Will Instagram remove shares to story feature? Has the algorithm just changed again? Are saves more important than likes?
There's a lot of noise on Instagram right now.
And because I care about both your productivity and your mental health, I want to share some information with you (and sources) so you don't waste time or headspace with any sensationalist or plain misinformed posts and graphics.
So today I will be addressing all these questions you may have been wondering about:
Will Instagram remove shares to story feature? Has the algorithm just changed again? Are saves more important than likes?
What I want you guys to know:
1) Instagram is testing removing the post share feature to stories in some accounts, but this will not affect your business
That's true that they are testing, and they show a notification to people whose accounts they are using to test (see screenshot below).
People are making crazy conspiracy theory-like posts on IG saying Instagram is trying to "silence" us, control our freedom of speech, that removing this feature would destroy our small businesses, lots of craziness.
Don't waste your time on these posts.
But while that's a great feature that helps with engagement and reach, IF they even decide to remove it, it's not the end of the world and it will not affect our incomes.
It would be an inconvenience. We would just have to go back to old school talking to the camera or typing up about other accounts and tagging them in the story.
On the bright side, since according to the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, misinformation spreads on social media 6x faster than facts, if they do remove this feature, we'd be combating some of that.
2) Instagram's algorithm has NOT "just changed again" and saves are not more important than other metrics
Or at least we have zero evidence to back it up, so anyone saying this now can only be speculating and spreading rumors.
Instagram has not officially released any information on the algorithm changing since June 1, 2018. I added all the info about this and links with sources in this blog post here.
While it's very likely that Instagram makes changes and doesn't report them -- like you and I don't publicly disclose every single thing that goes behind the scenes in our businesses, if that has happened no one knows, so any information insinuating otherwise is just speculation.
These posts never product any sources (again, mine are all linked here) and when asked for a source, a girl who posted about this today said "we have a girl who has 10 years experience in social media and she has all the secrets". WHA?
Same girl also blocked me once I commented this wasn’t true and added sources.
Not a shocker being that her average engagement is 200 likes per post, but at the time that post alone had 28k likes.
Is Saves A More Important Instagram Metric Than Likes, Comments and Saves for the Instagram Algorithm?
It was never reported that Saves had higher weight to the algorithm than any other metric. That rumor started in 2019 after this blog post by Later hyping up saves described it as a 'superlike', in the sense that for people to save a post, they have to really like it.
They were not saying saves count more to the algorithm, their words were just distorted.
After that we had a wave of that rumor in 2019, then another in the spring (I remember seeing it but not exactly when) and then another one in the fall. Now it's making the rounds again.
So my advice to you, is that you forget a little about the algorithm and all these rumors and use your own Instagram insights to see what your audience engages with the most and take that into consideration when creating your content.
Besides that, try to replace some posts with Reels and Lives that you save on IGTV. Those things will help with engagement if you do them consistently.
But more importantly, remember that what matters is our business and not its Instagram account. So your goal should be connecting with your audience and making sales, not pleasing the algorithm.
Remember: most of the time what grows our businesses is what we do when we're not logged on (even for me, whose business as built around Instagram).
Manu Muraro is the founder of Your Social Team, an Instagram training membership and Done For You content shop to help social media managers and Instagram savvy women entrepreneurs to beat the algorithm and grow their organic engagement (yes, even in 2021). This year she also launched Your Template Club, a Canva Template subscription to provide social media managers and Instagram savvy business owners with content template designed for engagement in their inbox.
Born and raised in Brazil, Manu moved to the U.S. in 2000 right out of college to work for Cartoon Network, where she made an award winning career in creative and strategy. In 2017, Manu started Your Social Team with the mission of helping women entrepreneur and social media managers grow engagement and sales through Instagram without the overwhelm.