How the Instagram Algorithm Works (2021) DETAILED Explanation

what's up eric b preston here and in this video i'm going to talk all about the instagram algorithm in 2021 and all the changes you need to know we're gonna go over how likes comments shares and even saves affect your content's exposure on instagram and some of the changes they've made for this year then we're going to go into three big hacks that you can use to manipulate the algorithm to make sure you're getting the exposure that you need so stay tuned for that as always be sure to subscribe to my channel and hit the little bell if you want to get notified as soon as i drop new content like this really supports me and i appreciate all of you guys watching now let's get into it oh and before i forget if you want a pdf copy of my 2021 instagram hacks drop a comment below and i will make sure you get a copy all right so first things first let's just explain how the algorithm works at a very high level then we're gonna go into likes shares saves and comments and what you need to know about those things and then we'll get into our three hacks so first things first is how does the algorithm actually work well to understand the algorithm first you have to understand what is facebook or instagram's goal with ranking content well their number one goal is to keep you on the platform and keep you using the platform so that they can serve more ads to you that's as simple as i can put it they are a company that makes 99 of their revenue from advertising so they have a vested interest in you being on their platform longer engaging with more content and in order to do that they need to put relevant content in front of you so that's really important to understand now the types of basically content that you're going to see is dependent on how that content gets engaged with on instagram so at a very high level what instagram's doing is they're gauging how people are engaging with comments or likes or posts or whatever and they're actually taking that information and they're using it to determine if content is something other people want to see or not so that's a very high level understanding of it so how it might work is something like this so you make a post on instagram for example now what instagram is going to do is they're going to show that post in the feed to probably your most active followers so the people that engage with your stuff on a regular basis right uh pretty obvious and you probably notice a lot of the same people liking your stuff a lot of the time right so what they're gonna do is they're gonna show that post to a certain number of people so say you have a thousand followers they might show that post to like 50 people let's say now that's just an example it's an arbitrary number now it depends on how much engagement you get on a regular basis with your following on how many people they're going to show it to you right away but let's just say for argument's sake they show it to 50. now how it works is depending on how your followers engage with that content instagram is going to decide whether or not to show that content to more people or not to show it to anyone else at all based on the engagement that that piece of content gets because that's how instagram decides whether or not they should start showing your content to more and more and more people is whether or not they think other people are going to engage with it and how they think other people are going to engage with it is by the people that have already engaged or not engaged with it everyone's just scrolling past it and not doing anything they're probably thinking uh it's probably not the best content i don't want to show this to our users because it's really not that exciting it's not going to keep them on the platform right going back to their main goal so if people do engage with it so they like it they save it they comment on it they share it that's a signal to instagram's algorithm that your content's good so instead of showing it to just those first 50 people they might show it to say another 50 people now depending on how those extra 50 people engage with that content they might stop it there or they might show it to another 50 people or maybe another 100 right and depending on how those other 100 people engage with your post uh they might show it to another 100 or another 200 and that's how things go viral on the internet is through engagement now that's the instagram algorithm at a very high level same thing goes for stories if people are engaging with your stories if they're viewing them at their whole length your stories are slowly going to get higher and higher in people's feeds if you go to the very last person in your stories on instagram and you watch their stories a bunch their stories are going to start showing up in your feed because the algorithm is thinking whoa you must be interested in this person that i didn't currently think you were interested in so i'm going to start showing you that content so at a very high level that's really what we're looking at now when we're talking about engagement on instagram there's four kinds okay uh number one there is saves which is the newest and kind of most uh popular type of engagement these days which some people say is a super like you might have heard that before but saves is really the new um comment now uh saves is really what you want to go for when you're posting content on instagram it tells the algorithm on instagram that people want to take consume that content at a later date maybe it's a long-form piece of content and they want to consume it later so it's saying it's important enough that i'm going to save it and make time for it later so that's one of the biggest things you can go for okay number two is shares so shares is pretty obvious if people share the post in their comments if people share the post on their feed or in their stories that is a good sign that your content is also interesting comments is the third one and on facebook comments is the biggest thing on instagram it's not quite the biggest thing but it's right up there with saved the reason is comments are getting your user base to actually engage with you they're taking the time to actually engage and comment on whatever it is you're putting out there now when you're talking about comments comments only really matter if they're over three words in length so if someone just comments like heart emoji it's not gonna do much for the algorithm but if they comment like a question or um something longer form that will actually really help the algorithm rank and the last one is likes now unfortunately on instagram likes don't matter all that much these days they still matter a little bit but instagram does not give that a whole ton of weight compared to uh the other types of engagements comments saves and shares so that is basically the instagram algorithm at a high level they're going for engagement on your content there's four main types of engagement some are more valuable than others the biggest ones are saves and comments those are the things you really really want and that's going to help the algorithm push your content out there to more and more and more people to get you the exposure you want so hope that makes sense let's get into our three hacks now first thing is you want to manipulate your trust score and avoid getting shadow banned so what do those two things mean well your trust score is a score that you can't see that instagram has on your profile which basically says how trustworthy you are as a business or as a person okay so there's a few things you can do to get in instagram's good books and there's a few things you can do to get an instagram bad books so shadow banning this means they've looked at your profile they've analyzed it and they've said you're likely a spam artist you're likely a fake profile or something like that they're saying that you're essentially not who you say you are or you post a lot of spammy to be honest so don't post spammy that's the biggest thing you can do but here's the basic things you can do that are bad that you want to avoid doing so number one is following and unfollowing really aggressively you don't want to start just following people and unfollowing them that's signaling to them that you're just trying to find people to follow you back and if you do this hundreds of times a day they look at that as like you're a spam account or something like that and that is getting yourself on a path to being shadow band now just to explain what shadow band means it means they've essentially seen a lot of spammy behavior and they actually limit your account so when you make a post and you have a thousand followers they might only show it to five people 10 people instead of 50 people and those people must follow you really closely or maybe they won't show it to anyone at all that's what getting shadow band is and you'll notice you've got shadow band if you've been doing a lot of spammy stuff and all of a sudden your content doesn't get much exposure anymore so number one is following and unfollowing aggressively number two is making repetitive comments so uh and hashtags by the way so if you comment on other people's posts say hey lovely post make sure you follow me here blah blah blah like people do collab hashtag collab like it's instagram unfortunately these days is really really spammy and i'm of the belief similar to uh i heard garyvee say this that it kind of just feels like instagram's on the decline and these are the reasons why and instagram's really really trying hard to remove these types of spammy people from instagram because it kind of just feels like instagram's past its peak now i don't have any data to support that but it just you can just kind of feel it like you could with facebook uh four or five years ago so anyway repetitive comments and hashtags don't do that um that's a really big sign to them that you're just spamming for follows or whatever it is and a lot of these kind of tricks you see on the internet to like grow your following are these exact spammy things that worked three years ago of someone saying hey check out how i grew my instagram following from zero to like 20 000 followers in just a few months well it's probably because they're doing some spammy and that's the exact kind of stuff that will get you in trouble today so avoid it uh number three is messaging people that don't follow you okay so don't message people that don't follow you at a mass scale that's just telling instagram straight up that you're a spammy person do you ever get message requests on linkedin on facebook and whatever from people trying to sell you something or just some spammy message it happens all the time they're trying to avoid that so number three don't message at mass a bunch of people who don't follow you or you don't follow like it's just not a good idea number four is fake followers comments and likes so if you get fake followers in 2021 you're gonna have to buy fake likes too and instagram is getting pretty good at figuring out what accounts are fake and what aren't so don't buy fake followers to begin with because they're not going to engage with your content and if you don't get your content engaged with well you're not going to get in instagram's good books your content isn't going to go anywhere and it's just going to stranglehold you don't buy likes or followers from the beginning and don't buy likes either but buying those things will get you shadow banned if they figure it out now last one number five of the bad is posting too many times per day now if you listen to garyvee like i do and probably a lot of you out there do he says post 80 pieces of content a day or whatever now for most people that's not necessarily realistic he has a full-time video guy following him around doing this stuff for him but you can get up to you know five to ten posts a day that's fine but if you start posting like so aggressively that it's like 20 30 40 times a day just on instagram um that might be a sign that they might audit you and if you're posting some spammy uh they might shadow ban you in that case so those are the five things that you need to know to avoid getting shadow banned and to keep your trust score high now what are things you can do that are good for your trust score that will avoid getting shadowmen well there's four main things i want to talk about here so uh number one is posting consistently not constantly consistently so consistently meaning you could post three or four times a day if you're doing that every day and you're getting a decent amount of engagement that tells instagram you're posting a lot you're creating a lot of content for its platform you're keeping people on instagram you're keeping people interested in the platform so that's a good thing post consistently not constantly number two is commenting and liking on people's posts in your news feed instagram wants its users to actually engage with people that follow them that they follow like they want to keep it an engaging platform so if you're someone who just posts don't doesn't engage with anyone else that's not going to really do you much good so it's good if you can go out there and you can actually like and you can comment and you can get engaged with the people who follow you and it's a great way to get those people to engage back with you now going back to how important getting engagement is from the people that follow you this is a great way to do it so make sure that you're going out there you're commenting on your friends or your followers posts you're liking them and you're showing that you're an active user and you're not just kind of blasting out your own information without actually using the platform itself so that's number two number three is moving removing false followers so you can actually remove followers and how you would do that is essentially go to your profile look at your followers you can remove them but um why would you want to do that well false followers fake followers you might have if you have a thousand followers you might have up to a hundred who are totally fake and are not relevant to you maybe aren't in your industry or whatever if you actually remove those people um it'll be good for you because the ins the algorithm will show those people content and they won't engage with anything that you put because they're not really in your niche or they're not following your business or they're not actually your friend and that actually hurts your content's performance because these people aren't actually engaging with it so that's number three um is make sure that you can remove some followers that aren't relevant to you and lastly is actually engaging with your audience so what do i mean by this well we talked about commenting other people's posts liking other people's posts but engaging with your audience meaning replying to comments that they make on your posts replying to messages that they send you getting engaged with the people who actually follow you is going to be a huge benefit for your trust score to move you up in instagram's books and make sure your content is hitting more and more people so that is hack number one is make sure you manipulate the algorithm in your favor by um being a good instagram user as they would call it getting your trust score up and making sure you don't get shadow banned by doing spammy hack number two is engage with and follow your audience so i know i just said that you don't want to go around and follow hundreds of accounts a day because that's considered spammy now you still shouldn't do that but it's a good best practice to actually follow back your audience of people that follow you people that engage with your content are following you are engaging with you regularly or what you can do is is follow a hashtag that's relevant to your industry like i'm in real estate coaching so i might follow a hashtag like hashtag real estate agent or hashtag realtorlife might be comment uh hashtags that i would actually look to follow and then i would go through and i would engage with other real estate agents posts and i would go to their profiles and i would actually follow them and there's a good chance that some of them are actually going to follow me back now i don't want to do this in a spammy way if i follow 10 people a day no big deal i actually know statistically speaking 30 of them are going to follow me back so you can do this where you follow accounts hoping people follow you back and if people don't follow you back at some point you can just unfollow them as well not a big deal but you don't want to take this to the extreme where you're actually doing this you know 50 80 100 times a day where you're just following everybody and then unfollowing them when they don't follow you back that's seen in instagram's eyes as bad behavior and that can get you shadow band but if you do this in a way where you actually go through a hashtag feed and you like and engage with posts that other people are putting up and then you go to their account and you follow them after and you do this you know 10 20 accounts uh on some days you just follow them and then you can go back and you can unfollow them later that's okay but this is a great way to build your following because if you can do 100 people a week and 30 follow you back you get 30 followers per week you scale that up over you know 100 days and that's 3 000 followers so you know what i'm saying is if you do this consistently going back to being consistently you can actually build a following but the important thing to note is you're building a following of people who are active on instagram so think about that when you're going into a hashtag feed so i follow like hashtag real estate agent or hashtag realtorlife because i'm in real estate coaching now if you're a real estate agent you can follow me here at eric b preston um now i won't go into those hashtags like realtor life or something like that because i know the people that are posting on them are realtors i might go through and i might like some posts i'm interested in and if i'm actually like what people are putting out there because i don't just follow anyone i'll actually go in and i'll i'll follow them and there's i know statistically speaking 30 of them will probably follow me back um so that's a great way to actually build your following and build it with the right people so that's kind of a targeted strategy you can use to engage with people who are putting out content you like and who are in your target audience so that is hack number two is make sure you're following hashtags that are relevant to your industry that you want to get exposure in follow people who are already posting in those hashtags right and then hopefully some of them follow you back they're going to check out your profile so you want to make sure you have you know a clean profile that's worth following and states very clearly what it is that you do again uh check out my instagram account if you want to see how to kind of set up your instagram profile properly but you want to very clearly state what it is you do because people are just going to glance at your profile and you want them to be able to follow you straight away so that is hack number two is make sure you engage with your audience and follow them and participate in instagram hack number three is use reels okay instagram is on a huge push pushing reels right now so they're actually over emphasizing reels in the algorithm now you've all heard of reels it's the thing that instagram stole from tick tock to compete with them right that's it they stole stories from you name it snapchat they're stealing reels from tiktok they're trying to just steal things from everyone so they just need to be on instagram now really smart move obviously but they're really really trying to push reels because a lot of people aren't comfortable or used to using them yet make sure if you're trying to grow your instagram profile that you're actually doing a reel once a week at least to get yourself out there it can just be something silly and funny that's kind of the nature of reels for the most part but you want to make sure you're using them because they're giving reels a ton of exposure right now and they can get you a lot of followers so my last hack is make sure you're utilizing reels because instagram right now has come out and said they're actually over emphasizing the exposure of reels in the algorithm this year to make sure that they can get reals becoming as popular of a thing as they are on tick tock because they want to kill tick tock so very very obvious make sure you're making some reels they don't have to be professional they don't have to be like that well thought out they can just be silly and fun but use them and make sure that you're getting into the right hashtag searches so by using the correct hashtags to get into the right hashtag searches that your target audience might be a part of right so my target audience a lot of times lives in the hashtag hashtag realestate so i'm always going to do hashtag real estate because i know there's a lot of real estate agents that follow that hashtag that might follow me when i put my content out there so that's my last hack for insta the instagram algorithm in summary it's important to understand that facebook and instagram algorithms are all about engagement there's a few different kinds of engagement likes comments shares and saves saves are the biggest thing you can get today saves are the new comments you really want to get people saving your content commenting long form comments on your content you want to use reels and you don't want to get shadow banned you want to get in instagram's good book so your content gets consistent exposure you want to post regularly and consistently but you don't want to do any spammy to summarize that's all i got for you today as always like i said smash that subscribe button hit the like button if you enjoyed this video hit that dislike button if you didn't at the end of the day any content helps support my channel i'd appreciate the subscribe it really helps me grow and keeps creating content for you guys at the end of the day so i appreciate you alright i'm gonna leave you with a couple videos here if you're a real estate agent check out my google ads video because i'm super bullish on google ads as you'll know that's why i started a google ads agency that does lead generation for real estate agents it helps you generate leads from google search results and steal those leads away from zillow if you're interested in chatting with me about having my team run your google ads to help you generate an abundance of leads to fill your 30 60 90 day pipeline in 2021 well leave a comment below i'm happy to engage with you we can set up a time to chat if you're of interest all you need is an idx website and a willingness to prospect the leads that i'm going to generate for you and that's all i got for today thanks for watching everyone i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Eric B. Preston

Views: 18,762

Keywords: eric preston, facebook ads, eric b preston, instagram algorithm 2021, instagram algorithm explained, ig algorthim, ig algorithm 2021, instagram algorithm 2021 explained, ig algorithm explained

Id: reNzYuIjA5A

Length: 20min 1sec (1201 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021