Instagram to allow users mark others as favourites

Facebook-owned social media platform Instagram has been testing a new feature that will allow its users to mark other users as their Favourites.

According to The Verge, Favourites will let users categorize their most important Instagram accounts (friends and creators) as their priorities so that the posts by these marked handles will land higher in the user’s feed.

Alessandro Paluzzi, a mobile developer, had first shared the update regarding this new feature on his Twitter handle.

If this feature sounds familiar, it's because Instagram was testing a different Favourites feature back in 2017, which let users limit the exact audience for each post.

For example, one could share their wedding photo with just their designated favourites, rather than with their entire following.

However, 2021 iteration of Favourites is about giving users more control over their feed by telling Instagram which accounts are most important to them.

Users generally follow a bunch of different brands and creators on their accounts, but they don't necessarily prioritise their content on the same level as their closest friends and families.

Instagram currently ranks the order of your feed by the most recent and shared posts from the people users follow, plus other 'signals' like how likely they'll engage with a post, according to the company's June 2021 blog post about its algorithm.

While users may 'like' several of the posts they see, those might not be the content they're actually looking for, but might be sending Instagram all the wrong signals on what they actually want to see in their feed.

As per The Verge, it's unclear whether this Favourites feature will become an official feature at all or if it will change before it's rolled out more broadly.