Content creators are well aware that they are playing in the attention economy.
More eyeballs on a creator’s content typically translate into either more ad revenue or leverage for negotiating contracts with brands. Industry insiders often refer to this metric — the number of unique accounts that view a piece of content — as “reach.”
“People always want more reach,” Instagram’s top executive, Adam Mosseri, said in a recent podcast interview with creator and social media coach Brock Johnson.
Reach was a recurring theme in Johnson’s interview with Mosseri, during which the Instagram exec dispelled rumors about the algorithm, hashtags, and shadowbanning.
Mosseri also listed out three priorities that Instagram is focused on when it comes to creators:
- Instagram wants to reward original content made by creators.
- The platform is looking to help small creators “break out” and build audiences on the app, which will require engineering power.
- It also wants to get better and quicker at driving trends. “It takes still too long for things to pop on Instagram,” Mosseri said.
Aside from Instagram’s top priorities for creators, Mosseri spelled out several threads that offer a glimpse into what Instagram will be building going forward and how creators can adapt to the platform’s changes.
“What we’re always trying to do is figure out something that’s not only good for creators, but also good for average folk,” Mosseri said, adding that anything in that intersection would also need to be “good for Instagram.”
Here are three key takeaways from the podcast:
1. Instagram’s main feed is the ‘most important place for creators to post’
Mosseri said on the podcast that only a small percentage of non-creator users post to the feed on any given day, making creators the bulk of content in Instagram’s feed.
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“It is the most important place for creators to post,” he said.
Creators will reach more people by posting to the feed than to stories, which are primarily for interacting with friends (much like DMs).
2. DMs are a crucial spot to share content for creators
Mosseri has spoken at length about how direct messages (DMs) are where people primarily share photos and videos with each other on Instagram. The company has also released over 20 new DM features in the past year.
But DMs are not just a space to interact with friends. They also help Instagram’s algorithm recognize what content is being shared.
“Shares” — when someone sends a piece of content, such as to their stories or DMs — is one of the most important metrics to watch for creators when considering what affects reach.
When asked if Instagram weights shares to DMs or stories more than the other, Mosseri said Instagram values both “relatively equally.” Still, he emphasized the importance of sharing content in DMs.
“If you send me something and you’re like, ‘I think you’d be really interested in this,’ that is a lot more meaningful,” Mosseri said.
3. Instagram is doubling down on SEO, both on and off the app
“We’re trying to do better at having content from creators on Instagram surface in search results for Google and other search providers because I just think that’s a win-win for everybody,” Mosseri said.
He added that there is a “lean and mean” team working on this. Instagram also has a lot of work to do on its own search functionality — something its primary competitor, TikTok, has been known for.
Mosseri said Instagram’s in-app content search is “not very good” and added that the company had “strengthened that team recently” and would roll out new features over the next few months.
One coming overhaul will be Instagram’s recommended search button that appears in the comment section on posts (somewhat similar to TikTok). Right now, Instagram’s recommended search feature pulls from the actual content of the post itself (the video, photo, or caption), but Mosseri said the next iteration will also pull information from what is being discussed in the comment section.
“Sometimes where the real interesting context is, is not in the piece that someone uploaded, but in the context around it, which is almost always in the comments,” Mosseri said.
Users can expect to see more of these recommended search prompts as Instagram gets better at “understanding content and context,” but not every post may have it, Mosseri said.
