Instagram's Newsfeed Updates Explained!

Okay okay okay, you’ve heard the rumours! Instagram is rolling out THREE newsfeeds, and we’re here to fill you in on what they mean, and what you need to do to make sure your business is ready for these changes!

Users will have the choice of THREE newsfeeds, that includes Home, Favourites and Following.

Home: The ‘Home’ feed is what you’ve been using up until now. It’s the algorithm that we’ve grown to tolerate, where AI (artificial intelligence) decides what you see and the order you see it. We’re expecting this to be the default setting for Instagram’s Newsfeed, however this feed will start to show us more and more content from businesses that we don’t follow - think TikTok, but a little glitchy - so get ready to start watching content from accounts that you might not be following.

How to get ready for this: Continue creating content that is niched and particular for your audience. Developing real relationships with your audience, creating content that your audience connects with every time, and using relevant and searchable key terms are going to be more important than ever!

Favourites: The ‘Favourites’ setting will only show posts from the accounts that you have marked favourite, kind of like what we’ve currently got with our ‘close friends’ list on Instagram Stories, but in a whole Newsfeed. This will let you easily avoid posts from accounts that you may not really care about.

How to get ready for this: Developing meaningful relationships, creating content that connects with your audience on a deeper level, and having a real, human-based strategy is going to be vital so that you can be a part of your followers Favourites list.

Following: The ‘Following’ newsfeed will sort all of your posts exclusively from the acounts that you follow in chronological order (think pre-2016 Instagram newsfeed). Unlike the Home feed, the Following feed will only include posts from accounts you follow. No algorithms, no suggestions from accounts you don’t follow, just posts from the people that you follow, in the order that they’re posted.

How to get ready for this: We got a little slack on knowing when our audience was online, but we can easily check by jumping into our Instagram Insights to check when our audience is most active. By taking note of this (and a little testing out different times as well!), make sure you’re posting just before your audience’s online activity spikes, so your content is there and ready for consuming when they are!

Adam Mosseri (Instagram’s head dude) has explained that the new features are already in the testing phase and the company hopes to release them to all users in the first half of 2022.

"It's important to me that people feel good about the time that they spend in the app, and I think giving people ways to shape Instagram into what's best for them is one of the best ways to pursue that goal," Mosseri said.

The Instagram chief explained that the main 'Home' feed will get "more and more recommendations over time", which has led some to speculate that users will get even more content from accounts they don't follow.

The new feature will be rolling out to all Instagram users gradually, so don’t expect to get it at once. However, when the next update arrives, you should finally be able to set your feed the way you want.