Tokimeki-unfollow but for Instagram. Well, Marie Kondo’s KonMari method has now hit the Facebook-owned photo and video sharing platform. But first, let’s rewind to early last year. There’s a show on Netflix called Tidying Up with Marie Kondo that has been a huge hit on Netflix – make the time to watch it this weekend. Marie Kondo is a renowned author and celebrity tidying up consultant that has made all of us look at our closets and judge our articles of clothes we’ve been hoarding since we got them even if they are now old or don’t even fit anymore.
Marie’s mantra is for people to discard stuff that doesn’t bring joy to your life anymore. Thank them for their purpose and say goodbye.
The same method can be replicated for our digital clutter and there has been a couple of tools made for that specific purpose for platforms. You can read about all of them here.
Instagram is now the latest platform to jump on that bandwagon of getting rid of things that don’t spark joy. Well, sort of.
Instagram will now offer suggestions of who to unfollow by launching “following categories.” These categories divide the list of who you follow into batches, including “most seen in feed” and “least interacted with.”
I am here for all of it. Here’s how to access it.
Thank you, Instagram. Now you can get rid of unnecessary follows.
To see the “following categories“, head to your profile, click on “following” to see the two categories.
Instagram also lets users sort who you follow by earliest to latest and vice versa. This comes in handy for those who have a ton of people they follow and helps to clear out the people you added when you first joined Instagram and only care about the people you’ve come to follow with intent.
Why This Matters
Instagram is trying to increase the density of high-quality posts and stories in users feeds and make you use the app more often instead of opening it to see posts from irrelevant accounts and then closing the app. With this move, Instagram will see more people open the app more frequently and increase ad views at the same time. Instagram recently brought an insane $20 billion in advertising revenue in 2019 for Facebook – this is 28% of Facebook’s ad revenue which raked in $70.7 billion and $5 billion more than YouTube.
Instagram is also planning to share this ad revenue with IGTV video creators thanks to a slated partner program in the works.
