Adam Mosseri on Instagram Algorithm, Reach & Features

Let's get into the questions and answers from the head of Instagram, and let's start with all the reach-related questions.

The first one: Does scheduling posts affect my reach? No, not at all.

No, scheduling a post is not gonna hurt your reach.

I do it all the time.

Sometimes I wanna post early in the morning, uh, to get ahead of when most of my followers come online, and I'm not gonna be up, or I'm gonna be on a plane.

So I do it all the time.

It's totally safe.

Moving on to the next reach-related question.

How does Instagram decide who sees my reel first? Adam actually gives a long explanation for this, but I think it's very valuable.

So we don't actually go, when you post a reel, and look for people to send it to, right? We have to wait for people to open up Instagram.

So the system is... tries to do well by producers, but is very consumer-oriented in terms of its architecture.

So when people open up Instagram, we go and try to find content for them.

So if they follow you, we're gonna look at your content and show it to them if we think they're gonna find it interesting.

Even if they don't follow you, we're gonna try to...

but we think they'd be interested in your content, then we're gonna show that reel or that photo or that carousel to them.

Uh, so what we try and do is order posts by how interested we think people are going to be in them, as best we can tell.

Educated guesses, we make mistakes.

Um, we don't take a post and then go look for people to proactively send it to.

Um, exactly.

We do try to give every piece of content a chance, uh, public content anyway.

So there is a little bit of that, but that's more of a is this thing interesting to, and should we be promoting it more to people who don't follow you?

I think that's a very good explanation of how the Instagram algorithm works, but it's frustrating when you work very hard on a piece of content, it doesn't perform well, you feel like Instagram isn't showing your content to the people who have chosen to follow you.

That's still a really frustrating experience.

Let's stick with the reach-related questions.

Does editing my caption after posting hurt my reach? We've talked about this fairly recently on the show.