For those unfamiliar with Instagram’s new submission-heavy algorithm, IG chief executive Adam Mosseri reiterated in his latest advice clip that creators should focus on making their content more share-worthy.
As Mosseri noted, with people increasingly interacting through in-app direct messages rather than through feed posts, Instagram is now aggressively trying to increase content that encourages more sharing behavior, such as posts that motivate more users to tap the “send” icon and forward them to their friends.
According to Mosseri:
“You don’t have to push yourself as a creator, but hopefully, when you’re creating content, think about creating content that people will want to send to their friends and loved ones, and that will help grow your reach over time.”
Instagram is trying to drive this point home with a new in-app send count feature that it recently rolled out to more users.
Instagram has been testing the feature with select users for almost a year, but it has recently expanded it to include more users focusing on the number of shares of their posts within the app.
So, submissions are clearly what IG wants creators to focus on, but how exactly do you create content that will trigger more DM shares?
According to a study conducted by Harvard Business Review that looked at social media reactions: The news site has 65,000 articles, so it’s important that your content provokes an emotional response.
This is probably not surprising, but the detail here is important.
Reportedly:
““We found that articles with a high number of comments evoke high arousal emotions, such as anger and happiness, and low-dominance emotions, such as fear, which involve a sense of loss of control. Meanwhile, social shares are highly associated with high-dominance emotions, such as inspiration and admiration, which make readers feel a sense of loss of control.”
For context, a “highly dominant” emotion is one where the reader has some control over their response and can cognitively choose how they feel, whereas a “lowly dominant” emotion is one where they have no control, such as fear.
So if you want to provoke the comments that have long been a key driver of maximizing algorithmic reach, you need to aim for concepts that provoke emotions like anger or fear that will provoke a strong response (see the media landscape).
But if you want to increase shares, inspiring, interesting and humorous content is key.
“Positive content is more likely to be shared on social media. Our research has found that praise and happiness are strongly correlated with high dominance, which suggests that people are more motivated to share upbeat content. Rooted in self-expressionSharing a positive emotional experience makes others feel good and makes them think highly of the person who shared it, so including an element of surprise can increase the positive value of your content.“
If you examine your own sharing behavior, you’ll probably find that it makes sense, so if you’re looking for a way to make sense of the concepts Mosseri outlines, this might help.
This is in line with Meta’s broader effort to shift its focus to a more positive user experience: in response to negative user feedback and widespread political backlash against the company, Meta is trying to dilute the political and news content in its app, and has also made it clear that it is aiming for a more positive user experience with its Twitter-like experiment, Threads.
The overall emphasis here makes sense, and with reels also becoming a big part of the engagement puzzle, it makes sense that Meta is looking to shift the focus to more positive elements.
If you want to win on Instagram in 2024, this is how to do it. The creative concept is never easy, but if you want to follow the advice offered by the Instagram boss himself, this is how to do it.
