Instagram feed: the two things the same word means

It is the source of almost every confusion about the term, so it is worth separating upfront.

The browsing feed is the home screen: the sequence of posts the app shows when you open it. It mixes accounts you follow with recommended content, ordered by the algorithm.

The profile feed is the thumbnail grid of your own account, in reverse chronological order, with pinned posts at the top. That is the "showcase" someone sees when arriving through your name.

When someone says "I posted to feed", they mean the second: they created a permanent piece that will appear in the grid and be distributed through the first.

The border between feed and Reels became porous: a video published to feed also becomes a Reel and gets distributed across video surfaces. That led many people to conclude the feed died, which does not match what it solves.

What the feed does and nothing else does is stay. It is where the reference carousel someone saves lives, and it is what a person scrolls through when deciding whether to follow you.

The browsing feed has more than one ordering, and few people use the alternatives.

• Default. Ordered by the algorithm, mixing accounts you follow with recommendations.
• Following. Only accounts you follow, in chronological order, with no recommendations.
• Favourites. Only the accounts you marked as priority.

For anyone producing, the existence of the last two is strategic information: part of your audience may be consuming in a feed where recommendation does not enter, and there what counts is being followed and being recent, not being recommendable.

• Reference content. Step by step guides and comparisons, which get saved and reopened.
• Pieces that hold up the showcase. The first nine tiles of the grid are the conversion page for arrivals.
• Dense content. Anything that needs reading at the reader's pace rather than video.
• Archive. A feed post keeps being found months later, through in-app search and the grid.

What usually performs better as a Reel than as a feed photo is pure discovery. They are not substitutes, they are different jobs inside the same account.

• I know when I mean the browsing feed and when I mean the profile feed.
• I treat the first nine grid tiles as a conversion page.
• I do not abandon the feed because of Reels: the jobs are different.
• I use the feed for content that needs to stay and be found again.
• I remember part of the audience consumes through tabs without recommendation.