Instagram, the second largest and fastest growing social network, launched in 2010 and was subsequently bought by Facebook in 2012. With Facebook’s help, it turned itself into an advertising platform in September of last year. Since then, the social network has grown rapidly, gaining over 200,000 advertisers that market to its 400 million active users. For comparison, Twitter has 130,000 advertisers and Facebook has more than 2 million.

Instagram is making changes to the way its user feeds are organised. This means that posts will be ordered depending on “the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content,” the “timeliness of the post”, and “your relationship with the person posting”. Instagram posts have timestamps, so you will still be able to see when a photo was posted, and, for the moment, no posts will be removed from your timeline, they will just appear in a different order. However, as the social network’s ordering algorithm becomes more complex, it is likely that posts deemed low importance will be hidden from the timeline in the same manner as posts on Instagram’s parent company Facebook.

Instagram states that the reason for changing the ordering of user feeds is that, on average, a user misses 70% of their feed. By using a non-chronological but more personalised timeline, the social network hopes that users will never miss posts that matter the most to them.

The change to the social network’s feed could be an attempt to increase audience engagement - if a user is more likely to see photos that they truly care about, then they are more likely to interact and dedicate more time to Instagram. This is important, as a study by Quintly shows that Instagram’s user engagement is falling; interaction with posts dropped 40% vs the same time last year.

Social media audiences don’t often react well to change, and it seems like Instagram’s tweaking of user feed’s hasn’t had a positive initial reaction. When Twitter announced that their timeline could become non-chronological, the hashtag #RIPTwitter trended globally - similarly, Instagram’s announcement has resulted in the spread of #RIPInstagram. Whether or not this is just a negative knee-jerk reaction or something that could cause a decline in Instagram’s user base in the long run is yet to be seen.

So what does the change in user timelines mean for advertisers? Well, if it does result in higher user engagement, we could see expect to see Instagram become even popular with marketers - according to a study by Greenlight, 53% of marketers plan to use the social network for marketing in 2016, and with a more active user base, this could grow higher. One thing that marketers should be wary of following the implementation of interest-based timelines is that if a post does not gain early traction, it may not register as an important post for users, so will appear further down in their feed.

It is unclear when Instagram’s changes to the order of users’ feeds will be rolled out to the entire user base, as they are currently testing with the timelines of select users. So, for the meantime, Instagram remains a major player in social which can be used by marketers to effectively build their brand and engage with customers.