In a recent update on Instagram, they have come up with the launch of “suggested posts”. Once you have reached the end of your feed, there will the option of scrolling with Instagram’s suggestions which are the posts are from the accounts you don’t follow.
As we all know, Instagram has shown users a message when they reach the end of their feeds for the past couple of years. This means they have seen every post over the past two days from people they follow. With suggested posts, they have the option to keep scrolling past that marker for more content.
They said, the posts that will show up, won’t be the same ones that show up in the Explore’s section. They’ll be related to the content that people already follow, whereas Explore aims to point people toward adjacent content, says Julian Gutman, head of product at Instagram Home. He used space content, which he follows on Instagram and engages with on his feed daily, as an example. A suggested post might be a new space photo from someone he doesn’t follow, whereas his Explore page might contain posts related to physics.
He declined to comment on how often people easily reached the end of their feed regularly. Ads will be in suggested posts, and only photos and videos posted to the grid will show up for now. This means you won’t see teased IGTV or Reels content yet.
It feels like major reverse; for Instagram’s stance two years ago on screen time. Once it launched the end of feed notification, Kevin Systrom, the company’s former CEO and co-founder positioned it as a decision made with users’ mental health in mind. He mentioned that at the time when the company was working on “tools that will help the Instagram community know more about the time they spent on Instagram, “adding that “any time should be positive and intentional,”. But suggested posts could easily keep people on the app for longer. The product was not designed to keep people glued to their phone, Gutman Said.
“I think for us this really came from a vision a couple of years ago around people really seeing feed as a place for their interests, and with the improvement in machine learning and our ability to kind of make it easier for you to see some more of those posts that are on Instagram every day, and really bring that personalized relevance to you,” he says. “So we just want to make it really easy for people to see that [relevant content] when they get to the end of their feed. That’s really the motivation here, make it easier for you to go deeper on your interest,”.
It can be seen that Instagram is taking a little idea from TikTok, which throws users into a continuous feed of content that never ends. This is apart of what’s made ht app so successful. Lengthening the feed also gives Instagram more ad space, allowing it to further monetize. This update totally makes users end up spending more time than ever on the app.
Source: The Verge