Here’s a small tweak that could have a big impact on IG. According to an updated overview of “re-posts”, content that you re-share in the app may now appear within the feeds of your followers in the app.
As you can see in this overview from the IG help guide (shared by social media advisor Sarah Roizman), Instagram has added a new explainer which explains that:
“When you repost, your followers may see what you reposted in their feeds.”
Which could give you more options for IG engagement and interaction.
As explained by Roizman:
“Before, you could only share someone else’s content to stories. Now, when you tap the repost icon under a post or reel, you can add your own text and it’ll show up in your followers’ feeds like a regular post.”
So it’s like retweeting, but IG’s version. Which is something that Instagram has been flirting with for some time.
Back in 2022, Instagram tested the same ‘Repost’ option, which enabled users to amplify any post by re-sharing it to their followers in the app, and included a dedicated “Re-posts” tab on profiles.
That seemingly didn’t pass the initial experiment phase, but maybe, Instagram now feels more confident that this will work, given that more than half your feed is AI-recommended content anyway, and that it’s already showing people posts that their friends have liked in the Reels feed.
In combination, that means that a lot of the posts that you’re seeing in the app are already coming via recommendations, be it human or machine. So reposts, in moderation, is just adding to that mix.
But still, I don’t understand the justification for a feed algorithm on IG if they’re just going to flood your stream with outside recommendations anyway.
Instagram originally implemented an algorithm because people had too many connections, which meant they were eligible to see more posts than they had time to check out in the app on any given day. So the algorithm was brought in to prioritize this display, and ensure that users see the most relevant updates first.
But now, it’s adding more and more content into this mix. Which means that the base logic, that it can’t show you all of the latest posts from the profiles that you’ve chosen to follow, no longer applies. Right?
I mean, I realize that IG likely gets more engagement from showing people AI-recommended posts, and posts that friends have liked, as well as reposts, just adds to this.
But really, Instagram should be able to give you a stream of just updates from the profiles that you’ve chosen to follow, which would put more emphasis on following as a means to control your experience.
But then again, people seem more attuned to letting the algorithms show them what they want to see now, so that probably wouldn’t work anyway.
But the key point is that the original justification, that there was just too much content to show you each day, based on your following graph, no longer applies.
Either way, if you want to get more reach for certain posts in the app, re-sharing could now be a means to do that. There’s no info from IG as to how much amplification re-posts will get, but it does note that your followers “may” see what you’ve re-posted.
We’ve asked Instagram for more info on re-posts, and the planned roll-out of the option, but they had not respondeded at time of publication.
