This may or may not be worthy of note, depending on how it’s actually applied in practice, but…
This week, Instagram has outlined a revised approach to in-app notifications, which will demote updates from the same person or profile if the system feels like its sending repetitive updates from those users.
As outlined on the Meta Engineering Blog, Instagram’s development team has devised a new way to ensure that users don’t get notification fatigue, by reducing the amount of updates from specific users.
As explained by Meta:
“Instagram leverages machine learning (ML) models to decide who should get a notification, when to send it, and what content to include. These models are trained to optimize for user positive engagement such as click-through-rate (CTR) – the probability of a user clicking a notification – as well as other metrics like time spent. However, while engagement-optimized models are effective at driving interactions, there’s a risk that they might overprioritize the product types and authors someone has previously engaged with. This can lead to overexposure to the same creators or the same product types while overlooking other valuable and diverse experiences.”
Essentially, IG doesn’t want to annoy people with too many updates from a single user or profile in the app. So now, it’s reducing such notifications in certain cases.
“We’ve introduced a diversity-aware notification ranking framework that helps deliver more diverse, better curated, and less repetitive notifications. This framework has significantly reduced daily notification volume while improving CTR.”
Which is better, right? More click-throughs overall means more meaningful, enjoyable engagement.
But then again, it could also mean that your followers, who already don’t see all of your updates, could end up getting even fewer notifications about your content.
“The diversity layer evaluates each notification candidate’s similarity to recently sent notifications across multiple dimensions such as content, author, notification type, and product surface. It then applies carefully calibrated penalties to downrank candidates that are too similar or repetitive.”
Yeah, downranking sounds bad, and is probably not good news for those who already feel like IG is restricting the reach of their posts.
Of course, this system, at least in theory, should only penalize updates that see lower click-through rates. So if your followers are regularly tapping through on your updates, they’ll likely keep seeing more of them, but then again, given that your followers are unlikely to see all of your updates, based on IG’s algorithmic ranking, the chances of them tapping on every one also decrease, which could further restrict exposure.
In other words, this is probably not good for your organic reach, even among your engaged audience.
But Instagram believes that this is better for users, because they’re tapping through more often on the updates that are sent to their notifications listings. And maybe that’s true, but still, it’s worth noting the change in respect to your engagement rates.
Instagram’s dev team also notes that it’s looking to apply stronger penalties to new notification candidates, “effectively mitigating overwhelming experiences caused by high notification volume or tightly spaced deliveries.” It’s also looking to use AI to further personalize notification experiences “with richer language and improved relevance while maintaining diversity across topics, tone, and timing.”
So if you notice changes in your IG engagement data, this could be a factor, though again, at least in theory, it should also help to drive more click-throughs, based on IG’s data.
You can read more about Instagram’s ranking update here.
