithm of Instagram can be deciphered once we have some insights into the mechanism behind the seemingly random posts in your feed. Same for all other social medias and search engines, the purpose that they keep improving on their ranking algorithms is for making content more relevant and interesting to users.
Source: https://later.com/blog/instagram-algorithm/