You might have noticed a few changes to Instagram over the past week — and now it’s official. Instagram has caved, and has decided to make newer posts more important to its users.

I had received messages from several people about this over the past few days, and while I, too, had noticed some changes, Instagram made it official on Thursday, saying in a press release, “With these changes, your feed will feel more fresh, and you won’t miss the moments you care about.”

What This Means

Simply put, you’re more likely to see new posts from the people you follow as opposed to random posts from a few days ago.

But Instagram didn’t stop there.

As a part of the update, they also announced they’re testing a “New Posts” button that “lets you choose when you want to refresh, rather than it happening automatically.”

This is even more of a big deal to me — I had been caught several times opening the app and seeing a photo that I wanted to learn more about, only to have it pushed way down in my feed. This should alleviate that problem, and also alert you (similar to Twitter) to new posts from your followers from within the app.

Instagram added that they’re going to be making additional improvements in the next few months as well, so stay tuned.

How Does This Impact My Marketing?

For most users, this should help you with your Instagram marketing. It’ll mean you can take advantage of prime-time slots to post your images, and hopefully be seen more often. It should be easier to predict, rather than having your images appear at random to users.

What doesn’t change is how you should go about marketing yourself through Instagram. You’ll still want to use best practices like adding relevant hashtags, tagging locations and more.

What this doesn’t change, though, are sponsored posts. The more and more I use Instagram, the more sponsored posts I see. So for photographers who pay for posts, this shouldn’t change that in any way.

Why Did This Happen?

While there was a ton of backlash against Instagram when they introduced their algorithm (and further refined it), this doesn’t appear to be happening based on users’ requests. Instead, this is the likely result of Vero, the new social network that organizes every post by time.

Conclusion

The changes Instagram is making are great for users. As photographers, this should help us in terms of scheduling our posts and better predicting user engagement across our images.

 

For more on Photography Marketing, see our weekly column.