Going on an explore page is the best free exposure you will get on Instagram.
Explore is a discovery engine that gives new content to users and gets featured, it is kind of instrumental to expand an audience on Instagram.
About 200 million users go on the Explore page every day.
It has all the amazing content from accounts users don’t follow.
That guarantees your posts will have maximum reach and people outside of your existing audience will see your posts.
Lastly, you’ll know what Explore page is and how to get landed on it!
How does Instagram explore work?
While the Instagram home feed will show all the posts of friends, family, and other people in your follow list – the Explore page shows content from all the accounts that users have no connection with.
When you would like to dig deeper into some photos and videos, Explore is the tab you should go for!
How does Instagram know what to show people on this page?
That’s what this section will tell you!
Instagram Explore Ranking Factors
Instagram’s Explore algorithm makes use of the same signals as the main feed to rank the content.
Those signals are:
Information regarding the post: This includes captions, likes, comments, hashtags, location tags, etc.
A user’s activity on Instagram: The Explore page is deeply customized for each user, and it is based on what they will engage on Instagram.
A user’s history with the content creator: Content would appear in the Explore if it’s shared by the account any user has connected with before.
Information regarding the content creator: this has things such as the content they publish, how many followers are there, how much engagement their posts are receiving.
Two-Stage Ranking System
Content will go through two stages before it ends up in the Explore recommendation system: the candidate generation stage (also known as the sourcing stage) and another one is ranking stage.
Candidate Generation Stage
When you are creating any content for Explore page the algorithm starts searching for any “seed” accounts, these are the accounts folks have connected with before.
By analyzing the seed accounts, Instagram will be able to find the accounts a person might be interested in.
Ranking Stage
The second stage of choosing Instagram Explore will involve the three-pass filtering process.
In the first pass, the algorithm will narrow down the people from 500 to 150
Then the candidates would be decreased from 150 to 50, and in the end, they decreased down to 50 down to 25.
How to optimize content for Instagram explore?
You can enhance your potential of getting on the Instagram Explore page by doing proper optimization of the content for its specific ranking signals.
To recap, those signals are:
A user’s history of interacting with the content creator
Information regarding the content creator
Information regarding the post
A user’s activity on Instagram
Information surrounding the Post
Write detailed captions that will make it much simple for Instagram to rectify what’s in each post you will publish.
Adding relevant hashtags is quite necessary for Explore algorithm as it will add up an extra layer of discoverability to your content.
A user’s activity on Instagram
This is a basic signal to optimize as what others are doing is totally out of your control on Instagram.
For this stage, you can begin by wondering who your ideal audience is and what types of accounts they would like.