TRANSCRIPT

Social Media
Marketing Society

Instagram Algorithms
and How to
Leverage Them

INSTRUCTOR:

JENN HERMAN

Sponsored by

Copyright 2019, Social Media Examiner

Transcript

Introduction

Now let me introduce your instructor. Jenn is a social media consultant, speaker, and
globally recognized Instagram expert. She is the forefront blogger on Instagram
marketing. Jenn provides tips, resources, and training for small- to medium-sized
businesses that need to structure their social media strategies.

Jenn has been featured in "Inc.," Fox News, Yahoo! Finance, Huff Post, The Verge, CBS
Radio L.A., and numerous other podcasts and publications. She is the author of
"Instagram for Business for Dummies" among other publications.

You can find Jenn on social media as @jenns_trends, or her website, jennstrends.com.

Jenn, thank you so much for joining us today. The floor is now yours.

Presentation

Jenn: Thank you so much, Ali, and welcome to everybody. I am so excited. You
guys know I geek out over some Instagram stuff, and the things we're going to talk about
today are going to be super exciting.

As a reminder to those of you who have heard me before, and a warning for those of you
who have not heard me before, I do talk super-fast. Fortunately, you get recordings and
playbacks of this. You can come back and catch anything we didn't cover or that you
didn't catch right away, and we will have the questions at the end where I can clarify
anything that you need. So get those pens and pencils and typing fingers ready. We are
jumping right in. Here we go.

First, before we jump into the algorithm component, I just want to give you a quick
reminder of why I love Instagram as a platform itself. The first reason is because traffic
from Instagram actually has lower bounce rates. It's virtually a zero bounce rate
compared to all other social media platforms.

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A bounce rate is when someone lands on your website and then they leave immediately.
That's a bounce. A high bounce number means people are not staying. That's a bad thing.
A low bounce rate is good.

Instagram generates pretty much a zero bounce rate, meaning when they come to your
website from Instagram, they genuinely want to be there and they will stay. That's how
you make conversions and get people on your lists and all that sort of stuff. It's very
powerful in terms of being able to drive that result for your business.

Also, Instagram is one of the strongest community-building tools out there. While all
social media is great, and we love social media, Instagram is a very community-based
platform that was built around that mentality, and people still interact as a very good
community on the platform, whether it's liking things, commenting, DMs, all that sort of
stuff. It really focuses on a community environment.

Because you have that community environment, you actually have some of the highest
engagement rates of all social media platforms. On Instagram, that engagement rate is
about 2.5%. There are various statistics out there, but it's somewhere in the average of
about 2.5% as average engagement per post.

You may be like, "Wow. That's really low. Why would you be excited about that?" But
as you can see, Facebook has an average engagement rate of 0.17%, and Twitter is a
fraction of that at 0.05% engagement. So Instagram at 2.5% engagement per post is
significantly higher than all other social media platforms and gives you the opportunity to
really build those relationships because people are engaging with your content.

We're going to jump into the algorithm, why the algorithm matters to you. Really, this is
probably the best way that I can tell you, is that for as powerful as Instagram is, for all the
reasons I love it, if you are not using it strategically, if you are not creating content that
actually benefits you and your brand, then, basically, it's like throwing spaghetti at the
wall to see what sticks.

We've all done that. We throw up a Story, we throw up a post, we try something
different, and we just wing it and see if it works. If that's your entire Instagram strategy
and you're not being strategic and you don't understand why things work the way they do,
you're never really going to see success.

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But understanding the algorithm and why content ranks the way it does, why it shows up
in certain people's feeds certain ways, and how you can leverage that for your own
content strategy will make such a difference in driving the results that you're searching
for with your Instagram strategy.

We're going to dive into all the nitty-gritty, all the things Instagram algorithm. I realize
this is not a super-sexy term. People cringe at "algorithm," but I'm a science dork. I love
me some algorithm, so I'm going to make this fun and exciting. Don't worry. You are
going to love it. You guys are going to learn so much, and it's going to be awesome.

The first thing I want you to take away from this session is this on the screen. If you
forget everything else I tell you, just remember this statement. The Instagram algorithm is
not the same as Facebook. I cannot stress this enough. I'm probably going to tell you this
about six more times today before we finish up. The Instagram algorithm is different than
Facebook.

When Facebook changes, Instagram does not. When Instagram changes, Facebook does
not. All too commonly we hear something that happened on Facebook and people assume
that the same thing happened on Instagram. People start making statements or writing
blog posts or recording videos, and it's not true. They work completely differently.

I'm going to show you how some of those differences actually impact content things
today, and I'm going to go through some of the differences between Facebook and
Instagram. But just remember, and again, I'll remind you, but just remember the
Instagram algorithm is not the same as Facebook.

On Instagram, it's all about each individual user. What I mean by that is if you listening
to me right now, if you are following me on Instagram, where my content shows up in
your feed is all determined by you, how you interact with my content, how you interact
with the content of other people that you follow.

What you see from me has very little impact by what everybody else on this webinar does
with my content. It's not a popularity contest. Again, not the same as Facebook.

On Instagram, it's all about you. If you always like my content, I'm going to be high in
your feed. If you always ignore me, I'm going to be low in your feed. That's the really
simple statement, but we're going to go into way more details. I just want you to really
focus on this concept as we go through all the things today and we start talking about
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content strategies about how you're going to focus on creating content for each individual
user, not the masses as a whole.

When it comes to Instagram, there are actually multiple areas that use algorithms. There
are about six or seven at work at any given time. Of course, when we think algorithm, we
think of the feed, but there are way more algorithms at work that you probably don't
know about or that you may be aware of but didn't think that significantly impacted your
content.

First, we're going to dive into the Explore feed and look at how that algorithm works and
how that impacts content. Then we're going to talk hashtags, those searches, how they're
sorted, and how you can use hashtags to your advantage. Then we'll talk a little bit about
Stories, and then we'll go into all the nitty-gritty on the feed and what you need to know
to maximize that algorithm for your advantage.

First, we're diving right in, you guys. We're moving through this content. We're going to
talk about the Explore feed algorithm. Again, it's about individual users' activity and
preference. If you're sitting next to five people and you all open up the search bar right
now, which is the little magnifying glass and takes you to the Explore page, each and
every one of you will see completely different things.

Yes, what you see on the screen is an actual screenshot of my Explore page, and it's
pretty accurate to what is normally in my Explore feed. There's a lot of royals, there's a
lot of "Housewives," and there's usually some food and some fashion, because I
shamelessly can admit that this is what I most look at on Instagram.

Yours is going to look completely different based on the types of content you interact
with, the accounts you follow, and that sort of stuff. There is an algorithm that is
determining what pieces of content you as an individual are most likely to interact with,
and that is what's going to get populated into your Explore feed.

Some of the things that impact what shows up will be the popularity of a post for both
followers and non-followers. If you post something on Instagram and your followers love
it but not a lot of non-followers love it, it's less likely to show up in the Explore feed
because Instagram knows your followers like it, but if your non-followers, people who
would find you in search, like in the Explore page, aren't likely to interact with that
content, it's not going to perform well. They won't show it in the Explore feed.

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But if you're using things like hashtags and location tags to show up in searches and non-
followers are really liking your content, as well as your existing followers, that gives you
a boost in ranking, and you're more likely to show up in the Explore feed.

Timing and saturation can also play a factor in this. If it's July 4 and everyone is posting
July 4 images, you're less likely to show up with a July 4 post when it's a highly saturated
time with everyone else posting. It depends on what is current, what's trending, and that
sort of thing at any given time as to whether or not you will show up in the Explore page.

There is no way to guarantee that you will show up in Explore. Anybody who tells you
that they can guarantee that is pretty much lying to you because there's no guarantee.
Again, this is all individually based and whether or not individual users are likely to
interact with your content.

You don't have to have super high-performing content. You don't have to have thousands
of likes. You could show up in the Explore page with 27, 92, 108, or whatever likes. It
doesn't have to be super popular. It has to be super relevant to the person who is looking
at it.

The algorithm is at work with this. There's also some artificial intelligence in the
background to determine what to show people.

For example, let's take the image on my screen that has the hamburger in it. The AI is
looking at that and recognizing that that is a hamburger, that it is food, and regardless of
what other content is in there, it's already recognizing the type of content that is.

If it knows that I am likely to respond to food images, or specifically something with a

cheeseburger, that will more likely rank for my viewing because the artificial intelligence
is recognizing what is in that image regardless of the fact that I typically like other pieces
of content. The AI is determining that as well.

Hashtags. We can't talk Instagram and not talk hashtags. Let's talk about the hashtag
algorithm first. When you go to search a hashtag, again you click on the magnifying
glass, and up there in the top, you can see in this case I'm looking at #guitarshop. It's
going to list a series of results for that hashtag.

You will see two tabs. There's Top, and there is Recent. Currently selected is the Top tab.
Top are ranked algorithmically. That means it is determined on a variety of factors based
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on my individual user activity and preference as well as popularity of posts from both
followers and non-followers, just like the Explore tab, as well as timing and saturation.

But here's the thing. The user's individual activity is going to play a factor. If you, again,
are sitting down next to five people and you all type in the exact same hashtag and go
look at the results, you may very well see different top results because the AI is going to
look at it and be like, "Oh, well, this person always likes dogs, and this person always
likes kids, and this person always likes the color blue," and it will actually show you top
filtered results based on those criteria that you typically interact with. Looking at the
exact same hashtag hub, you will see different results than different people.

By contrast, if you go to the Recent tab and you were to click on that one, that is
chronologically sorted. There is a small algorithmic component, meaning not every post
is guaranteed to show up in a hashtag hub.

By going to Recent, that is chronologically sorted. If you look at that next to the five
people sitting next to you, it would look almost identical or identical in terms of search
results because that is chronologically with the most recent in the topmost corner.

Again, there is still some algorithmic sorting that goes on, especially in really popular
hashtag hubs. This one was #guitarshop at 152,000 posts. It's in the moderately popular
range, and there could be some algorithmic sorting that would determine which posts to
show. Even with those five people sitting next to you, you may see slightly different
results.

Using a hashtag does not guarantee you show up in that search result. There's a very good
chance that you will, but there is no guarantee.

All right. So how do you use hashtags to better increase your chances of showing up in
those top searches? Top is where it defaults. That's what you first see. We want to get you
ranking as a top post. Let's review some hashtag strategies.

This is where you'll want to either feel free to grab your phones and grab screenshots of
this, or you can always come back and listen to the replay to go through this. I'm going to
give you a very specific recipe and a very specific strategy for using hashtags to get better
results.

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You do want to use at least 10 to 20 hashtags per post. I recommend as many as you can.
Fifteen is my minimum, but I know some people balk at that, so I say 10 to 20. They're
use it or lose it. You can use up to 30.

If you use 10 hashtags, you can only show up in potentially 10 searches. If you use 20,
you can potentially show up in 20 searches. I would rather have the opportunity to show
up in more searches, so I'm going to use more hashtags. If you don't use them, you cannot
show up in search. That is just how it works. So the more you use, the more opportunities
you have for exposure.

You're going to want to use a combination of your own custom branded hashtags, trendy
or themed hashtags, content-related hashtags, and industry-related hashtags.

In this example I have up on the screen from @westernaustralia, which is a tourism

Instagram account for Western Australia tourism, they have a caption, they have this
photo, and they have a variety of hashtags in here. Within the caption, they have
#Kalbarri, and then they have #KalbarriNationalPark. Then down at the bottom they have
#justanotherdayinWA, #thisisWA, #WesternAustralia, #seeaustralia, and
#amazingcoralcoast.

With those hashtags, the custom branded ones, #justanotherdayinWA, is their branded
hashtag. That's what they use and they recommend that their audience uses when they tag
content. So check off number one.

Trendy or themed would be things like . . . we have the #WesternAustralia. That's kind of
a theme. That's where they are. As well as the #seeaustralia, which ties into a vacation
type. That would be your trendy or themed.

Content-related are the two, the #Kalbarri, and the #KalbarriNationalPark, which are
literally what is in the photo. That's the content.

Then, again, industry-related would tie into things like the #WesternAustralia,
#seeaustralia, and #amazingcoralcoast, which are all of those tourism ones again, and that
are still related to what they do as business and promotion and that sort of thing.

Those hashtags have hit all of those criteria, but we're going to take it another step
further. Oh, we're not done yet. Don't put those pencils down just yet. Now we want to
look at how to combine your hashtags for best results.
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If you go again to the search bar, you go to the little magnifying glass and you type in a
hashtag, it will tell you how many posts are associated with each and every hashtag.

You're going to want to use this very specific recipe, and I'm going to tell you why this
recipe is so important. You want to use four to five popular hashtags. These are posts
about the mid-hundreds-of-thousands up to a million posts associated with it.

Once you get over a million, you usually only start attracting spambots, and it's so
saturated that your content is only in there for a matter of seconds before it gets buried, so
you're not really getting much chance for exposure.

There are some exceptions to this rule, like the beauty industry, the wedding industry.
Using the hashtag #weddingphotographer is going to produce millions of results, but it's
relevant, and you might still want to use it even though it is so popular. So there are a
couple of exceptions, but in general, go up to about a million as the top threshold.

Then you're going to choose five to six moderately popular hashtags. These are going to
be in the high tens of thousands to that mid-hundreds-of-thousands range.

Two to five niche-specific. These are going to be highly targeted specifically to what you
do as a business, the solution you provide, what you do for your audience, what your
audience is looking for.

Then one to three branded hashtags exclusively for your business.

If you do this, you're at 15 to 20 hashtags and you haven't even tried yet, so this is really
easy to get to that minimum number of hashtags to show up in multiple searches.

But here's why this works. Here's why this specific recipe is so important. It's because
those popular hashtags give you an initial burst of activity, meaning somebody finds you
in that search. It's a popular search. There are lots of people looking at it. They're going to
like your post. You're getting an immediate burst of activity.

The moderately popular hashtags are going to keep you active for hours into days. You're
not going to be buried in a matter of seconds like the popular ones. So if people go and
look at those hashtags a few hours later, a few days later, you're still probably showing up
in that search high enough up that they can actually still find your content.
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Meanwhile, all of this is going on, your followers you posted are liking your content.
They're engaging with it. They're putting up likes and comments.

Instagram looks at your content and goes, "Well, your followers are staying engaged and
interacting with it. Non-followers are staying engaged and interacting with it. You're
doing a really good job. We're going to start ranking you with a top post in some of these
hashtags."

What happens is in those niche-specific hashtags, those super targeted, very specific
ones, you will rank as a top post. When you rank as a top post, you're now the number
one, two, three, whatever position. You're the first thing people see. They're going to
click on your photo. They're going to end up on your profile. They're going to follow you.
They're going to send you an email. They're going to leave comments. They're going to
send you a direct message. You're going to get results, and I can prove it using the
example on the screen.

This is @outofmybloomingmind. Her name is Dani. She is a long-term blog reader of

mine, and she used this very specific recipe. She did this with paper flowers. She creates
paper flowers. That's what she does for her business.

She used this exact recipe, and as you can see from the image on the right, she ranked as
a number one top post for #paperflowers, and that was a post with a hashtag with a
million posts associated with it. She is number one with only 97 likes. She doesn't have
thousands of likes. She's not some celebrity account, but there she is number one, and she
made multiple sales off of that one post. Within hours of that post, she had multiple
people reach out to her to purchase her product.

So, yes, I am telling you this works. It has to be strategic, and it has to be consistent. You
need to know what hashtags you're going to use, how you're going to use them, and
where you're going to use them with your content, but if you do this, this will work to
drive results for your business.

But one more caveat before we walk away from hashtags. You need to think about what
your audience is actually looking for, not what you want to be found for. These can be
very different things.

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In that example that I showed you with the paper flowers, she's using #paperflowers
because that's what her audience is actually looking for. They're looking for paper
flowers. That's great.

But let's take the example of car insurance, because car insurance is super sexy, right?
Car insurance brokers still want to sell. They still want to be on Instagram. But here's the
thing. Nobody goes to Instagram looking for car insurance. That's what Google is for.
People are not coming to Instagram and looking for #carinsurance unless they are other
insurance brokers. You're not going to attract your audience by using #carinsurance.

Who's your target audience? What are they doing? Where are they on Instagram? They're
doing things like #dreamcar, #newcar, #myfirstcar, #mustang, all these sorts of things
that they're actually doing where they're actually creating content, where they're looking
for content.

You know what people with a new car need? They need car insurance. So if you're using
the hashtags where they hang out and creating content that is valuable to them, you will
find those customers. But if you're focused too much on you and what you do, you are
not going to find them with that hashtag strategy.

I want to leave you with that. I know it's a lot to think about, but we're going to move on
to Instagram Stories because there's an algorithm at play here as well.

When it comes to Instagram Stories, these are the bubbles that show up at the top of your
feed. You can see on the screen I have an example of what those bubbles look like. They
have the colored circle around them that shows that person has a new Story.

If you have never, ever watched a single Story ever, this is chronologically sorted with
the most recent new Story in the leftmost position. Where you see @thedigitalgal, if I had
never watched a Story ever, she would be in the position that she has the most recent
chronologically posted Story.

However, I've obviously watched some Stories. Once you've watched Stories, this is
algorithmically prioritized based again on your personal interactions. In this case,
@thedigitalgal, who I'm sure many of you know because she just recently did a training
here in the Society as well, is my best friend, and I watch all of her Stories, so she gets
prioritized placement.

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Whenever she places a new Story on Instagram, she automatically bumps to that number
one position in the banner because Instagram knows I'm going to watch her Story. She's
probably the only person on the planet whose Stories I watch every single one.

It will go down in prioritization towards the right-hand side of the screen from there
based on people whose Stories I have viewed and whether or not they have new Stories,
and then live video plays a factor as well.

If I've watched somebody's Story who I'm always consistently watching, once I've
watched their Story, they'll move down to the right-hand side because they don't have
anything new. But the moment they have something new, they bump back into one of
those top positions.

As they move down when I watch their Stories, people filter back up towards that
leftmost position based on priority ranking of whether or not I am likely to watch their
Stories based on past interactions.

Let's take, for example, @chocolatejohnny. If he was to go live, he is going to bump up

to most likely the number one position when he goes live because live video will get
priority placement.

However, in this specific example, because I don't usually watch a lot of his Stories — I
do watch them, but not a lot of them — and I always watch @thedigitalgal, even if
@chocolatejohnny went live right now, he would not overtake the number one position.
He would move in the live video to the number two position behind @thedigitalgal
because she still outranks him because I watch all of her Stories, even though he's live.
So live does get priority placement, but it won't outrank somebody who always gets their
content watched.

That's how Instagram Stories basically get placed within the feed or in the banner. Now
let's jump into the Instagram feed. This is your home page. This is where all of your
content that everyone you follow shows up in that home feed.

Here are some key factors to pay attention to when we start talking about the Instagram
algorithm. It is based again, I'm reminding you, predominantly on individual interactions.
This is determined by your interest level in related content as well as your relationship
with that account.

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If you always like the content from that account, if every time it shows up in your feed
you like it or you stop and pause . . . and when I say interactions, interactions can be as
simple as clicking on the ". . . More" to read the whole caption. It could be stopping to
watch a video. It could be tapping over to their profile from that post. It doesn't have to
be a like or a comment. It doesn't have to be something obvious to you. An interaction
means that in some way, they took an action with that piece of content. Instagram is
tracking all of that from an algorithm perspective.

If every time you see a certain account's content, if you're liking it, it's always going to
rank high in your feed. If you occasionally like it, it's going to get a slightly lower
ranking. If every time you see it, you ignore it or you scroll past, it doesn't catch your
attention, and you don't give it the time of day, it's going to rank lower and lower and
lower in your feed.

There's also that relationship value. For example, my sister-in-law always ranks number
one in my feed, always, because I do like all of her content, and when I see it, I interact
with it. It's usually my nieces, and I want to see what they're doing, so I'm usually
hyperactive with the content.

Additionally, because Facebook owns Instagram and Facebook knows everything in the
world, sometimes for better or worse with the current privacy situation, Facebook knows
that she is my sister-in-law. Facebook has that relationship understanding over on
Facebook, and so it shares that information with Instagram. So Instagram knows that she
is my sister-in-law. Therefore, I am more likely to be interested in that content than just a
brand or somebody else that I follow.

Those two criteria are the dominant factors in determining how content ranks in each
individual's feed.

There is a slightly bigger focus, and I'm saying "slightly" bigger focus, on more recent
content. When Instagram changed to the algorithmic feed and went away from
chronological, which, by the way, if you're sitting there saying you want chronological
back, you're going to have to get over it. We are never going back to chronological. It's
going to be algorithmic forever, and it's okay. Don't worry about it. We can use this to
our advantage.

When they first went to this algorithmic feed, a lot of times people would log in to
Instagram and the first thing they would see was from five days ago. Then all the posts
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that had been posted in the last 24 hours were lower in the feed. People were
complaining, so Instagram agreed to put a slightly larger focus on more recent content,
meaning they would show you content from two hours ago versus content from two days
ago higher in the feed.

But that is a minor component, meaning if you haven't logged in to Instagram for five
days, so if you logged in Monday and now it's Friday and you're logging in again, if it
was my sister-in-law's content, even if she posted it on Monday five days ago, I'm going
to see that as the number one post because my priority of that content outranks any
recency of that content.

The recent issue is a bigger issue for people who don't log in consistently. If you're on
Instagram every single day, you won't notice this as much because you're more likely to
be seeing recent content anyway.

There is some small value on popularity of a post, unlike Facebook, which has a huge
value on popularity. Over on Facebook, if a post is performing really well and is getting a
ton of activity, you are more likely to see it because Facebook recognizes it as a high-
performing, popular post. Instagram is not the same way. Again, it's very individually-
based, and if something is performing really well in a popularity contest, it may get a
slight bump in where it places in your feed, but it's not significant.

Finally, your activity actually impacts the reach of your content. I'm not saying this in a
way to game the system, but if you show up and you post something for your brand and
you leave and you don't log back into that account for five more days and you're not
liking posts, you're not replying to comments, you're not viewing Stories, you're not
checking DMs, if you're not actively on the platform, Instagram is going to look at you
and be like, "What's in it for me? It takes two to tango," and they're going to hurt your
reach because you're not actively involved on the platform.

But if you log in once a day, a couple times a week at least, and you're actively on there
engaging with content, looking at people's Stories, doing things that in some way show
you're practically involved on the platform, and I mean practically as in a practical
application of it, then you are going to get more reach on your content.

We don't want to post and ghost. We don't want to just show up and leave. We want to
stay active in a way that keeps your content at a higher ranking.

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Let me state this, because this is another really big piece that I want to make sure you
understand when it comes to content and how it is sorted and provided on Instagram.
Content is not hidden. Again, not the same as Facebook. Facebook literally hides stuff
from you. Facebook determines what it wants to show you and when it wants to show it
to you. Instagram does not. Nothing is hidden.

If you scroll far enough back in your Instagram feed, you will see every single post from
every single person that you follow. Additionally, when you log on to Instagram, the
moment your feed refreshes, that content has been sorted based on all of these criteria,
and it does not get resorted from that last login.

Again, on Facebook, sometimes you refresh and old content moves back up to the top or
things refresh and rearrange themselves. If you scroll down, new content pops in midway
through the feed. No. The moment you log on to Instagram, the order of that content is
determined, and that does not get rearranged.

The algorithm is not impacted by the following things. Instagram Stories and Instagram
feed are mutually exclusive in terms of performance. I told you if you're on Instagram
and constantly interacting and reading Stories and stuff, great. That helps because it
shows you're interactive.

But if somebody watches every one of your Stories and ignores every one of your feed
posts, your feed posts will not rank any higher. They could watch every one of your
Stories, watch every one of your live videos, and it will not impact the placement of your
feed posts. They are mutually exclusive. The same thing applies, if they're always liking
all your feed posts but they never watch your Stories, your Stories will not rank any
higher in that banner.

Response times. This just came up again today in another conversation. It does not matter
if and when you reply to people. If they're leaving comments, you do not have to respond
within an hour or five minutes or anything. These don't matter. We want you to be
responsive. We want you to engage and entertain your audience and answer questions
and have conversations, but there is no time limit restriction. I promise you.

Editing and deleting. Go nuts. Edit it. If you need to fix something, if you have a typo and
30 seconds after you post it you realize it's there, go in and edit it. It's okay. Instagram is
not punishing you for creating better content. This is not a bad thing.

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If you want to delete posts, go for it. I don't think you should delete them, but it's not
going to hurt you to delete something. It's not going to hurt any of your other performing
content. I don't recommend to delete a repost. That's a whole other argument. But just
deleting something because you decided it wasn't the right time to post it, that's okay.
You can delete things or archive them.

Your hashtag usage. I just gave you a whole hashtag strategy. Instagram wants you to use
hashtags. They want you to get found. They're not going to punish you for using
hashtags. There's no punishment for using a certain number of hashtags, and there is no
punishment for using the same hashtags repeatedly.

If you want proof, go look at my Instagram account @jenns_trends. I use the same
hashtags in almost every single post, and all of my posts have very similar engagement.
My last one was even bigger than the one before. That is not an issue. You can use the
same hashtags over and over and over again.

Video versus photo. The algorithm does not give preference to one versus the other. Your
audience may prefer one over the other. Your audience may love your videos, in which
case your videos are higher performing and therefore your content is raking higher in
their feeds. Great. Create more video. But video in and of itself does not get preferential
placement based on the algorithm. It's based on your individual users and how they ingest
that content.

Finally, business profiles have no negative impact. It's not going to hurt your reach. It's
not going to hurt your exposure. It's not going to hurt your chances for building your
following.

If you immediately switch from a personal profile to a business profile, you may
sometimes see a drop in engagement. That returns to normal in about three to four weeks.
Instagram will sometimes reduce reach when you make bulk or massive changes, and a
switch like that could be considered a major change, but within three to four weeks,
everything goes back to normal, and you're better off being a business profile for all of
the advantages. There's no negative impact.

What may hurt you when it comes your content, what may get you reduced reach, is that
your content just straight up isn't good. This is the last thing people want to look at, is
that your content sometimes just plain sucks or it's not appealing to your audience. You're
trying too hard to sell. You're thinking too much about you as a business, and you're not
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thinking about your audience. We need to create content that appeals to them. Don't
worry. We're talking all about that in just a couple slides.

You may also see reduced reach if you act like a spammer, and these are things where
you like a lot of content really fast. Maybe you copy and paste comments and you're
putting the same comment on a whole bunch of people's posts. Things like that are spam-
like behavior. You could get flagged.

Your content may get flagged for spam by somebody else. Let's say people don't like
what you post and they think it's spammy or you're leaving spammy comments. They will
flag you. Boom, there goes your reach.

If you tag a lot of people in a post they are not in purely for the chance to show up in their
notifications and they report you for spam-like behavior and for inappropriate tagging,
you're going to drop your reach.

Additionally, posting content that may violate copyright laws. This is a big issue with
music and when you have audio in a video. If you have music playing in the background,
if there's karaoke going on, if you're doing a cover song, this is a big issue for musicians
and that sort of thing. If there is that music that is recognizable as copyright protected,
Instagram will automatically flag your content.

Even if you appeal it and you get that appeal approved and you get your content put back,
it's going to take so much time that your reach on that post is done. It's never going to
perform well. These are things that you really want to think about if you're doing a lot of
music or audio content.

I told you we were going to talk about the algorithm and creating content. Here we go.

When it comes to creating your Instagram content, some of these things will apply to
Stories, but most of what I'm talking about here is for your Instagram feed. I want you to
do less content and better content. When I say better, it has to be a-freaking-mazing. It
has to be the best of the best.

I always use this example where Twitter can be like, "Meh. It's okay content. That can go
on Twitter." Mediocre to good, we're like, "Eh, LinkedIn can deal with that." Good
content, we put that up on Facebook. It has to be amazing content to show up on

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Instagram because, for all the reasons that we just talked about with the algorithm, your
content has to stand out.

You don't want your content to be mediocre, and if it doesn't capture their attention, they
scroll past it. Once they scroll past it, that is a negative ranking for you. We want your
content to be so appealing that people stop and pay attention to it and they take some sort
of action on that post.

We also want to mention that your content doesn't compete with itself. This is that "less
content" factor. If you're posting every single day on Instagram right now, your content is
quite simply competing with itself. Less is more.

Right now, I recommend on average three to five times a week is probably good. If you
can do less, go for it. I live on Instagram, you guys, and I post once a month on
Instagram. Literally once a month, maybe twice a month. You can post once a week,
twice a week. That's okay. It doesn't have to be all the time.

What happens is if you post on Monday and you have a super high-performing posts and
it's got all these likes and it's doing really well and Instagram wants to show it to more
people when they log in on Tuesday, but now you have a new post that you just posted on
Tuesday, your Monday post is going to outrank your Tuesday post.

Your Tuesday post is probably going to rank lower in their feeds, which means now
they're not going to see your Tuesday post. Your Tuesday post is going to have a fraction
of the engagement that your Monday post had because you made it compete with your
own content.

Spacing out your content and giving more time for high-performing content to run its
time will actually help your overall strategy.

You want your content to stand out, and you want a post with a purpose. We want
something that people see, that they recognize, that, like I said, stands out in the feed,
captures their attention, but that actually serves not only them but you. It has to in some
way benefit your overall Instagram strategy.

Gone are the days of checking the box, "I posted to Instagram today." Nope. That is done.
We are not posting for the sake of posting. We now post with a purpose.

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Here are some content things that we can think about. We're going to go through a
number of slides here with ideas on content for you. These are examples that I have
pulled from accounts that I follow that I would put into that better content category.

Why? The image on the left from #sofabfood is clean. It's minimal. It's got a lot of subtle
tones, and then, boom, there's a pop of bright fuchsia. That is going to stand out in the
feed. That is going to capture your attention, and it also falls into a well-aligned rule of
thirds. That lower ramekin is in that lower third. The left ramekin is in the left third.
You've got all of these components from digital photography and alignment that make it
a beautifully well-composed image, but that pop of color is going to get people's attention
in the feed.

The image of the guitar, you could be a guitar on a shelf doing nothing, but instead it's an
image of a guitar, which is for sale, but it's in a natural environment. It's with all the other
equipment and things that a musician would be used to having around, so it appeals
organically to that target audience.

Similarly, the example from #maine_blonde, the object of focus is the watch, but it's not
a watch in a box on a shelf, which is boring and pushy and annoying. This is a watch. I
see the jewelry and the sweater. We're coming into fall, although here in San Diego it's
still gorgeously summer, but we're coming into fall. We see the boots and the leaves. I am
obviously her target ideal audience, but this speaks to me as a whole. I want everything
about that. Now I absolutely want the watch because it's all part of an emotional
connection. It's not just the watch.

Similarly, the image on the right is the diamond ring, but it's again not just a diamond
ring. It's on her hand, and it's in front of the Eiffel Tower. This isn't a massively
professionally photographed image. It's taken on probably an iPhone or a smartphone,
and it's just edited and uploaded. It's simple, but it really clearly puts the ring in focus,
and it makes it relatable and happy, and it ties in emotions, but it's beautifully formatted
from editing and alignment as well.

We also want to make sure that you write better captions. I'm going to say this. Captions
are where you make conversions. Photos are where you get attention. Photos get people
to pay attention and stop the scroll. Captions are where you make conversions. Captions
are where you get people to follow calls to action. That's where you get them to your
website and all these sorts of things.

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Here are some great examples of captions. I love TSA. If you're not currently following
TSA, you can thank me later. They just crossed one million followers yesterday, so I
think they're going to do maybe a couple of fun things with that.

I love TSA. Their captions are hilarious. In this case, "If you see something, say
something, but don't saw something. If you saw something you see at the airport, there's a
good chance you won't make your flight. We know it's a cutting-edge tool, but it'll have
to go in your checked bag."

They had a post yesterday. It was all about gaming, really funny comments and things
related to different gaming systems in the caption. They're really funny. It's the TSA, you
guys. Could you pick a more boring organization besides the TSA? They have hilarious
content. They have a million followers because they're awesome, not because they're the
TSA. Who cares?

They do share educational content. They show a lot of other things, but their captions are
great. They use it as a way to help their audience and answer questions, but they do it in a
very humorous and entertaining way.

The image in the middle is from my co-author on the Dummies books. She says, "Be like
a postage stamp." The image gets your attention. It's bold. It's pink. It's like, "What the
what?" Then you read the caption. "Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you
get there." Then she goes on to talk about shiny object syndrome and all these sorts of
things. The photo gets the attention, the caption tells the story, and then she can drive
people to the blog post and all these sorts of things from there.

@generalelectric is another good example of a good caption that I love in this one. Here's
a wind turbine, a multimillion-dollar piece of equipment. It's a cool photo, but it's the
caption where they start talking about, "Never underestimate the value of arts and crafts.
This clean energy innovation started three years ago with a Styrofoam ball and a
toothpick." I'm like, "Well, I have a toddler who plays with Styrofoam balls and
toothpicks." You just took something super complex, super advanced technology, and
you put it in terms that relate to me as an average human being.

Find ways that you can use your captions to connect with people in these ways that
appeal to them, whether it's through humor, education, relatability, all these different
things.

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With your content, I've mentioned a couple times already that emotional connection, but
also your brand voice. You and your brand have a unique tone, a unique style, and you
want to stay true to that when you're on Instagram.

This example is from @hotlipssociety. I love it because if you know me, you know I
have this minor obsession with shoes. I was scrolling through my feed, and I saw this,
and I was like, "Oh, hello, honey." The shoes, you're speaking immediately to me. That's
an emotional connection as I'm her ideal target audience.

She writes a caption talking about it, but it's very much her. She's saying, "I don't care
who knows it." She's got the hands-up emoji, and she's got the lips emoji and the heart
emoji, and she's asking people to guess which shoes are hers. It's an emotional connection
that appeals to her target audience, but she stays true to her brand voice.

From @melaniecmusic when she was at this event, at the end, even after she's talking
about the whole performance, she throws in the #outfitgoals, staying true to who she is in
the fashion world and all that sort of stuff. Let's face it. Their outfits were amazing. She's
again sticking true to that brand voice.

@beatsoncharity is a cancer charity for children based in New Zealand, and I love their
profile for nonprofits if you want to go take a look at them from that perspective. Again,
their caption talks to an emotional connection. Rather than being sad and negative, this
caption talks about the bell and how they ring the bell when they leave, when they're in
remission, or when they're healed.

It's a very emotional story, but that is what people connect with. They don't want to read
corporate speak and things like that. They want to connect emotionally. So look at how
you can create more content that connects directly with your target audience in an
emotional way.

You also want to create more of what your audience wants. I keep telling you it's all
about the individual user. It's about your individual users.

How do you know what's working? I can sit here all day long and tell you what to do, but
until I see your data, I won't know what's working for you. You can go into your Insights
when you're a business or creator profile and you can sort your posts for top-performing
content in a variety of reactions. In this case, I'm looking at impressions. You can look at

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clicks. You can look at likes. You can look at all the different metrics to see what content
performs best for you.

You can see based on this example of my screenshot there's a whole lot of me. Guess
what, you guys? I don't want my photo all over Instagram. I don't want my photo in every
single profile post. But when I post my photo with a very simple text overlay, which I
don't usually recommend text overlays on Instagram, but when I do this, I get crazy good
engagement. People love it. I get high-performing posts.

So guess what I do. I create more of it, even though I don't like it and I would never
recommend somebody else to do this. It works for my audience, so I keep giving them
more of that.

Maybe someday all of you who follow me will like sunsets and flowers and I can go back
to pretty pictures, but until then I'm going to keep giving you my face with a text overlay
because that works for my audience.

Similarly, go look and see what other people are doing in your industry. In this example
from #makeupover40, guess what. Everyone in those photos is over 40. If you're using
#makeupover40 but you're 22 with flawless skin and don't have a wrinkle anywhere on
your body, we don't want to see how to do makeup over 40 from you because you don't
know what that means.

Look and see what is working with people in your industry around popular hashtags.
Once you know what other people are doing in those top-performing posts, you can look
and see how you can emulate that.

Again, you can look at this #makeupover40 and see there's a lot of before and after.
"Maybe I should do some before-and-after posts. Maybe that's going to help give my
audience more of what they're looking for." You can look at that for inspiration in terms
of what's working to create better content.

All right, you guys. To wrap it all up, remember it's about your audience more than it's
about you. When it comes to the Instagram algorithm, when it comes to everything out
here on this platform, it's about the individual user experience.

If you are creating content that they like, if you're creating the content that they interact
with, they will see more of your content. They will read your captions. They will follow
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your calls to action. They will end up buying from you. But you have to make it about
them first and foremost in order to have success.

All right. To wrap it up, I want to give you all a to-do list, because we like homework
here in the Society. I want you to go research hashtags to find a combination of popular,
moderately popular, and niche-specific hashtags that appeal to your target audience,
keeping in mind that car insurance example.

Go take a look. You can go onto Instagram or you can use other tools if you wanted to,
but go and find some hashtags that work in those three different categories and put them
into a note on your phone. Put them on a spreadsheet on your computer. Whatever you
want to do, I want you to go find those different hashtags so the next time you do a post
you can do a combination of the three to five, essentially, of popular, moderately popular,
and niche-specific.

I then want you to go and look at your analytics as well as top hashtags in your industry. I
want you to find out more of what works for your audience.

You may find that every time you use the color blue or the color yellow you get more
engagement. Maybe it's when your content doesn't have your product in it. Maybe it's
when, like I said, my photo is in it. Maybe it's every time you have a dog in the photo.
What is it that's creating the top-performing content for your brand, and how can you
recreate that in a way that benefits you as well?

Then I want you to go review your Instagram posting frequency to determine how often
you can realistically post that high-quality, amazing content. Are you currently posting
three times a week? Are you sure that's high-quality content? What if you went to twice a
week or once a week? Would that allow you to create the really high-performing content
that is going to serve you better in the long run?

Ladies and gentlemen, that is your homework. It is now time for questions. I am here to
answer all the questions you have about all things Instagram.

Questions and Answers

Ali: Thank you so much, Jenn. That was some really, really great stuff. I hope
everyone here loved that as much as I did because I like to geek out a little
bit about algorithms. I'll be honest.
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 All right. We're going to transition to the Q&A portion of this event. You
can ask any questions related to Instagram you would like, and we are
going to go on camera for this portion of the training. Hello, everybody. I
will read the questions out loud, and we'll try to get to as many questions
as time allows.

Let me go to the first question. This was asked early on from Marnie.
"There's been discussion in the past about shadow bans on accounts that
use the same hashtags on back-to-back posts. Is that still an issue. How do
we know if we're being affected by this?"

Jenn: No. Shadow banning is a very universal term. It started off meaning one
very specific thing, and it got broadly used to describe any sort of
"demotion" in rank, search results, search performance, anything.
Everything is now categorized as a shadow ban.

There's no punishment for using the same hashtags on back-to-back posts.

You absolutely can. It's perfectly fine, especially when they're brand
related or they're very specific to a niche that you work in. Go ahead.
There's no punishment to that.

There's no way to really know. There are tools out there that will "test"
your shadow banning. Those will most likely get you flagged by
Instagram right now. I don't trust any of those pieces of software because
I've never seen anything actually resourceful come from any of them for
people that have used them.

There's no real way to know if you've been shadow banned in that sense,
because you can go look at a search result on Instagram hashtags and
you're going to see something different than somebody else. Again, there's
an algorithmic sort at play. It's not that your content is being hidden. It's
just that, for whatever reason, it got out algorithmically sorted differently
for you than somebody else.

There's no real way to check, but you can actually go into your Insights if
you are a business profile or a creator profile. You click on View Insights

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 for any individual post, and then you scroll up. Down at the bottom, it will
actually show you if you showed up in hashtag results.

It will say your discovery and it will say from hashtags, and will show you
that you showed up in 20 hashtag search results or 100 or that you were
seen from 20 results, meaning 20 people saw you in a hashtag, not that
you showed up in 20.

Ali: It won't show you which hashtag searches you were in, though.

Jenn: No, it won't. It will just show you hashtags in general.

Ali: Wouldn't that be nice?

Jenn: Could you imagine? I would love those analytics.

Ali: All right. Cool. I know there's such a thing as banned hashtags. Can you
explain a little bit about that? I think some people will use a hashtag, and
if they include one of those, they think that they've been shadow banned
when it's just a different thing.

Jenn: Right. There are a couple different levels of a banned hashtag. What
happens is in a supersaturated environment like on Christmas day, if
you're using #christmas, you're probably not going to see any content in
that hashtag hub because it's just so saturated that Instagram just shuts
down the hashtag. That's considered a banned hashtag, even though it's not
banned. You can use #christmas any other time of year, but it gets
oversaturated.

There was a while where #dogsofinstagram was a banned hashtag because

it was so popular that content wasn't showing up, but now it does work
again. Those aren't necessarily a permanent situation.

But if you use #iphone, that's banned. You can't use that. You can't use
#instagram. That won't show any results. If you use things that are
criminal like something related to pornography or something related to
even suicide-type things, they will ban those hashtags, meaning if you use
them, content doesn't show up.
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 But using those doesn't mean your other hashtags won't work. It just
means that those won't don't work and they're wasted space because you
wasted a hashtag that you're not going to show up in.

Ali: I've heard of some poor people who have their own branded hashtags who
then got trolled with inappropriate content using those hashtags, and then
their one brand hashtag gets banned because of some doofus.

Jenn: Again, there are bad people out there. People will flag you for spam just
because they want to flag you for spam. Your competitors could do this.
People who have nothing better to do with their lives can do this. People
can find your branded hashtag and just upload a bunch of inappropriate
content.

There are a lot of things that can go wrong. You just have to roll with the
punches on those and just either create a new branded hashtag or move
forward as best you can. But using that isn't going to ruin everything else
you do.

Ali: All right. The next question is from Colleen. She was asking, "I sometimes
get a ton of views on my Stories from people that don't follow me. Can
you talk about why that is? Is it because I'm showing in Explore or is it a
hashtag? What do you think?"

Jenn: It's a combination of things. What will happen is if you use location tags
and hashtags, those are the golden sauce for Instagram Stories to show up
in search. In general, the only people who will ever see your Story are
your followers, but if you use a hashtag or use a location tag, there is a
good chance that you will show up in some searches related to those. That
is absolutely one means.

Right now, it's just started happening in a more popular rollout where they
are now showing Stories in the Explore feed. It just started showing up in
my feed in the last maybe two weeks. I've started now seeing Stories pop
up, but they're very infrequent.

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 It is something that Instagram said they were going to roll out putting
Stories in the Explore feed, which is like, "Oh, my gosh. This is a big deal,
people, because it's that much more chance for exposure." But it's so
minimal right now that it's unlikely most views come from Explore. It's
more likely the hashtags and location tags, which are really good for
search and exposure to new people.

Ali: Gotcha. Amanda is asking, "How often should we be posting in Stories

versus in the feed?"

Jenn: Again, the feed, like I said, less is better. Stories, kind of the opposite.
More is better. People love Stories, and Instagram is making a huge push
for Stories. But again, we still want content to be strategic and quality.

It doesn't have to be overly edited. It doesn't have to be overly thought out,

but still posting with a purpose. If you can post a Story sequence every
day, go for it. That's going to be a huge opportunity to connect with your
audience. But if that's still too much content for you to plan and create and
monitor and all that sort of stuff, then do a couple of series maybe two to
three times a week.

A series could be a three to seven series post. Usually, for Stories, that's
ideal. Less than three is not ideal, and over seven you lose attention. Three
to seven is that ideal range.

So a Story sequence on a Monday, a Thursday, and a Saturday, for

example, would be great. Again, it depends on how often you can create
the content that is going to appeal to your audience, serve those results,
and not make you go crazy just trying to create content all the time.

Ali: I'd say don't be one of those people that has so many Stories on every
single day that you can't count the number of them.

Jenn: When you can't see the dots anymore, we've got problems.

Ali: Right.

Jenn: People won't watch. They will jump off.

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Ali: If you're on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure and you've got to show
everything, fine. If it's every other weekend . . .

Jenn: No.

Ali: All right. Chelsea and Josie are both asking this. I'm sure you've seen this
question many times. All right. Age-old question. "Do you add hashtags in
the post or in the first comment?"

Jenn: It is the age-old question. This has been going on forever, and it's the
question that will never die, but it is a great question because this is a
legitimate concern for a lot of people. Multiple studies have shown it's
better to leave it in the caption.

In reality, from an algorithmic perspective, it doesn't matter. The

algorithm doesn't care where you put them. It's not going to rank you
better in search whether you're in one or the other.

The reason why the caption generally works better is because of timing. A
lot of people are using popular hashtags that they don't realize are that
popular because they're just randomly picking their hashtags and not using
a strategic plan to do it.

If you're using popular hashtags, if you take even 15, 20, 30 seconds after
you post to go and get your hashtags, to go and create a comment, to
upload that comment, and post it, that 30 seconds could cost you 10, 20,
30 likes in a popular hashtag. Even at 10 likes, if you add that across 5
hashtags, that's 50 likes that are gone in a matter of 30 seconds of time.

That is why for popular hashtags it's better to put them in the caption than
to wait and put them in the comment. For anything that's the more
moderately popular and below, it really doesn't have an impact because
timing isn't that significant.

Ali: Interesting.

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Jenn: Honestly, I'm lazy. I don't have time to go put things in a comment, so I
just put everything in the caption.

Aesthetically, what people did by posting things in the comment doesn't

actually work anymore. It used to be that you would see the whole caption
when you scrolled through Instagram. You would see all the hashtags.
People would put them in the comment as a way to hide them and not look
spammy. But now Instagram truncates the captions to the ". . . More" so
people aren't seeing your caption and the hashtags in there unless they
click the ". . . More." So it's already hidden.

The reality is if you put them in a comment, a lot of times that comment
actually shows up in the feed. So where you think you're hiding them,
you're not actually hiding them. So put them in the caption.

Ali: I would also say give consideration to whether you are cross-posting your
Instagram posts to your . . .

Jenn: Which you should never do.

Ali: . . . to your Facebook page or whatever, which I am guilty of, but it's my
public profile page. I don't really care if there are a lot of likes over there.

Jenn: It's one of those things. When it comes to the Instagram-to-Facebook

autopost, a lot of people do it. Yes, if you're doing that, you obviously
don't want your hashtags in the caption because it would automatically
post to Facebook. Now all of your hashtags are in there, and it looks
obvious you posted from Instagram. It looks amateurish.

I never recommend doing autopost. If it's your personal profile, then do

whatever you want. If you want to share it on both, go for it. A lot of
people do. But as a brand, you want to give people something different on
the two platforms. You want to give them a reason to come to Instagram.

If you're automatically putting everything on Facebook, here's what

happens. In the average user mindset, not in this crazy marketer's mindset
but in the average user mindset, if they go and look at your Facebook and
they look at your Instagram and they see the exact same content on both,
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 especially people over the age of 35, they're probably going to follow you
on Facebook because that's just easier for them. We all know Facebook
reach sucks.

What happens is they go, "Well, it's the same thing on both platforms. I'm
not going to follow them on Instagram. I'll just follow them on Facebook
because that's easier for me." But now they're not going to see your posts,
so you're actually hurting yourself in the long run in terms of engagement
and potential exposure to those audiences by putting the same thing on
both.

They're different. They'll follow you on both. That way, they actually see
much more of your Instagram content than they'll ever see of your
Facebook content.

Ali: Great. Renee is asking, "Hi there. I've not yet grasped Stories. What if I
never get it and just continue creating Instagram posts?"

Jenn: High-five. Do it. Do whatever makes you happy. Listen, I don't love
Stories. I'm the first person to tell the whole world I don't like Stories. I
don't like to take in content that way. I don't like to create content that
way. I do it because I see the business value, and I know it's a good thing
in a lot of ways.

But if it doesn't work for you and you're going to force yourself into
content creation that doesn't align with you and your brand, that's going to
stand out. People are going to recognize that you're making yourself
awkward in creating this content, and they're not going to love it in return.

On any platform, any social media, any type of content strategy, if you
hate videos, you don't have to do videos. But if your audience loves
Stories and they love it, you've got to adapt to it because that's where they
are and that's the content they want.

But if you're doing well on Instagram and you like it and you're
comfortable there and your audience is interacting there, then keep doing
what works and don't stress yourself out trying to do something that you're
not comfortable doing right now.
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Ali: All right. This is from Chelsea. "Do you utilize IGTV at all in your
strategy?"

Jenn: No. There are only so many hours in the day. I want to, and I have a whole
strategy and all the things I want to do and all the things I want to create,
but, no, I don't have enough hours in the day.

Here's my thing with IGTV. I think it's incredibly powerful. I think it has a
ton of potential. It's still really young. That's not a reason not to use it, but
it is still really young. But the way the platform on IGTV is set up is it's
single channel, meaning if they watch one video, they go to your next
video and your next video. You don't have playlists like you have on
YouTube.

If you're going to go on IGTV and create a content strategy, we want

everything to be consistent, meaning I don't want to see your Christmas
vacation followed by some of your kids. Then we have a tutorial, and now
we have a quick tip, and now we have a behind-the-scenes. Now we have
a live event. It's disjointed and all over the place.

If I find you because of your Christmas vacation video and the next one is
a tutorial on how to use Facebook ads, you've just lost me. If I found you
for a tutorial on Facebook ads and now I'm seeing videos of your kids
going back to school, I'm like, "What?"

You want to keep the content on IGTV very structured and a very similar
content strategy. As a result, I haven't gotten to a place where I'm ready to
create that content for my own personal brand where I can be consistent
with that in that way.

So, no, I'm not currently using it, but I definitely think you should. I think
you should be doing one video a month minimum. Do as I say, not as I do.
Do one a month. Create a piece of content. It can be a minute, five
minutes.

It doesn't have to be anything crazy-long, but at least you start to build up

some content, and then you can get some of the platform foundation so
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 that when Instagram does more for IGTV and they continue to push this,
because they will continue to push this, you've already got a foundation.
You've already got the lower layer of bricks in place when everyone else
is trying to play catch-up.

Ali: That's a great tip. The next question is from Anne, and she's asking if
there's any downside to user-generated content.

Jenn: No. I mean, there can be depending on how people are creating content
about your brand and if they're saying negative things, but a negative is
always a chance for a positive. So I don't really think it's ever a bad
situation.

UGC is great because it gives people another perspective of your brand

besides you and how you want your content to be used. Sometimes your
audience may choose to use your content in a different way or showcase it
in a different way. There's a huge trust factor that comes from UGC.

Of course, if they're using your hashtag and that content is out there for
other people to see, it's out there. There's nothing you can do about it.
Reposting it to your own platform is great as long as you're choosing the
content that aligns with your brand tone and style.

For example, let's say your brand uses stereotypical light, airy, fresh,
pastel colors and I come out and I post about your brand and it's bright
reds and yellows and blues and deep saturations and color tones. You
wouldn't want to take that piece of content and put that on your own feed,
because it's going to completely clash with how your brand style is. It
doesn't mean my content is bad. It's just not necessarily re-shareable
content for your brand.

So whenever you are using UGC, you do want to make sure you're still
picking to share things that align with your style, your tone, your colors,
and all that sort of stuff. If you can do some edits to their image to put it
more in line with your branding so it stays cohesive in your feed, you can
always do that too.

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Ali: Great tip. All right. The next question is from Logan. I love this question.
"How is the algorithm working for hashtags within Stories to have Stories
appear in the hashtag search page?"

Jenn: Great question, and no definitive answer. For example, let's say you go
look at #SMExaminer, which is not a huge hashtag hub. It's going to have
a good number of things in there, but it's not going to have a ton, or even
something like #SMMW19 from Social Media Marketing World '19. I
think there's a couple thousand in there. There are a lot of posts, and that's
a feed post. You can scroll, and you can see all of those posts.

But if someone posts a Story with that hashtag, it's only available for 24
hours, but they're not going to show 300 Story posts. You're not going to
have the endless string of dots because no one's going to watch that.

The algorithm is very selectively going to choose a handful — and when I

say handful, it's probably less than 10, and sometimes it gets a little bit
higher, but not a lot — of posts that are relevant to the user looking for
that hashtag.

Again, there's a huge user component. There's a popularity component,

meaning how is that Story performing with your existing audience? Is it a
highly-engaged post? Are people tapping forward through it? Are they
tapping back to watch it more? Are they interacting with the poll or the
stickers or those sorts of things? There are a lot of criteria that go into
determining which ones will show up in that search.

Some of it is, again, timing and saturation. If you're literally the only
person who's used that hashtag in the last 24 hours, you're pretty much
guaranteed to show up. But if you're competing against thousands of other
people, there's going to be a lot of algorithmic sort that determines
whether or not your post shows up for any given individual user.

Instagram doesn't come out and tell us these things, you guys. I wish I had
a secret Batphone or a weekly detailed log from Instagram that said, "Here
are all the things we're doing." No. They don't tell us any of this. We all
learn this from trial and error and seeing what happens and seeing how
things interact, and then literally next week they change it. So we're
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 always adapting when it comes to things like the algorithm in terms of
what really is working.

We talked today about a lot of high-level algorithmic components. There

are thousands of components that go into all of these different algorithmic
sortings, none of which the average user would ever know, so it's hard to
know exactly how those things are determined. Again, it's usually
individually-based and then the preference is based on artificial
intelligence and that sort of thing.

Ali: All right. The next question is from Christine. This is timely because I
know that this is a recent problem that's popped up for several people. She
uses Sprout Social for scheduling and got a message that she was blocked
for a couple of days. Have you seen this issue, and what's your advice? I
know you had a great tip for this in the Facebook group, so spill it.

Jenn: Yes, I've seen it. I had a friend text message me literally 20 minutes from
when we went on camera today. She was like, "So I got this message.
What do I do with it?" I'm like, "Oh, my." It won't go away.

Recently, as in recent months, Instagram has taken a crackdown on third-

party tools. By third-party tools, these are tools that do automation things.
Typically, they're going after tools that do automatic likes, follows,
unfollows, comments, those sorts of things. They've been cleaning that up
to the last, let's say, six months to a year.

They decided to ramp up those efforts, and they went a little too zealous
with this. Basically, they've gone after even approved third-party tools.
Iconosquare was getting flagged for it. Sprout Social was getting flagged
for it. A lot of third-party tools were getting flagged.

The idea was that at some point you had given your password to these
tools. Now, you've never given your password to Sprout Social. You've
never given your password to Iconosquare. That's not how those tools
work. But because they're falling into some sort of metric that is
considered an automation, they're getting flagged.

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 The best thing you can do to start is you have to go to instagram.com from
the desktop or from an actual internet browser, so not the app. Go to
instagram.com. Go to your profile. Go to the Settings, which is the gear
icon, and then click on Authorized Apps. It's something like Authorized
Apps.

Ali: Authorized Applications.

Jenn: You click on that, and it's going to show you every app that you've ever
given access to on Instagram. There's an active, and there's an expired.
Make sure you check the expired as well.

You're going to go through and revoke access to anything that doesn't

need it. I think I have six or seven that still have access for various reasons
on mine. Anything that's an approved tool, like Agorapulse, Sprout Social,
Iconosquare, Tailwind, all of those are approved, but even some of those
are still causing flags.

Assuming all of that is clear and you're not doing anything bad, you can
click on that Tell Us button. When you get the popup, you get the Tell Us
or the Okay. You can click on the Tell Us. You can try to appeal it, and
they will look into it.

The flag is usually going to hold your account for anywhere from 24 to 72
hours, and then it eventually goes away. The flag means you can't like
posts. You can't comment on posts. You can't send DMs. It locks your
account down.

It is a pain in the you know what, and I am sorry. If I had some magic
wand that I could wave and solve this for you guys, I would, but this is an
ongoing problem, and it's hit a lot of people. You are not alone.

If it's happening to your clients and you're trying to manage your clients,
explain this to them. Tell them that this is what's happening. We can bear
with it for a short period of time and then hopefully all will go back to
normal soon.

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Ali: I'm hoping a lot of these people are going to be like me, where they go in
there to that link that you just gave us. I saw where there were a ton of
apps in there that I couldn't even remember what half of them even were.

Jenn: Oh, yeah. You gave them access five years ago.

Ali: Right. Exactly. I'm like, "Okay. Revoke, revoke, revoke. I don't remember
what you are, and I don't trust you."

Jenn: On that note, it's good to do that every six months just as a safety check,
because sometimes you have people managing your account or maybe you
go in through a widget on your website and you gave access to something
or you're signing up for something and you say, "Yeah, go in through
Instagram. It's fine." This is more common on Facebook, usually, but it
does happen on Instagram. It's a good safety habit to get into doing that
once every six months. Go in and revoke access to things that don't need
them.

Ali: I'm hoping for a lot of these people it will be something shady that they
forgot they authorized four years ago, and that's all it is.

Jenn: It wasn't shady back then, and it's shady now.

Ali: Yeah, you never know.

Jenn: We know you're not doing this on purpose. We know the you didn't go out
and do bad things. You're good people, but bad things happen to good
people, and this is one of those bad things that we're just trying our best to
overcome.

Ali: All right. Let's move on to Josie's question. I'm not sure if you know the
answer to this. "Do we know if Instagram will take away likes in the USA
anytime soon, the like counts?

Jenn: Yes. We don't know when. Assume it's going to happen. They tested it in
Canada first. They rolled out that test for a number of months, and then
they recently rolled it out to six more countries. At this point, we can
assume that likes are going to go away.
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 Why? There are a lot of issues. There are the very skeptical people who
are like, "Oh, Instagram is doing this as a way to make more money and
manipulate the system." There are a lot of skeptics out there.

There are people who are saying it's for health and mental awareness
issues. There's all the bullying that comes in. There are the issues that a lot
of younger people have when they see their posts get a certain number of
likes.

Ali: Self-esteem.

Jenn: There are a lot of other things that tie in from a psychological and mental
perspective.

From a branding perspective, does it matter? Hell yes, it matters, because

we're all comparing ourselves to our competitors. Your customers are
coming to you as an agency being like, "Well, I want 100 likes. I want
this." It's ridiculous that we've put so much focus on a vanity metric that
means nothing. A thousand likes on a photo doesn't mean a single sale.

I think it's a good thing. I hope they actually do move in this direction. I
was a little on the fence in the beginning. The more I've seen this tested
and the more that I've actually thought this through, I think it's good for
businesses.

You as a business will still see your like count. It's like when you go into
your Stories and you can actually then see all the interactions that were
taken on a Story. No one else can see that, but you can. Your posts, you'll
see that you got 281 likes. No one else will see it. They will see that them,
and it will say, "@so-and-so and others liked it," or whatever.

Instagram is still scroll, double tap, scroll, double tap. People are
conditioned to do that. They're not doing that because the post has 300
likes on it. They're doing it because they like it.

From all the testing that I've seen, engagement hasn't gone down at all.
People are still seeing the same engagement rates, so it's not impacting
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 them negatively. You still see your engagement, and it's going to force
businesses to look at other things like conversions, like writing better
captions, having better content, doing things that actually serve their
audience rather than chasing a like count.

Ali: Great. Julie is asking, "If our engagement has typically been low, how
long do you think it would take to start seeing improvements if we follow
these strategies and start creating higher-quality content like you
suggested?"

Jenn: Four to six weeks. It usually takes about three to four weeks for the
algorithm to pick up a shift. If you're doing all these things and starting
next week, you're not going to see any changes. In three to four weeks you
might start to see some shift, and within six weeks you should see what
your new normal is.

This is because of the algorithm. They're not just going to suddenly be

like, "Oh, you listened to this webinar and you learned all this stuff. Let's
just put your stuff up really high." I wish it was that easy, but that's not
how it works.

Ali: I'm really glad Julie asked this question because it sets a good expectation
for people.

Jenn: You've got to give yourself time. I see that across Instagram for all things.
If you're going to start testing using video, you don't post one video go,
"Oh, it worked," or, "It didn't work." You have to do video consistently for
three to four weeks before you will know if it works for you.

If you want to start using Instagram Stories more strategically, three to

four weeks. It takes that much time for the algorithm to pick up that you've
made changes, for it to start trying to give your content to people in a
different ranking, for people to see the content and respond to it, and to
have a positive impact down the road. So three to four weeks is the
minimum. Four to six is realistic to see any sort of changes.

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Ali: All right. Elena is asking, "My main competitor uses a specific hashtag. Is
it possible to overtake it with my content? It's an incredibly niche market,
and I'm fairly certain we are more savvy." Elena's getting sneaky.

Jenn: You could. There's nothing that says you can't overtake it. If you're
creating more content and if you're creating better content and if you're
ranking higher in that hub, then, yes, essentially, that's you overtaking it.
Anyone can overtake a hub if they really wanted to.

The bigger question would be do you want to? Is it such a specific hashtag
that it's literally that is what you do and that's exactly what your audience
is looking for? Is it something where you could do a slight variation of that
and use that one? Don't just take theirs and hijack it, but look and see if
there are other things you can create. If their hashtag is very specific to
their brand, no, we don't want to hashjack in that way by taking it away
from them.

But if it's a generic term, I'm just trying to think of something totally
random, but because the landscapers are outside, let's say you make weed
eaters, a landscape tool. You use a very specific hashtag for that type of
very specific landscaping tool. That's very specific. That's a reasonable
hashtag. But, really, there are other things you could do, other hashtags
you could use without totally just going after their hashtag as a way of
overcoming theirs.

Ali: If it's their branded hashtag, it's a little bit of a faux pas.

Jenn: That's shady.

Ali: It's frowned upon. I mean, you could, but it's . . .

Jenn: It doesn't look good for your brand if you try to overtake somebody else's
in that way, because they're going to be like, "Well, I came here looking
for ABC company, and now I've found XYZ company using ABC's
hashtag."

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Ali: It's like some of the ads you see on Google. All right. The next question is
from Christine. "What tools do you use for researching hashtags?" What's
your favorite?

Jenn: I go native on the platform. I go into Instagram, I go to the magnifying

glass, and start typing in a hashtag. It will show you all the hashtags that
have that either keyword or characters in it.

Let's say you just start typing in #photographer. It's going to show you all
related hashtags related to that. If you choose any one of those, they will
actually show you other related ones that maybe don't have
"photographer" in it but that are other related ones to that hashtag that are
similar.

That's a great way because that's what's working on Instagram right now.
That's what's working. Those are the counts. Those are the similar ones.
That's the best.

There are two other tools that I do recommend. One is called Tagboard,
but that's a bigger pull from Twitter. It does pull from Instagram, but the
Instagram stats aren't really as accurate. They definitely pull from Twitter.
It's a good way to look and see what's trending, what's popular in certain
industries, other alternatives for things you may not have thought of.
That's a good one.

Then Hashtagify is another one that is a really good tool. Again, it goes in
and looks at everything, finds other recommendations for you, post
performance, all that sort of stuff. Those would be the two if you didn't
want to do native, but Instagram is going to tell you what's working on
Instagram. That's just the easiest.

Ali: If you have a handful of hashtags that you regularly use, how often do you
go back and re-research them to see if they're still relevant?

Jenn: Not frequently. Again, once every six months or a year you should be
checking all of your metrics, so checking your hashtags and making sure
those hubs aren't full of inappropriate content and that they're still

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 relevant, who else is in them. At least once every year, if not twice a year,
at least just going in and double-checking things.

Ali: Good deal. All right. Joanne is asking, and I would actually like to know
the answer, "Are there any positives or negatives for archiving posts that
don't fit with your feed, meaning archived to make your feed look
prettier?"

Jenn: There's no real negative. If you're going to do it, archive. Don't delete.

For those of you who are not familiar with this, if you go into your
Instagram feed, you can choose any one of your posts, and you can choose
to delete it or you can choose to archive it. Archiving it takes it off of your
public-facing feed, meaning nobody else can see it anymore, but the
archive retains all of the stats and data. It keeps your caption. It keeps all
your analytics on it.

You could, if you wanted to, unarchive it and it populates it back exactly
to where it used to live in the feed. So it gives you the chance to bring it
back.

But if you're going to choose one, pick archive over delete for all those
reasons. Deleting it, especially as a business, you lose all those metrics. It
affects a lot of things. I'd rather just archive.

Aesthetically, there's no negative impact. It's not going to hurt you. Your
audience probably isn't going to notice.

There are some things that you might genuinely want to hide either
because somebody else posted it when they worked for the company and
they said things that you maybe didn't want them to say, but the reality is
all of those posts are part of your brand story.

What you did a year ago and what you did three years ago and what you
did six years ago on Instagram is all an evolution of your brand. There's
nothing wrong with that, and there's nothing wrong with people seeing
that you haven't always been perfect or that you haven't always had the
perfectly formatted, perfectly curated feed.
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 My content style has evolved, and my aesthetic style has evolved, and my
frequency has evolved. I don't want to go delete any of that old content
and take away from that story. But if you want to, there's no negative
impact as a direct implication by archiving anything.

Ali: All right. I think we may only have time for about one more question. This
one is from Josie. "How can we leverage Instagram Stories to connect
with future followers and clients?" That's kind of a big question.

Jenn: That's a big question. The best thing is a lot of Stories can be very
interactive, and it's a good way to get them into your direct messages.
Asking them to do a poll, a quiz, any of those types of stickers, if you get
people to do a slider sticker, if you get people to do any of those types of
interaction ones . . .

Ali: The ask-a-question ones I love.

Jenn: . . . that allow them to show up in your DM. What's that? I lost Ali. There
she is.

Ali: Oh, I said the ask-a-question ones are my favorite.

Jenn: The great thing is if you post those questions, the polls, the quizzes, any of
those sorts of things, when people reply, their reply comes into your
analytics on it, and then you can reply to them via direct message.

For example, a while back, I did one. I had an empty wine glass. I turned
the slider sideways and said, "How much wine do you want?" You could
drag the slider up and down the wine glass.

Ali: I love that.

Jenn: It was goofy. It was silly. Did it solve a business solution? Heck no. But I
had 42 responses. Then I could DM those people and be like, "Girl, you
get me too. How is your week going? How are the kids?" You start

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 chatting, and now you're having a conversation. You're building a
relationship.

If you're doing this in a way that is a bit more educationally-based or

product- or service-based, again, they could be answering questions or
offering solutions that you want or that you can offer them. But get them
in that direct message and be able to answer that question for them. Be
able to give them a solution to something they're looking for. That's going
to really build that relationship towards the future customers in a way
that's completely personalized and off of the public space.

Ali: All right. I'm afraid I don't think we have enough time to get to every
single question that we had in here. There were a few more good ones. If
we were not able to get to your question, please go over to the Society
Facebook group. Ask your question over there, and our wonderful team of
admins and moderators and Jenn if she has time will help us get those
answered. We apologize that we could not get to all of them today. It's just
that there were so many good ones.

Jenn, thank you so much for your insight on today's training session. You
provided such a great overview of Instagram Algorithms and How to
Leverage Them. Please remind people where they can follow you.

Jenn: I'm everywhere as Jenn Herman and/or Jenn's Trends. I'm on Instagram
@jenns_trends.

I have a Facebook group. If you just search Jenn's Trends in Social Media
over on Facebook, you'll find the Facebook group. It is a closed group, but
I will let you in. It's a very active group. I share all breaking news related
to Instagram actually in the Facebook group first because that way I can
get all your feedback. Then I can go over to Instagram and tell people all
about it. So if you want to know what's happening on Instagram, join me
in the Facebook group.

Of course, my website is jennstrends.com where you can find out pretty

much anything and everything you need to know, including how to either
work with me or reach out to me, all my blog posts. All that sort of stuff is
all over there on the website.
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Conclusion

Fantastic. That is a great group. Like I said, if your questions were not answered, please
just head over to the Facebook group and ask your question there.

Be sure to check out the schedule page in the Society for details on our next training
sessions.

Jenn, again, thank you and hugs to you. This has just been fantastic. Thank you for all
your time and your hard work in putting this together for us. We're just very appreciative.

We'll see everybody around in the Society. Thank you.

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