How To Curate Your Perfect Instagram Feed

Before we start, let’s make a clear distinction between feed and grid. The former is your “news feed” a.k.a all the photos you see from people you follow (and ideally engage with). The later is your own Instagram profile where you post all your content. I feel sometimes the two are a bit blurred and used to describe the other. Now that this is clearer, let’s start with my top tips to curate your perfect Instagram feed.

Again, these are tips on how to make sure all the photos you see in your news feed are ones that you absolutely love and how to make your feed perfect and personal to you. As in content that you really enjoy seeing and engaging with.

We will see together that curating your perfect Instagram feed has as many advantages for you personally than for the people you follow. I’ll get to that down below when the time comes. A few reasons why you want to curate your feed are seeing content you love, seeing content that does not make you feel bad about yourself, does not make you compromise your morals or ethics. However, the most important reason is that it improves your overall Instagram experience and contributes to make it a good place for you (and the people you interact with).

1. Follow Fewer People

The rumor has it, the algorithm hides your pictures, preventing your followers to see them. Considering it is the engagement the photo received in the first ten minutes that impacts how many people will see it next, and will see the next one and the one after, it can quickly become a vicious circle. And that’s how you see your engagement drop massively. It is then very hard to get back to a good engagement.

The thing is, the rumor has it all wrong. Instagram does not hide your photos. However, what it does is that it prioritizes which photos you will see based on photos you previously liked. If you scroll till the very bottom of your feed, you will eventually see every single photo posted by creators you follow. The other thing is, no one has the patience to get to the bottom of the feed so no one can see everything.

And that’s where following less people comes in handy. Realistically, you will never be able to see all 1000 images posted by the 1000 people you follow. Or it might take you a day or two. If you follow less people, you have less content to see and thus you increase your chances of seeing it. Which increase the chances you’ll engage with said content and push it to the top of your feed next time you open the app.

2. Follow Content Creators You Love

I will publish a post on a few very bad reasons to follow someone on Instagram which should tie in nicely with this one. You want a perfect Instagram feed with content you adore, images that inspire you and people that motivate you to do better.

If you follow accounts you don’t particularly engage with, have no interest in or just don’t like at all, you are not doing yourself a favor, or to the creator you follow. To the content creator because they have a follower that does not enjoy what they are doing and do not engage with them, thus decreasing their engagement rate. To yourself because you see content you do not like, which decrease your likeliness to engage with said content and any content in general. But most of all, it does not create a good Instagram experience for you.

If seeing content you like makes you happy, makes you want to come back to using the app and see more content, then what does seeing content you dislike make you feel? Probably sad and unwilling to spend time on the app. Only follow content creator whose work you adore and want to engage with. Or at least drop a like on.

3. Mute People You Cannot Unfollow

Say you are following a very good friend who either does not post often or does not post images that you find attractive. Which can happen. And it is okay to dislike what your friends do. Tastes and colors as they say. However, it would be very awkward to unfollow a friend. Especially nowadays when the state of online friendships has such an impact that it sort of influence offline friendship.

Unfollowing a friend might make them think you’re not friend with them anymore? Maybe. But beyond that, I would not be super happy myself if a friend of mine unfollowed me. I guess that answers the question as far as I am concerned. So, no unfollowing. What you can do however, if you really don’t like their content, is muting. You can choose to mute both feed and story content or one or the other. I’d unfollow feed content because stories are not as curated and I’d still enjoy to see raw content from them.

Muting is very handy when it comes to brand, agencies and other partners you might have worked with and that you need in your contacts for future work or just in general. Sometimes I enter giveaways with brands and follow them. However, then my feed is invaded with their content, which I don’t necessarily always like. Muting is the solution.

4. Do What Needs To Be Done: Unfollow

Muting was already a delicate thing. But this one is almost like declaring war. Unfollow is taboo in this industry. Especially if the person you unfollow follows you. And the thing is, even if you think they won’t see it, they will. I personally do not check who unfollows me but I guarantee other persons do.

I have been unfollowed by plenty of people whose account I follow. And sure, when I realized they no longer engaged with me and that they had unfollowed, it hurt. I have to admit it. However, I loved their content so I stayed on. And taking the risk to upset a few people, exchanging comments on photos on Instagram does not make a friendship. So it is not like breaking up with a friend.

I would not unfollow a friend, as already said up there. However, I have felt stressed by the idea of unfollowing someone whose content I no longer like and do not want to engage with when I know they follow me. Or unfollowing someone to realize then that they follow me.  So yes, it is never a nice feeling.

But it is not nicer to follow someone while refusing to engage with them because you don’t like the content. You could mute if you want but I do not believe it is the right solution. Because that will give that person an inactive follower and decrease their engagement rate.

If you don’t like a book, you do not keep it. A dress does not fit anymore, you donate it. If you don’t like someone’s content, you unfollow.

5. Engage Consistently

This is where everything I said earlier will come together. And why you should do all the things above before focusing on this. You follow less people, hence you’ve got less content to like and so you probably like it all. All the accounts from brands or that you could not unfollow are muted, so they will not parasite your feed and put you off from your feed.

Now, you follow only people whose content you liked and unfollowed people you don’t engage with. This last step is so important and is beneficial to you and whomever you unfollowed. Because it helps no one to have ghost or inactive followers. 

Since you do not have as much content to engage with, you are more likely to be more consistent with your engagement and more genuine. Chances are you will be happier with your Instagram experience as well. And because you will have less content to engage with, you will see most of the people you follow and will be able to like pictures and drop comments. Increased engagement on other’s content will come back to you. Which will in turn increase your own engagement, reach and impressions. It might even get you more followers! What not to love?!

So here you go, the five top things to do to curate the perfect Instagram feed and insure the best user experience for you. Following fewer people, following account whose content you love, muting and unfollowing people you do not like the content of and engaging more genuinely!

Shop my outfit
Top – Topshop (old collection)
Mesh Skirt – Shein*
Wedges – 3 Suisses (old collection)
Straw bag – Shein*

What do you think? Do you find those tips helpful? Is that something you already do? What are your top tips to curate your perfect Instagram feed?

Thanks a lot for stopping by. I hope you liked this post.

See you soon,
Love,
Corinne.

*Gifted items.