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Instagram chief Adam Mosseri announced that Instagram is adding a few changes in order to put more focus on creators and the credit they get. One of the mentioned changes is updating its ranking algorithm with the goal to put more focus on original work. Judging by the number of copy-paste posts we’ve seen so far, this update should have been made a long time ago.
📣 New Features 📣 We’ve added new ways to tag and improved ranking: – Product Tags – Enhanced Tags – Ranking for originality Creators are so important to the future of Instagram, and we want to make sure that they are successful and get all the credit they deserve. pic.twitter.com/PP7Qa10oJr — Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) April 20, 2022
Making Sure The Credit Goes To Those Who Deserve It
Instagram announced the following changes:
Product Tags – it will now be available to everyone. So, no matter who you are, you will be able to tag products and drive traffic and attention to a business, creator or a company that they like.
Enhanced People Tags – now, you can add a category for yourself (into profile, edit profile) which will show up when you are tagged in a photo or a video. This makes sure you have your identity be what you want it to be, and credited according to your wishes.
Ranking – people that actually created something from scratch should be more credited for that, so the algorithm will focus more on that kind of content.
“We are going to do more to try and value original content more, particularly compared to reposted content. So, more to come there as well.” – said Mosseri in the announcement.
But, what does it exactly mean? As mentioned in SocialMediaToday, the changes in ranking are not that well explained and it’s not clear if any penalization will happen.
What Will Affect The Ranking?
The Twitter community did have some questions regarding the originality of content and asked about editing outside of the app. If you remember, Instagram started down-ranking content that was re-shared from other apps. So, if you will be re-posting your TikTok with a watermark on it, your content will still be penalized. However, if you only edited it off the Instagram app, that shouldn’t be a problem and won’t affect your rank.
Still, Mosseri admits that Instagram can’t know for sure if a content piece is an original or not. They only build classifiers that will show how likely something is to be an original, but they can never know for sure. It’s still a work in progress.
The idea is if you made it, it’s original. It’s okay if you edited it outside of Instagram and then bring it in via the gallery. Identifying “originality” is hard though, so we will iterate over time. — Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) April 20, 2022
Posting History Is Also A Factor
Content aggregators are the focus of this update, and Instagram will be able to determine this with the account’s posting history. Instagram is more likely to detect that an account is an aggregator if it re-posts a lot of content from other accounts.” So if you’re re-posting a lot of content from other accounts, you’ll likely see a drop in reach.
It would be hard. If the account is an aggregator, we’ll more likely be able to detect that it’s not original. If it’s someone pretending to be that original creator, which is less likely but could happen, it’ll be hard for us to know. — Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) April 20, 2022
The main goal of the whole update is, as we mentioned, to give more credit to original creators, but the system is not yet perfect. However, Mosseri said that Instagram will continue to improve its detection features over time to better distinguish where the content comes from and who posts original content, to promote the real creators and reduce the influence of big farm accounts.
It looks like it’s time to say goodbye to reposting trending memes in order to boost engagement.
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