As you all know, social media is my number one way of advertising my business and my blog. To me, its one of the best ways to grow your business and your online presence. Instagram is one of my favourite platforms to use as I find it the most effective to drive cyber traffic to both my businesses.

So, how exactly do the new algorithm changes affect our business and our social growth? A few changes which are now in effect can make or break your business.

New Features

We all love the explore page of Instagram because it’s a way of finding new profiles to follow. The fact that I am able to browse through the different posts and follow only those I wish to follow is self satisfying. However, with the new changes in effect, posts from the explorer page will now be funneled into your actual feed! Yup – The ones you may or may not want to see will be in your home page feed, and not the explorer page.

The other really cool feature I find to be helpful, is that you are now able to follow hashtags! I am religiously typing in my favourite hashtags to see what is new and this will save me a whole lot of time! Plus, as an added benefit, if you follow hashtags, it could promote your account a little more. So be sure to follow your favourite hashtags in order to be exposed more on social media.

Engagement

I read on another blog post that if you wait to respond to comments on your post after an hour, it may decrease the visibility of your account. Try to respond to comments as early as you get them – a little difficult in some cases, but it’s worth a shot to see if this helps the growth of your business account. For me, this may be difficult as I like to post at night right before I go to bed! I’ll let you know how this works out for me.

Another thing you may want to STOP doing is to only comment with one or two words on posts you’re engaging with. With the new algorithm changes, they are trying to get rid of the bots that are continuously spamming our accounts with one word comments. So, even if You yourself comment on a post using one word, it could treat your account as spam, and in the end, your account won’t get as much exposure as you hope it would.

In terms of engagement, the more stories you publish, the more exposure your account will receive. I’m not saying to story your entire life – but a few stories a day can help with continuous engagement on your account.

Post Exposure

If you post something on Instagram, there is a good chance that it may only be exposed to 10% of your audience! And if that particular post does really well, it is then released to more people in your audience. There is no real way to get around this, but I would suggest being more interactive in other posts and commenting as you see fit in order to drive cyber traffic to your posts for more engagement.

Captions

So, if you have noticed from my last two posts on Instagram, I have changed the way I hashtag. I no longer add my separate 30 hashtags as a separate comment under my caption. I have chosen about 5-10 hashtags and have incorporated these right into my caption. Even though you are allowed to have up to 30 hashtags in a post, this can now be viewed as spam, which can then turn into shadow banning.

Another thing for you to switch up – or me specifically! – is that you need to switch up your hashtags regularly. I have the same set I am constantly using and I recently narrowed it down to about five and that seems to be working a little better for me.

Also, the hashtags you post below your post will no longer be viewable in the search results. You must now have the hashtags in the body of your caption in order for your audience to find it.

The last thing I want to share about captions is that you should NOT edit your caption within the first 24 hours of posting it. This can have a negative impact on the visibility of your posts.

And that pretty much sums up how the new Instagram changes will affect your engagement. These changes were not advertised as new and updated, but rather hidden in their profile and help centre. So, be sure to check in with me from time to time to get the scoop on social media management.

With Love | Nikki xo