Instagram explains why your content isn’t reaching your followers

The platform insists its algorithms are not to blame if you have noticed a steep decline in reach recently.

Instagram shed light on why your posted videos may not be reaching all of your followers on the platform.

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, explained that “nobody” reaches every single one of their followers due to two primary reasons:

1. Many of your followers may not open the app on the particular day you published your new content.
2. Those followers who do log into the app that day are presented with far more posts than they have time to scroll through on Instagram. As a result, they may not scroll down far enough to see every post.

What Instagram is saying. Sharing these insights on Threads, Mosseri followed up his comments by advising content creators to not blame the platform’s algorithms for poor reach. He wrote:

• “Before some of you say ‘the algorithm’ is the culprit, understand that ranking and recommendations *increase* the amount of posts people get to, and therefore the amount of reach to go around, more than any thing else we’ve ever done.”

Focus on views and likes. Mosseri also encouraged content creators to prfioritize view and like counts over follower counts in their reporting. He added:

• “I understand why people focus so much on follower counts; they’re prominent and they’re easy to find. But if you actually want to get a sense for how relevant an account is, look at their how many likes they get per post and how many views per reel instead.”

Reaction. Content creators did not take too warmly to Mosseri’s advice and accused Instagram of implementing poor algorithms that were negatively impacting reach. Many creators shared analytics screenshots to support their comments. Piques, who has 2.1 million followers on Instagram, wrote in response:

• “Stop gaslighting the people who built your platform and who put a roof over your head.”

Award-winning author Diana Urban replied on Threads by sharing a screenshot of her analytics five days after sharing a post with her 9,000 followers:

She wrote: “I understand what you’re saying @mosseri but I find it hard to believe that only 200 of my followers opened the app in the past 6 days and didn’t scroll down far enough to see this post. And while I appreciate that this one went viral, I mostly just want my followers to see my usual posts *which they opted into*. I hope what so many of us are saying makes sense.”

Why we care. If you are following Instagram’s guidelines and are still not seeing a boost in terms of reach, it may offer some reassurance that plenty of other successful content creators are in the exact same boat.