← Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
10 NEW Instagram Algorithm Updates: Changes For June 2026 - 898
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As I've said before, not all AI tools are created equally, but especially when it comes to shipping. Oftentimes what separates a basic tool from a good tool and a great tool is what the AI is built on. Shipstation's AI is built and trained on over 20 years of experience, so that means it's designed to help you optimize, not just execute. ShipStation is smart enough to adapt to your unique business. It can alert you when stock is low, recommend the best carrier, and automate tasks so that you can focus on other areas of your business and stay one step ahead. Over 1 million businesses already use and trust Shipstation to to optimize and scale their shipping needs. We are all already using AI in our day to day life to make things simpler, easier or more efficient and we should do the same with our shipping as well. And if you're going to use AI to help you out with the shipping process, then why not use the company that has more experience than anyone else? The sooner you switch, the sooner you start saving time and money. Get started with Shipstation today and get your first 60 days free at shipstation.com with code by T. Again, that's S H I P S T-A-T-I-O-N.com and use code BYT to get your first 60 days free. Taxes and fees apply. Today's episode is brought to you by Shopify. More than just a program, it's truly a partner in online business. You can learn more about them@shopify.com tribe or I'll tell you more later. In this episode, 10 brand new Instagram updates, algorithm changes and new features that you need to be aware of. Hey future Brock here. Cutting in because I lied to you. There aren't 10 updates in this episode. There's actually 11 updates in this episode because a few days after I finished recording this, I received an email from Instagram staff about a new feature that is being released literally at the time that this podcast is being released. So I'm super excited to let you know I'm one of the first people in the world to let you know that you can now officially reorder or reorganize your Instagram profile grid. This is a feature that was originally teased and talked about by Instagram staff and by Adam Mosseri about six months or so ago. But then on Adam Mosseri stories, as recently as the last month or two, he has said that that's a program that they have discontinued and all reports looked like they weren't going to pursue the ability to reorder your grid. It seemed like it was too glitchy, too clunky, and the people weren't using it. But in typical Instagram fashion, they keep us on our toes and they keep changing things. So you can finally reorganize your Instagram profile grid to make it look however you want you. You could use this as a way to highlight certain posts, to keep important sales or announcements up at the top of your grid, or just to make your profile look however you want it to look. All you have to do to reorganize and reposition any post on your profile grid is long. Press on any individual post and then click Reorder Grid and then it will open up a grid that you can reorder, customize, and totally control to make it look however you want. And like I said, you're getting that news here first, before anyone else. So shout out to Instagram. Thank you so much for Instagram staff for keeping me in the loop. I really appreciate that. And if you want to continue being kept in the loop by me, consider hitting that subscribe button, because it's my job to keep you up to date with the latest Instagram news that you need to know in simple, understandable ways. Number one, Skip Rate is the most important statistic for your Instagram reels. Or to say it another way, the percentage of people who stop watching your reel before the three second mark is now the number one kind of engagement or the number one metric that the Instagram algorithm is paying attention to. Instagram has even completely redesigned their Insights layout so that the stats that you're seeing below your reel now show skip rate as the number one stat, the first thing you see. But with that said, I do want to be clear that while skip rate is the most important thing, it's not the only thing. In fact, there are two other competing statistics that determine how many views your post is going to get, and more importantly, where those views are going to come from. And those two other statistics are like rate and share rate. Adam Mozeri has recently been on the record numerous times of saying the like rate or the amount of people out of 100 who are liking your post determines how many views your post will get from your followers. So if your post is shown to 100 people and 75 of those people like your post, which is an extremely high ratio, you would probably only get like maybe 5% or 10% if you're lucky. But let's say you got 75% of the first 100 people who saw Your post also liked it, then the algorithm thinks, oh, this post is going to be really enjoyed by this person's existing followers and thus the reel will be pushed out to more of your existing followers. Shares, on the other hand, are similar, but different in what they do. Your share rate determines your reach to non followers. So if your post is getting more shares, if people are sending your post to each other, your post will be pushed out by the algorithm to more non followers, more new people. Basically, the algorithm is using skip rate to determine whether or not the reel is even good enough to be pushed out, and then it's using the like rate and the share rate to determine who it's going to be pushed out to. Update number two, Instagram is creating their own version of the TikTok shop. Essentially, you are now going to be able to add clickable affiliate links to your posts so that people can shop anything that you're talking about or referencing in the post to directly from your post. And then you're going to get paid a small commission fee for doing so. This is something that was actually announced by Instagram about a month or two ago and it has now been slowly begun to be rolled out worldwide. So keep an eye on your professional dashboard to see if you have access to this new feature. But once it's rolled out, it's going to be a great way for smaller creators to earn an income directly from Instagram. There's a lot of people on TikTok who are earning five or even six figures every single month, as crazy as that sounds. Directly from the TikTok shop. And so I think this new Instagram affiliate program is going to be really awesome. And hopefully this new Instagram affiliate program is a step towards Instagram allowing us to put any links on our post. Hey Instagram, us small business owners would love to put clickable links on our posts. I appreciate that we can now link to other people's businesses, but we want to be able to link to our own as well. Real quick, before we move on to update number three, I want to address the elephant in the room, or rather I should say the hat on the head. This cowboy hat is not part of a new alter ego or a new reinvention of my brand that I'm going through this. This is Warren intentionally, because I am hosting my first ever in person live conference this year coming up on September 11th and 12th in Dallas, Texas. Over the last 10 years, I've been lucky enough to speak at stages all over the world and I've even hosted a few small meetups and trainings myself, but I've never hosted an entire conference. And so starting on actually the evening of September 10th, and then all day on September 11th and 12th, I'm inviting you and about 400 other small business owners and content creators who want to grow on Instagram to join me and a bunch of other Instagram coaches, content experts, and small business strategists to help you grow on Instagram and make more money. We're gonna have a bunch of different keynote speakers, panels of experts, we're gonna do hot seats, live feedback, and live implementation. So if that's something that you're even remotely interested in, DM me on Instagram with the word Dallas D A L, L A s. And of course my Instagram is Brock11Johnson. Oh, and while you're there, don't forget to follow me, because according to my tracker right here, I am currently at 900 9000, 604. But anyways, Instagram news number three is that Instagram removed more bot profiles than they ever have in one single swoop. They removed over 15 million profiles like that with no warning. And unfortunately, while they primarily removed bot, AKA robot profiles, fake profiles, spam profiles, they removed quite a few real profiles as well. The amount of people posting on X and TikTok about their Instagram being wrongfully disabled in the last few weeks has seen a significant spike. And the thing is, Instagram already removes tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of fake profiles every single day, but they've never removed this much all at once. And while they've since come out and said that this was just a routine cleanup, it leaves a lot of speculation as to whether or not they accidentally removed more at one time than they meant to and they're just trying to cover their butts. Or if this is part of a bigger purge that they're trying to do, of removing big chunks of inactive profiles from this. I personally lost a few hundred followers, which makes sense because as someone who's been on Instagram for like 15 years and who has nearly a million followers, it's likely that at least some of my followers are not real people. But I know that some people lost hundreds of thousands. And some of the big name celebrities like the Jenners, the Kardashians, Taylor Swift, they lost millions of followers in just a few hours. Update number four might just be a coincidence, or it might be a reaction or response to update number three, but Instagram just rolled out a new selfie verification system where if you go to your Instagram settings, you can essentially upload a selfie, take kind of like a face scan just like you would use to unlock your iPhone if you use face ID and Instagram will be able to save that selfie so that in the future you can use it to verify that you are you. Meta hopes that this will make it easier for people to get back into their accounts to prevent hacking and the like. Of course this has raised a lot of concerns about Instagram having a scan of your face and having access to that data to use. Maybe however they want, but not to side too much with our social media overlords. I would argue they probably already have scans of our face from the selfies that we're posting on Instagram anyways. So as some who is constantly posting their face all over Instagram every single day and who really values their Instagram following I'm going to submit my selfie so that I can verify my account and hopefully protect myself against future hacks or disablings. If you want to add your own selfie for this selfie verification program, all you have to do is go to your Instagram settings and then go to your account center, then tap on the button that says Passwords and Security, then click on verification selfie and then just follow the instructions from there. It's my job to give you the latest marketing strategies. But even with the best strategies, if you're using the wrong tools and you're not going to get very far, imagine if you were running a marathon with perfect form but you were wearing sandals. It would be a pretty painful experience. And in all honesty, my first few years of online business were kind of like running a marathon in flip flops. I was trying a bunch of different tools, I was bouncing around from idea to idea and I just never found the right platform. And that's why today I'm excited to tell you about an E commerce platform that's more than just a platform, it's a partner. And that's none other than Shopify. With Shopify you don't have to be an E commerce expert because it itself is an E commerce expert, handling everything from merchandising to international shipping and handling returns so that you don't have to. And if setup time is your concern, don't worry. They've got you covered there with hundreds of pre built templates that you can click on and experiment with to find what you're looking for in less time. That way you can build a beautiful online store that fits your brand and if you ever get stuck, they have 24. 7 award winning customer support to help you out. It's time to turn the what ifs into with Shopify. Today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com tribe. Again, just go to shopify.com tribe. That's S-H-O-P-I-F Y.com T R I B E. Instagram update number five is another classic Instagram. Why are you giving us this feature? Nobody asked for this and it's clearly just a copy of another app. And that is what Instagram is calling Instance. Instance is basically Instagram's copy of Bereal. Bereal is the social media app that absolutely blew up and took the world, or at least took Gen Z by storm in 2022. And on Bereal, you would get a daily prompt at a specific time and everyone would get that same prompt at that same time. And what you were basically supposed to do was take a quick selfie at that moment and it was a forward and backward selfie. So that kind of captured your whole moment and what you were actually doing. And you weren't able to edit it or really filter it or change it in any way. And then you posted it and everyone would kind of see what everyone was doing. It was an opportunity for us to all be real. Well, now in 2026, Instagram has rolled out their own version again called Instance, that lives in the Instagram dms. The small differences is that there isn't a daily prompt, so you can take your instant at any time you want. And you're not limited to just one per day. So you can take a dozen, you can take 50. And I do want to warn you, when you open up the Instance camera on Instagram and if you take an instant, it automatically sends right then and there. So be careful what you're snapping pictures of when you're testing out the instant section. And Instagram also did release their own Instance app to go along with this. For those of you who are just lovers of this new feature and who really want to use it more. But to speak candidly, I don't really think there's much you could do from a marketing perspective with Instance. I mean, I guess theoretically, if you had a really popular brand, you could add people to your list of following or your close friends list, which I should pause and say that's part of the whole Instance thing is it's not that all of your followers can see your instance, only your close friends or your mutuals can see your instance. So it doesn't really have a reach to your follower base or your community. So again, I guess you, if you had a big brand with a lot of followers, you could add like a select group or a VIP clientele to your own following. Like you could follow them back or add them to some special close friends list and then you could use your instance to like give behind the scenes updates on your. But there's just not really a great or widespread marketing use case, for instance. So if you're a business owner or a content creator, you can forget about instance. Instagram update number six came directly from Adam Mozeri and it has caused quite a bit of confusion. He posted saying that sending more DMs does not help your reach. And that is true. But the way it's been misinterpreted is that DMs in general don't help you get more reach. And that is not true because Instagram is optimized for direct messages. Instagram rewards accounts that are getting more direct messages and specifically rewards posts that are getting sent via direct message. So basically what you can take away from this is that if you are spending hours on Instagram like messaging people. Messaging people, DMing a bunch of people, that's not going to directly improve your posts views per the algorithm. Like the algorithm isn't going to say like, oh, you messaged 40 people today, let's give you some more views. Now, there is some human nature here where if you message 40 people, maybe those 40 people are now more likely to click on your profile, they're more likely to see what you've posted recently. That is absolutely possible. But algorithmically you will not get a benefit from messaging those people. However, if people are messaging you in general, if more people are messaging your account, like I mentioned a moment ago, if more people are sending your post via direct message, your post will get more views and your overall account will grow. So should you spend hours every single day DMing new people? No, probably not. But should you optimize your account and build around DM conversations, DM automation? Yes, absolutely. Instagram update number seven also comes from Adam Mozeri via his Instagram stories where he said that deleting a post does not impact your reach. And that is true from our extensive testing within the Insta ClubHub. When you delete or archive a post, it does not impact your future posts, engagement or reach. Instagram isn't like, oh, you deleted a post, we're going to put you in Instagram jail for a little bit. That's not true. What's more likely happening is that if you make a post and then for whatever reason, maybe there was a typo or a mistake, or you just weren't in that moment anymore and so you deleted it. And then maybe you posted a different post a little bit later, or you posted a post a little bit later that was like a slightly modified version of what you originally posted. Human nature is going to cause people to be less likely to engage because their psychology is that, well, I've already engaged with this post, or I've already liked it, or I already liked this person's post today, so I'm not going to be a super fan and be liking 40 of their posts today. So again, no. Algorithmically you will not be punished for deleting or archiving a post. But human nature could cause people who see that future post to be less likely to engage with it because they think they've already engaged with your previous post even though it was removed. Instagram update number eight has me singing Hallelujah from the rooftops, and that is that Instagram has finally opened up access to their music library to third party apps and tools. Translation if you use an app to schedule your posts in Instagram, like I use Metricool to schedule all of my posts in Instagram, those apps, those tools and softwares can now access the Instagram music library. In the past, there have been no apps that have been legally allowed to do this. There have been some apps and tools that have kind of like snuck in through a back door and grabbed Instagram's music and applied it to your posts, but now they are officially approved to do so. Meaning that it's allowed. Meaning that you're not going to get punished for using that music. You're not going to get a copyright strike or violation. Basically, all these popular scheduling tools can now access the Instagram Trending Audio library, and you can add any song or trending audio or even original audio to your reels and schedule it that way. It's such a time saver for someone like me because sometimes there's a specific song or audio or trending song that I want to use in one of my reels, but because that hasn't been available on the scheduling app, I would have to schedule 99% of my posts in the scheduling app, but then schedule those 1% that have a specific audio use case in the Instagram app. And it's just been very clunky and having two places to schedule has more than doubled my workload. And so now that I can schedule all of these things in one place. It's been a game changer. And if you want a little bit more info about scheduling tools and how to use them, I did an episode about that a few weeks ago and I'll link it up in the show notes below. Speaking of scheduling posts, Instagram now allows in app scheduling for trial reels. This is another one of those hallelujah moments. Thank you Instagram for giving us this feature. A lot of people have been asking this for a long time, basically since trial reels first rolled out in December of 2024. It's crazy that it was that long ago, but now you can schedule trial reels right in the Instagram app. Now you've been able to schedule trial reels outside of Instagram using a tool like Metricool or many other scheduling platforms since December of 2025. But now Instagram officially has made that available in the Instagram app. So if you create a reel, that's an experiment if you want to test out different hooks, if you're playing around with a new style or format, you can schedule that as a trial reel right in the Instagram app so you don't have to worry about manually posting it yourself or posting it at the exact moment that you created it. And then finally, Last but least Last but worst the worst update that I was really dreading having to share is directly referencing the episode that I put out last week about Instagram Plus. Instagram plus is now being rolled out worldwide. If you're like, what the heck is Instagram Plus? Again, I did an episode on it like two weeks ago and you can go check that out. Essentially it is a new program where you can pay a monthly subscription to Instagram to unlock certain benefits and features. The one caveat or the one change from that episode that I put out that is different in this official rollout is that it appears that anyone can sign up for Instagram Plus. Originally it appeared that only regular Instagram users, non business owners and non creators could sign up for Instagram Plus. But now it appears that basically anyone who wants to can pay the monthly fee and get the added benefits. All of the extra benefits are pertaining to Instagram stories. You get some extra insights, some extra features, some really cool things that will help you get more views. So as soon as it's available for me, I will definitely be signing up for Instagram Plus. And we also have one other minor change is that when it was in testing it was available for like one or two US dollars per month. And now that it's officially being rolled out, it appears that it will be available for US$4 per month. Oh, and by the way, they're also rolling out Facebook plus and WhatsApp plus if that's your jam. But that's it for today. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you can stay in the know with the latest changes, algorithm updates, and new feature Instagram. It's my job to simplify it for you so that you don't have to do the work. You can create the content and focus on growing your business. And let me do all the hard stuff. Let me come up with the strategy and keep you up to date with what you need to know. Thank you so much for being here this week. And as always, happy networking.