Machine learning and AI plays a very significant role in almost all technical aspects of life. It also reigns supreme in the digital world. Social media platforms, especially Instagram, use AI extensively to choose the best content for the Explore tab.
To know how exactly it uses this technology, you will first need to know a bit about the algorithm scenes. Instagram uses AI and machine learning to select the best content and makes recommendations based on the factors such as the types of accounts people love to:
- See
- Enjoy and
- Get engaged with.
There are lots of technicalities in blog posts and there is no big surprise in it. However, the good thing about Instagram is that it offers the users to add interesting behind-the-scenes pictures. This comes at the time and perspective when the algorithmic recommendation systems are under analysis. This prevents the users from publishing contents that are:
- Hateful
- Dangerous and
- Downright extremist.
If you compare Instagram with YouTube, it is not dubbed as the ‘Great Radicalizer’ by The New York Times. However, this does not mean that Instagram does not have its own share of problems.
- There are misinformation and hateful content as it is in any other social media platforms and
- There are a few specific mechanisms in this app such as the follows feature that push followers to extreme viewpoints for certain topics such as anti-vaccination.
These can raise severe political issues. It is this aspect that AI looks into to make the platform steer clear from such issues.
The modeling choices
The use if AI has enabled the platform to make a few important decisions. One such decision is making ten modelling choices. This has proved beneficial for the platform as well as the platform in different aspects. A few of the most important ones include:
- Improving the predictive power of the models
- Providing far better features and improvements
- Maintaining accuracy and
- Reducing memory consumption.
The platform now uses caffe2 as their general modeling framework. This has helped in different ways such as:
- Writing and designing the models better
- Optimizing the workflows and
- Providing more headroom with model weight per CPU cycle in terms of inference time.
Another significant metric that has helped the platform in a much better way is the ‘Stack Footprint.’ The ML team loves it because in their networks they can now use:
- Different CPUsand
- More intensive statistical techniques.
All these enables them to have a better control over their final value function and helped them to use ranking losses and pointwise models.
Emergingthe foundational building blocks
There are millions of photos and videos shared on Instagram platform that helps the users to gain or real Instagram followers. With such a huge volume of content, the platform previously could only builda recommendation engine that helped them to tackle with these daily uploads of photos and videos.
Wil the help of the attest technology, they can now developfoundational tools. these tools are far more effective in addressing three of the most important needs. These are:
- The need for the ability to conduct quicktesting at scale
- The need to get a stronger signal on the extensiveness of the interests of the people and
- The need for a way that is computationally efficient to ensure the freshness and high quality of the recommendations.
All these custom techniques and abilities have helped the platform to achieve their goals. One of the most significant achievements is the ability of iterating with IGQL quickly which has created a new domain-specific language. This in turn has helped them to build the best techniques that ensuresoptimal recommendation algorithms and better results on the ongoing area of research about the ML community.
Achieving success on IG
As it is in all forms of marketing, achieving success on Instagram even if you use the best IG influencers is hard and it entirely depend on several factors. These are:
- The number of followers they have
- The amount of money spent on the sponsored posts
- The amount of money they make and more.
This means that having a personal Instagram account for a few years may not get you anywhere if you do not have quite a substantial number of followers.
In order to get the best results, you will have to automate the entire process. This automated process will help you in ways more than one including:
- Choosing the content to post
- Posting it multiple times in a day
- Posting them at the right time to ensure higher reach
- Writing the captions for the posts
- Choosing the right tags
- Crediting the original author while using a user generated content and
- Determining who to follow and who not to follow.
This ideally entails the entire process. This means that when AI and latest technologies of its likes are used all you have to do is sit back, relax and watch it work. The best part is that you will not even have to pay to use a server for your bots to live in.
Summing it up
The use of AI technology enables the explore tab to focus on showing only those accounts that you enjoy instead of those individual posts you may like to see. The type of machine learning the Explore tab utilizes for this matter is called ‘word embedding.’ This feature enables it to find the pages that you may want to check out. More importantly, it locates those specific words in the photo captions that tells about the type of content each account is posting.
For example, if you use words like ‘music’ and ‘festival’ together a lot of times then Instagram will think that you may be posting the same content as other accounts that use these two words a lot as well. Based on this assumption, Instagram will select a content for you.
Therefore, the use of machine learning and AI has helped Instagram platform a lot in selecting and evaluating a content from among a large number of media pieces from their most personalized media inventory.
