Since Instagram launched Stories in August 2016, the Facebook-owned company has been steadily increasing in popularity, mostly at the expense of Snapchat. In early 2017, Instagram Stories overtook Snapchat in terms of audience size.
Instagram uses the Story viewer order to help creators gauge the level of interest each viewer has in their content. This helps the site effectively facilitate interactions between creators and their viewers.
One of the early differentiators between Instagram and Snapchat was Instagram’s heavy reliance on algorithmic ranking. In June 2016, the Instagram feed moved to an algorithmic model (it was previously chronological) and the order of Instagram stories at the top of the app is based on engagement data from Instagram and Facebook.
Most social platforms are built on proprietary algorithms that aren’t 100 percent transparent to users (not to mention advertisers). Consider the entire practice of “search engine optimization” (SEO) for example, which essentially involves reverse-architecting Google’s mysterious algorithm to attain higher organic search rankings.
Within Instagram, one area in particular that has been met with public intrigue has been the order of viewers within one’s Instagram Stories.
The list of viewers is not chronological, but it also doesn’t seem to be rooted in “activity” data—that is, public interactions like likes, tags and comments—alone. This has led some users to launch their own tests to determine which other factors might be in play.
In an exhaustive Reddit thread, several users have put forth the hypothesis that our top-ranked story viewers are, at least partially, the people who view our profiles and photos the most, without necessarily engaging the with the content. In other words, our stalkers rank highest.
To test the theory, the Reddit users created dummy accounts and made frequent visits to their other handle from that account without liking or commenting on anything. The testers claim that this behavior helped push the test alias up in the ranking, thereby confirming the theory that our top story viewers correlate with our top stalkers.
It’s most likely that Instagram weighs several factors in the ranking, including public activity, messaging, interactions within Stories and, yes, profile views, too. We reached out to Instagram for comment and here’s what Paige Thelen of their tech communications team said:
“Similar to the feed, stories are ordered based on which moments you’ll care about most. The order is determined based on a number of signals, including: 1) the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content; 2) timeliness of the posts; and 3) your relationships to the person posting. The technology is powered by machine learning, which is adaptive to your behavior and improves over time.”
In a follow-up email, Thelen confirmed the Redditors’ suspicion: “Profile visits are considered, as well as likes and comments.”
Regardless of what goes into the secret sauce, the algorithm and its (sometimes mysterious) relevance to our lives seem to be driving the app’s stickiness—even if we don’t always know why the people or content within the app are prioritized the way they are. Per a Harvard study, social networks are both physically and psychologically addictive, so it’s reasonable to believe that platforms like Instagram are optimizing interfaces and features that trick our brains into wanting to check and engage more and more.
To better understand how the Instagram Story views order algorithm works, some users on the Instagram Subreddit experimented with the feature. These tests revealed that the site actually uses two different ordering schemes based on the number of views:
- If a Story has been viewed by 50 people or less, the views list is arranged in a reverse chronological order.
- Once the number of views goes past 50 Instagram switches to its more complex sorting algorithm.
- This more complex order organizes viewers based on their level of interaction with the user.
Understanding how viewer relevance is determined
- A viewer’s level of activity
- The frequency of profile visits
- Viewer interaction with a creator’s account with likes, comments, etc
- Messages sent by the viewer to the Story poster
These two sorting systems, which are not officially confirmed by Instagram, work together to show the most relevant people on the top of the viewers list.
Of the two sorting systems, users are more interested in the second one, since this reveals audiences interest levels in their content. Instagram uses a variety of factors to determine this level of interest:
Each factor is given a specific weight that adds up to determine a particular person’s position on the Story views order. Of these factors, the testers determined that profile views have the largest influence. The tests showed that frequently visiting a user’s profile will put a particular viewer in a high position on the list without any other engagement.
The various tests also revealed that Instagram uses engagement data from Facebook for determining Stories view order. Since Facebook owns Instagram, this does not come as a surprise. However, how much this engagement data influences the viewing order is unclear.
Taking advantage of the Instagram Stories views order
The order serves as a useful tool for creators to determine who among their audiences are most interested in their content. To fully take advantage of this info, they need to have a good strategy for interacting with these people:
- Determine who the most engaged users are by tracking them when they show up as having viewed a story.
- Tagging them in content related to stories they’ve viewed.
- Engaging them in conversations on Instagram in both private and public messages.
The point of this strategy is to bring your account to the top of their mind when they log in. This will help you move them down your sales pipeline, or to your website, more often.
Engaging lower ranked viewers
Capturing the interest of the people from the bottom of their Instagram Stories views order list is also vital for creators. Moving people up the list will indicate their growing interest, and will help creators deliver more content to them
Interacting with Story viewers
Proactively engaging with the Stories and accounts of viewers will also encourage them to visit a creator’s profile more often:
- When commenting on the viewers’ posts, creators should do more than just drop a link. They should focus on talking about the viewer’s content and how this relates to their own.
- This will encourage viewers to visit their profiles and increase these viewers’ positions in the Instagram Stories views order.
- Creators can take this idea further and engage their viewers on Facebook and Whatsapp. Since these three applications are under the same ownership, it is easy to share content among them.
- WhatsApp, in particular, is useful for engaging Instagram viewers on a more personal level.
These engagements will contribute significantly in moving people up the Instagram Stories view order, and show that Instagram is a two-way street.
Get more views by using the Instagram Story views order
The Instagram Story views order is a surprisingly handy metric that creators can use to gauge viewer interest in their content, and find out who is doing the engaging. Creators can take advantage of it by:
- Knowing how the views order is determined: Creators should be familiar with the algorithm that is used in sorting their viewers list, and the factors that impact the listing.
- Engaging viewers correctly: They should use the list as a guide on who to engage first among their viewers and get them to interact even more, especially when that person is an Instagram influencer on the rise.
- Getting more viewers interested: Creators should strive to push lower ranked viewers to the top of their lists by leading them to more of their Instagram content.
These steps will help creators attract even more views to their Stories, make their account a focal point for many of their followers, and drive traffic to their pages..