8 Ways to Beat the Instagram Algorithm and Increase Your Brand Visibility

As social media marketers are well aware, March 15, 2016 marked a significant day in the Instagram world, as the social network announced that it was changing its algorithm. Instead of showing photos in the usual chronological order, Instagram decided to switch things up and follow Facebook’s algorithm of ordering posts based on the viewer’s presumed level of interest.

This means that, essentially, it doesn’t matter how often you post about your brand—if your followers are not engaging with or showing interest in your content, your photos are likely to be pushed to the bottom of feeds. It’s survival of the fittest now, and brands that aren’t strategic or creative in their posting disappear in the noise.

If you’ve noticed a dip in your brand’s likes and engagement over the past year, this algorithm (and your strategy) is the likely culprit. So how can you make sure that your content continues to be seen? Follow our tips below and your brand will no longer suffer the consequences of this algorithm—instead, it will reap the benefits.

1. Post Unique, Quality Content

It may seem obvious, but this is now more crucial than ever. Brands can no longer get away with publishing subpar, unoriginal content. To be heard above all the other noise out there, it’s essential that you find a unique voice for your brand. How is your content different from everything else that’s out there? How does it differ from your competitors? Give this some serious thought. And whether that’s through jaw-dropping photos or thought-provoking captions, find a way to make your brand stand out.

Give your followers something that they will want to share. Show them something that will make them want to come back for more. A good rule of thumb is the following: every time you post a picture, put yourself in the shoes of your buyer persona(s) and ask: is this something that I would want to share if I were them?

2. Go Crazy on the Filters

The multitude of filters and editing features on Instagram make it so that nearly any photograph can go from mediocre to breathtaking with just a few screen taps.

The power of filters is undeniable. Researchers found that “filtered photos are 21% more likely to be viewed and 45% more likely to be commented on” than those without filters. So which filters are the most effective? They found that photos with a “warmer” temperature, higher contrast and higher exposure received the most engagement.

3. Connect With Your Audience

At the end of the day, this is what it’s all about. Responding to comments (even if it’s just saying something like “Thank you!”) is one simple way to make your brand appear more personable. To keep boosting your following, like (and comment on) pictures posted by your target audience and follow users that are following accounts similar to yours.

Many of the most successful brands on Instagram rely on visually captivating, compelling stories to connect with their audiences. Whether that’s by sharing a photo accompanied by an interesting and unique quotation; providing fascinating historical tidbits; or posting a behind-the-scenes glance at your company, there are numerous ways to tell stories on Instagram. Just be sure that the narrative is directly correlated with your brand’s values and mission.

User-generated content (UGC), which is reposted content from other users, is another popular form of storytelling.

One simple way to create UGC is by searching for a unique photo that relates to your brand, and, after asking the owner’s permission, reposting that photo—all the while of course giving credit to the user.

And of course, throwing UGC contests will undoubtedly get your fans excited and involved.

Let’s say your brand is a growing e-commerce clothing company. You could ask your followers to post a unique photo wearing or demonstrating an item of clothing from your brand, accompanied by a hashtag generated for that particular campaign. The reward? The best photo would not only be reposted to your brand’s Instagram account, but the winner would also receive a free item of clothing of their choice.

4. Be Consistent

According to Buffer, “major brands post an average of 1.5 times per day to Instagram.” While posting frequently is important, you don’t want to bombard your users with content—after all, nothing is more annoying than a brand (or individual) that posts incessantly. Test to find the magic number that works for your brand—and post away.

Also make sure that you are consistent in the content that you post. Think about everything from the captions, the filters, the angles, the colors, the lighting…develop a unique visual identity, so that when users see your photos, they will immediately recognize your brand.

5. Don’t Forget About Hashtags

Using hashtags are an easy way to increase following. Not sure what hashtags to use? Think of basic keywords that relate to your brand and the product or service offered. If you are trying to target a specific region, consider using location-specific hashtags, as well.

Still stuck? The free online program, Webstagram, is a helpful resource. Simply enter in a hashtag related to your post and it will generate a list of popular, related hashtags, and the number of times that they’ve been used.

6. Check Out the Competition

Look at brands that are similar to yours, particularly those with high followings and engagement. Are they doing anything that you’re not? Examine the type of content that they are posting and how successful it is. Look at the frequency in which they post to get an idea of how much you should be posting. Finally, consider how they are engaging with followers.

Take note of what your successful competitors are doing and implement those techniques in your own brand strategy.

7. Reach Out to Influencers

To cheat a little bit, you can also get help from Instagram influencers (or individuals with high followings). A study by Nielsen found that 92% of consumers trust individuals over brands (even if they don’t personally know the individual).

Proceed with caution, however, and remember that it’s about quality, not quantity. An influencer may have three million followers, but if the majority of those followers do not fit your buyer persona, investing in that influencer will likely just be money down the drain. Also look at the influencer’s engagement rate. A user may have one million followers that fit your buyer persona, but if their posts are not generating many likes or comments, your money is not likely to go very far.

8. Determine What Is Successful and Why

Why might one of your posts generate 150 likes, while another gets 400 likes? Think about what content is successful and why. Is it the filters used? The hilarious caption that resonated with your audience? The unique perspective of the photograph?

Once you figure out why certain posts are more popular than others, you can continue to drive engagement by capitalizing on that knowledge.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, the most important thing is making your brand relatable and personable.

Bottom line: If you post high-quality, relevant content, while finding a way to connect with your users, the Instagram algorithm will reward you in the end, and your brand visibility will skyrocket.

By: https://www.successagency.com/growth/2017/04/05/beat-instagram-algorithm/

Google Penguin 3.0: Worldwide Rollout Still In Process, Impacting 1% Of English Queries

Google updated their Penguin algorithm with version Penguin 3.0 late Friday night. The Penguin algorithm primarily looks at a site’s backlink profile and may demote a site that appears to have a poor backlink profile.
The Penguin 3.0 release was communicated very poorly by Google. With Google only confirming the update 24-hours after the update was release and not giving us the details they would typically give when we ask them. But this morning at 3:50am EDT, Google’s Pierre Far shared more details on Google+.
Here is the summary:
(1) This is a worldwide update, impacting all versions of Google
(2) The rollout is not complete yet, it will continue for the “next few weeks.”
(3) It impacts less than 1% of English queries but may impact other languages more or less
(4) Google confirmed the roll out began on Friday
(5) Pierre Far specifically called this a “refresh”
(6) It should demote sites with bad link profiles and help sites that were previously hit that cleaned up their link profiles

Worldwide Penguin Rollout

Unlike some of Google’s other algorithm updates, such as the Panda algorithm, the Penguin update typically launches globally. So sites in any language, any region, are all open to the potential impact of this algorithm.
Why? Since Penguin is mostly about link profiles, language doesn’t really need to be looked at by the algorithm. Panda looks more at content and language, thus those algorithms roll out different by region or language. Penguin doesn’t need to worry about language, for the most part.

Penguin Still Rolling Out

There was some confusion if the Penguin refresh was done rolling out or not. SEOs were wondering why not all sites were impacted yet, they felt the roll out was halted or not complete. But yesterday Google’s John Mueller felt it was complete but then retracted that a few hours later. Pierre Far this morning said the roll out is not complete and will likely last for a “few weeks.”
So when analyzing if a site was impacted, it may be hard to nail down the issue to Penguin or another algorithm, since this is a multi-week roll out.

Penguin 3.0 Impacts Less Than 1% Of English Search Queries

When gauging how large an update was and how much of the webmaster community felt it, Google sometimes tells us how significant it was by measuring the percentage of queries impacted.
Penguin 1.0 impacted ~3.1% of queries, 1.1 was 0.1% and 1.2 was 0.3% of queries. Then 2.0 was 2.3% of queries and 2.1 was about 1%. Penguin 3.0, which some may argue is 2.2 and not 3.0, impacted less than 1% of queries.
Now, it may be higher in other languages, but Google’s measurement was English queries.

Penguin 3.0 Launched Friday

Google confirmed that Penguin 3.0 launched Friday, October 17, 2014. Keep in mind, the rollout will continue for a few weeks as we said above.

Penguin 3.0 – A Refresh

Google’s Pierre Far called this update a “refresh,” he didn’t mention that any new signals were added or the algorithm was changed in any way. A refresh in Google’s terminology around algorithms means they just re-ran the algorithm to release sites that fixed their issues and demote sites that had issues they didn’t pick up on. They did not add any new signals to the algorithm to find Penguin related sites, it was just a refresh.
Just a refresh even after waiting over a year? Indeed and this is pretty shocking to most of those in the SEO industry. Many expected a refresh could have happened way earlier and that Google was laying the ground work for a new Penguin algorithm.
Again, this is why some want to rename this update to Penguin 2.2 versus 3.0.

Helps Some Sites & Hurts Other Sites

Like any algorithm refresh, some sites that were previously hit would see a ranking increase because they are no longer negatively impacted by the algorithm. While other sites may see a ranking drop in the search results because they were just picked up as sites that should be impacted by the Penguin algorithm

Google Launches Panda 4.0

Panda 4.0 has officially hit the Google search results.

The Panda algorithm, which was designed to help boost great-quality content sites while pushing down thin or low-quality content sites in the search results, has always targeted scraper sites and low-quality content sites in order to provide searchers with the best search results possible.

Panda 4.0, which Google and Matt Cutts confirmed began rolling out yesterday, has definitely caused some waves in the search results. However, the fact that Panda 4.0 is also hitting at the same time as a refresh of an algorithm targeting spammy queries like payday loans makes it a little bit more difficult for webmasters to sort through the damage.

With the payday loans refresh impacting extremely spammy queries and Panda targeting low-quality content, some webmasters could potentially get hit with both of these or by just one or the other.

While usually people complain about losing rankings, Alan Bleiweiss from AlanBleiweiss.comshowed via Twitter that Panda can also bring about some serious improvement to a site's traffic as well.

Prior to Cutts confirming via Twitter that Panda 4.0 hit, there had been plenty of speculation about a change with either Panda or Penguin, although many found it hard to pin down exactly what the change was.

"It was interesting to see the chatter amongst SEOs over the last few days," says Marie Haynesof HIS Web Marketing. "We all knew that something was going on, but there was significant disagreement on exactly what Google was doing. Most of the black hats were saying that it was related to Penguin because they were noticing huge drops in their sites with the spammiest link profiles."

This would have been the changes to the payday loans update, where the goal is to target the spammiest search queries Google sees. There was also plenty of debate on forums and Twitter about whether the shake-up we saw was Panda-related or Penguin-related. And with the payday loans update thrown in there for good measure, it was definitely confusing.

"I was really hoping that this wasn't a Penguin refresh because the majority of the sites that I had done link cleanup on were not seeing any improvement and if Penguin refreshed and none of my clients were seeing ranking increases, then that would not be good," Haynes says. "I was also puzzled because one site that I monitor that has been adversely affected by several Panda updates saw a vast improvement today. It does not have a bad link profile and would not have been affected by a Penguin update. "

"When I heard the announcements that Google had released two algorithms over the last couple of days – payday loans and also a big Panda update, everything made sense. And still, so many of us are waiting for that big Penguin refresh. It wouldn't surprise me if that happens in the next couple of days," she says.

Google has said previously that they try not to throw multiple updates at once or within a very short period of time, so it is interesting that they pushed out two completely unrelated updates – although updates that could both impact some the same sites – within a couple of days.

Releasing two back-to-back updates makes it a lot harder for webmasters to analyze the changes and what specifically was targeted in these updates, and could affect Google's ability to evaluate how well (or not) the two updates worked. It also means webmasters might have a challenge knowing what changes need to be made in order to recover search rankings.

However, Haynes speculated that some of the Panda change might have been to reverse some of the damage done to sites that had great content yet were impacted for other on-page reasons.

"I think it's too early to say what this new iteration of Panda is affecting, but I can tell you that in the case of the site that I saw big improvements on, no cleanup work had been done at all," Haynes says. "It was always in 'Panda flux.'"

She says some Panda refreshes would hit it hard and then occasionally the site would show a slight increase with a refresh.

"This is by far the biggest increase, though," Haynes says. "It really is a good-quality site and I believe that what caused it to be affected by Panda in the first place was a site layout that caused crawlers to get confused. Underneath that confusing layout is a site full of really good content. It may be that Google found ways to see past structural issues and recognize the good content as the structural problems would not affect users, just crawlers. But really, that's a guess."

Panda first blazed onto the scene in February 2011, and was believed to be Google's response to criticism of how well content farms were ranking. Google later announced that they internally called it the big Panda update, after Navneet Panda, the Google engineer who created it.

While there have been many smaller Panda updates and a couple larger ones, each rolled out monthly over a period of 10 days, Google had announced several months ago that Panda would be integrated into the algorithm updates and that the "softer" Panda would be less noticeable. However, that clearly isn't the case with Panda 4.0, which has had a widespread impact, both positively and negatively.

Dr. Pete Meyers from Moz also studied the changes they saw from the latest Panda update, and noticed that eBay got hit particularly hard.

Digging into the May 19th data (and before Google confirmed anything), I noticed that a few keywords seemed to show losses for eBay, and the main eBay sub-domain fell completely out of the "Big 10" (our metric of the ten domains with the most "real estate" in the top 10).

In fact, Meyers notes that eBay's drop was so significant that it dropped from 1 percent of their queries to 0.28 percent. It won't be surprising to hear of more sites who have seen a drop due to Panda 4.0 – especially sites that have been notorious for having low quality content.

We will definitely see more come out in the next few days as webmasters and SEO professionals have a chance to evaluate the changes and what might have caused sites (either their own or competitors) to either rise or fall in Google's search results. And since we're still awaiting a Google Penguin update (Penguin 2.0 launched a year ago this week), I wouldn't be surprised if we see one of those updates coming soon, especially in light of Google releasing both the payday loans and Panda 4.0 so close together.

May 21'2014 #SEW