A Look Into Instagram Content Planning and the Algorithm

Moving along in section four of the Instagram Bootcamp, let's introduce a very useful tool in the planning and creation of your content, and that is the planning feature on the Meta Business Suite, right? We have already seen how the Meta Business Suite provides insight into your audience for your content, your followers, as well as competitive benchmarking information. Well, here's another useful tool that they have, where you can create and schedule your content in advance. Now, a pro tip, if you sort of wait to the last minute, as I do for so many things in my life, to create and post your content, more likely than not, you're going to fall behind whatever cadence you want to keep, right? Because they're going to be short-term priorities, and other issues that are going to cause you to shift your attention to dealing with that, and then you fall behind further and further.

So, if you use this planning feature, you can, you know, allocate the first few days or the first week of a month, or the last few days of the previous month, to spending time creating content and placing it on the schedule. You can lay out your themes across the week, across the month, so you're better able to track that and develop a cadence for those themes, right? So, by allocating that time and setting it, you don't have to worry about it for the rest of that time period, and you can always go back and revise or adjust it if necessary. The planner also points out, you know, special days and holidays, obviously the main holidays, but also the other types of days, National Secretaries Day, another type of month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, etc.

So, you can plan your content accordingly in some cases, acknowledge some of these dates, right? So, a very useful feature is found right off the main menu of the MetaBusiness Suite. Now, let's turn our attention to one of the more important aspects of generating visibility, increasing the reach of your content, and that is understanding and leveraging the Instagram algorithm. The Instagram algorithm is what determines what content is going to show up on your Explorer page, what Reels are going to be presented to you in your Reels section, what they are going to provide, and responses to searches you may be doing, either by hashtag or by keyword, right? So, the Instagram algorithm was born in 2016.

This meant, from that point forward, the posts with the higher engagement and greatest relevancy would show first. Prior to that, posts were presented in reverse chronological order. The most recent posts from people you follow or accounts you follow would show up first, I mean, at the top of your feed, and then as you scroll down through your feed, you see older and older posts.

That type of approach worked when there was less content on Facebook or Instagram, people were following fewer accounts, and accounts were creating less content. But as content increased, as these platforms matured, it became harder and harder for people to effectively find the content they wanted when the brands or people they interact with the most, their posts might be buried beneath other posts from brands and accounts that they don't interact with as much, simply because those were posted more recently. So, the algorithm was hoping to fix that.

But one of the consequences of the algorithm is that, as a brand or even as an individual, not everyone who follows you is going to see your posts. There are estimates that it might be as low as 5-10% or maybe 15-20% of your followers will see your posts consistently, right? So, a lot of brands were missed by that because now they either have to pay for people to see your posts, and we'll discuss promoting your posts in one of the next lectures, or they were creating content, and only a small percentage of the people they wanted to see the content would see it, right? But by understanding the algorithm, you will increase the number of people both among your followers and those who are not following you, and that's why it's such an important concept. Because the people who do see your content are your biggest supporters, right? And the first hour your post is shown to your biggest supporters, if they like it, if they engage in it, they like it, share it, etc., then it will be sent out to a wider range of supporters, right? And if they like it, it will be sent to more supporters.

And if enough of your supporters are liking it and engaging with it, it could possibly be added to the Explore page, so now it will be seen by users who are not following your page, right? It might potentially be showing, if it's a real show up in the real, you know, on the Discovery page, right? And that's how you create more visibility and growth for your content, right? So it's important that you get engagement from those top followers when they do see it, because only if they engage will more people see it, more of your followers, and more people who are not your followers, right? So ask questions, create content that's compelling and engaging to them. If it's something that's really significant, maybe the day before, let them know that this is coming, right? Like a webinar or something that, or a new product video or product launch video, or something along those lines. Maybe use a story that they will see and then know that this is coming, right? But most importantly, ask questions, challenge them, you know, motivate them, create a reaction that's going to result in engagement.

That's the best way of leveraging the algorithm, right? We discussed the ways that people can engage with content on Instagram, and each of these, depending upon the intensity or the magnitude, is going to receive a score from the Google algorithm, you know, with likes, which is important if you can get likes, but likes are not as valuable as comments, right? Because comments show more commitment, and the more involved the comment is, the more there's back and forth around a comment, the more points the algorithm will assign to that. Sharing it means endorsing it, so that will create even a higher level of value to the algorithm, and finally saving it, meaning that customer thought it was so important that that audience member thought it was so important that they wanted to save it, so when they come back to the platform, they can engage with it again, right? 

So the more you get of all of these, but certainly the more of the higher impact ones, like saves and shares, is going to create, increase the virality of your content, and then eventually go from a few of your supporters to more of your supporters, to all your supporters, to people who aren't your supporters, right? If you can generate that level of engagement. So what are some considerations to be in the algorithm? Share great content, right? The old adage remains true: quality content is king, and great content doesn't have to be slick professional content; it just means content that resonates with your audience, that improves their lives, educates them, entertains them, makes them happy, makes them feel empowered, right? Answers questions that they have, that's what great content is.

Use paid ads or boost posts you believe should have, to boost posts you should believe should have performed better, right? And we'll talk about the use of paid ads soon. Share content to other social media platforms, right? So cross-pollinate to get even more exposure. Post consistently, you have a cadence, right? The algorithm respects cadences, right? And you might have some, even though you might want to cross-pollinate a lot of your content, you might have some exclusive content that can only be seen on that platform to create a little bit more engagement on this platform for that.

And pay attention to the analytics, you know, seeing which content is driving the engagement in terms you can see for all your content, the likes, the views for the video, the shares, the comments, etc. All right, so let's do an exercise to pull all of this together regarding your content strategy, and in the worksheet provided, I want you to choose a constant. The content theme could be a combination of many themes, and it should all ladder up to a big idea, right? So you may have a big idea to describe the content, but also identify the visual voice from the colors, the style, etc.

Establish a posting cadence, right? And clarify what type of content and what I mean by all that is, as you can see, you have a big idea, what if company A can make the audience do or feel something by a creative execution idea, right? And then you can list the various themes, user-generated content, educational content, motivating content, whatever it is, right? The visual voice, like the visual and brand voice, are you going to be, you know, the colors are going to be bright, they're going to be subtle, they're going to be, you know, professional or whatever, however you want to describe the visual aspects of the brand and the brand voice, informative, personable, friendly, what we're discussing before. The cadence and type, right? 

So, for this type of content, for the user-generated content, it's going to be every Monday, or it's going to be every other Thursday, or whatever the day is, and it's going to be a user-generated video that we're having, right? So the cadence and type of content, right? So every Tuesday we're doing this particular type of content that represents this theme, and groups is where you include the hashtags, whatever community hashtags you're using or other hashtags you're using to identify the content, particularly for the sake of the algorithm, all right? We want the big idea, we want the content themes that you're using, a description of your visual and brand voice, the posting cadence, and what type of content will be posted for what you'll be using on a content scheduler, all right? So this sort of pulls together all the pieces that are part of developing a content strategy.