In just over a decade, Instagram gained incredible popularity among the social media platforms. Within 10 years, it crossed the one billion mark of active users, which is simply phenomenal. What began as a photo sharing app evolved into one of the chosen marketing platforms because of its exceptional engagement rate. Instagram adapts a business-friendly policy to attract businesses on the platform to use it for their branding, marketing, and promotional activities. In addition, the social media platform is constantly innovating and adding new features to attract professionals who can use the platform for better fulfillment of their professional needs.
Instagram holds a special place in the hearts of the younger generation like the millennials, Gen X and Gen Y, who love to express their thoughts and feelings by communicating through images. Instagram gives them endless opportunities of showcasing their creativity through images. The new generation is generally tech-savvy and constantly keeps clicking photos on mobile phones to capture moments of their lives that they want to share with many others. They want to see their content gain maximum likes and keep gathering real likes for Instagram, pointing to their popularity. Real likes mean more opportunities of engaging with real people and exerting more authority on the platform.
The tremendous growth of the Instagram user base has rapidly multiplied the volume of data that the platform handles. Today, it can handle Big Data that plays a critical role in providing a better user experience. Instagram is among the leading tech companies that make the best use of artificial intelligence for managing Big Data to offer new features by analyzing user behavior much more precisely. Proper use of AI helps close monitoring of individual users to identify their tastes, likes and dislikes, and other aspects of their online behavior that empowers the platform to serve more appropriate content at the right moment that delight user.
Adding automatic captions to IGTV
Since AI works behind the scenes, it is not always possible for users to understand its role in bettering user experience. Take the example of Instagram introducing the feature of adding captions automatically to content uploaded on IGTV. Earlier, adding captions to IGTV content was up to the discretion of users. But since adding captions to content enhances its prospects of engagement many more times, Instagram uses AI to read and understand the content and add a suitable caption to it automatically. This approach creates more inclusiveness because the feature aims at making the content more understandable to users with hearing infirmities. Even if users do not provide the caption of the content, the system does it automatically and leaves nothing to chance.
Here are some more examples of Instagram using AI to upgrade its performance to provide more creative options to users.
Explore page and search function
Instagram makes widespread use of machine learning and AI. To serve users better, Instagram uses machine learning to understand the nuances of users’ behavior on the platform, and the technology is much superior to any other algorithm used earlier. For helping users perform the simple task of finding photos and posts of particular activities and topics and even for exploring information about any topic of their interest, AI is indispensable. Instagram keeps like-minded people connected closely by tracking and recognizing the pattern of their online behavior to engage better and gain mileage from the interaction. By using ‘word embedding, a machine learning technique, Instagram can categorize the users efficiently. The technology can decipher the order of the words in the text to understand how any two accounts share some relationship that serves their mutual goals.
Before making recommendations, the Explore system observes the seed accounts or the accounts with which the user interacted earlier, had liked the content, and even saved it. The system then identifies other similar accounts and selects 500 types of content from them.
To eliminate spam or misleading content, the system uses some filters and then ranks the remaining posts by considering the probability of users interacting with each type of content. After sorting, the system selects 25 posts for displaying on the first page under the Explore tab.
Instagram bots
To automate the interactions of user accounts, Instagram uses bots powered by machine learning. The bots can like some comments of customers about the post and track likes purchased from Insta4likes.com that have real people behind it and facilitate the posting of comments on the content of another person. The increased level of bot facilitated interaction paves the way for increasing engagement. Kenji.AI is a new bot that Instagram is using for automating user activities more efficiently. The bot uses machine learning algorithms to identify other accounts that would be interested in engaging with that account. AI helps to see through the accounts to identify the behavioral traits of users to determine like-mindedness that can result in the users interacting closely with each other and enhancing engagement.
Designing personal feeds
The feeds presented to users must be completely relevant and exciting, or else they will fail to generate engagement. Instagram makes all efforts to serve the most relevant content in the user feeds. With engagement in mind, it is not enough to display only relevant content in the feed, but it is vital to select feeds that users would like the most. Using a machine learning algorithm for evaluating all content, Instagram can better understand its relevance for users so that the feeds become completely personalized that meets users’ expectations.
Although users might like to explore a new type of content, they would not want to experiment with it in their feeds. Instead, they would like to see that Instagram serves only the most likable content in the feeds, which helps users to enjoy the platform much more.
Without machine learning and AI, it would never have been possible to attain the level of personalization that Instagram achieved today. Better analysis of Big Data provides better insights about users, which helps Instagram keep raising its standard for achieving higher engagement.
