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Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
5 Massive New Changes To Instagram - January 2025 Updates - 819
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In today’s episode, Brock Johnson covers 5 massive new changes to Instagram with the January 2025 updates. We’ll go over the latest Instagram algorithm changes, including the introduction of 3-minute Reels and the new Edits app, which allows...
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CT mobile.com I don't think there has ever been a time in the history of Instagram or probably even in the history of social media with more changes than this past weekend. Between Friday, January 17 and Monday, January 20, there were so many changes that were massive complete overhauls to both Instagram and TikTok. And so in today's episode I'm going to update you on every single Instagram change that's taken place over the last few days and weeks and what it means for you as a business owner or a content creator who's trying to grow their brand or following on Instagram. Now of course a lot of these changes happened at the same time that TikTok was shut down for about 12 hours and then brought back online, which was probably the most dominant news story of the news cycle, the most important thing that people were talking about. But that's why so many of these other Instagram changes were missed. Yet. These Instagram changes are very big and a lot of them are going to drastically changed the way we use the app on the day to day basis. And so I'm about to fill you in on everything that you might have missed that has either already changed in the last few weeks on Instagram or that they say is going to change within the next few weeks. Specifically, there are seven app updates that I'm going to explain to you today and kind of a bonus one that we can start with right now. The bonus one was actually something that took place and was announced at the beginning of December 2024, but a lot of people are still gaining access to it and a lot of people missed the announcement. We did do an entire build you'd tribe episode about this fe, so I highly recommend going back if you haven't already. But of course I'm Speaking about none other than trial reels. Basically, trial reels are a new option that you can select before posting your reel. And when you post a trial reel, your video will only be shown to non followers. So essentially, Instagram designed this as a way for you to test and see how the reel is going to perform by showing it to a group of people who doesn't already follow you. Now, pro tip that I've already been sharing with our Insta Club Hub students is to take all of your best reels from the past, anything that you have posted in the last one to two years that has either done really well or that has gained you a lot of followers, and post it again as a trial reel. The cool thing is, because it's being shown to people who do not follow you, they likely have never seen this reel in the first place. But because it did well for you last time, it gained you a lot of followers or maybe it even went viral. It's likely going to perform well for you again. Now, of course I say likely. There are no guarantees, but some of our students have been gaining literally tens of thousands of followers with doing little to no extra work by just reposting their best reels as trial reels. So again, if you want to get more details on that feature, go back and check out the episode that we put out in mid December about this new feature, kind of explaining how to find it, how to use it and all of that. But that's just the tip of the iceberg, because let's get into the seven changes that have been announced in the last one to two weeks that have either already taken place on Instagram or that will be changing very, very soon. The first one was definitely headline news. Mark Zuckerberg himself put out a post basically saying that Instagram is changing the way they do fact checking and they're changing their community guidelines. To summarize, basically they are simplifying the community guidelines. They are making less strict guidelines. So you're going to be able to post about different things that in the past were deemed political. Speaking of political, in the past on Instagram, they have not recommended political content. What that means is if you post about something that's political, you can still be seen by your followers. Theoretically. But if you post about something that is deemed political, that post itself cannot be recommended to non followers. It won't be shown to someone who isn't already following you. They could find it, but it won't just be recommended to them. Now, of course, you're probably already asking yourself how does Instagram or Meta know what is political and what isn't? How do they draw the line? Some people believe that literally everything is political. And so how does Meta decide and who decides at Meta? Well, that's kind of the issue that they're addressing right now and that's why that they are removing this restriction. So now political content is something that can be recommendable. It can be discovered by non followers in the feed. They're also doing away with their fact checkers. Their internal reports, at least according to them, showed that their fact checkers were biased and that they were fact checking more things relating to one end of the political spectrum and fact checking less things relating to the opposite end of the political spectrum. And so rather than having independent fact checkers, which is what they've had for the last four years, they're going to be replacing that with a feature that was popularized on Twitter X called Community Notes, where essentially if there is something that is deemed false, deemed inaccurate, misinformation, the community can self report that to Instagram and then the approval process isn't exactly clear. But basically, if that gets enough reports or if enough people deem that the Community Notes are accurate and that they are actually correcting the misinformation in the post, then the Community Notes will be visible below the post. It's kind of like putting fact checking in the hands of everyone rather than a select few private people in a third party group. Now, here at Build you'd Tribe, it is our job to teach you how to grow on social media. We try our best to not share our own political views and beliefs. Of course you are welcome to form your own interpretations. Some people are saying that with the removal of fact checkers it is a win for free speech. But some people believe that the removal of fact checkers is going to lead to the proliferation of misinformation and inaccurate statements. And so they don't see it as a win for the First Amendment and for freedom of speech. But of course you're welcome to form your own opinions on this. We're just here to help you navigate your way through it and continue to grow on social media. But again, that was just number one. So let's get into number two. The second big announcement, and this is one that a lot of people missed, is what we're calling the Friends feed. Now you might remember back in the day, a few years ago on Instagram there was what was called the Activity tab, basically when you looked at your own notifications where it showed you all of your Likes, comments, et cetera. There was an additional tab that showed you everything that your friends were doing. So you got to see, like, what posts your friends had recently liked, what their recent comments were. And it was kind of an invasion of privacy. And so Instagram removed that a few years ago, which I think was for the best. But now they've added back something that's somewhat similar. It's not so precise so that it's showing you every single post that each of your individual friends has liked and commented on and followed. But instead it's going to be just a feed with reels that your friends have liked. So to find this feed, basically just go to your reels tab and then up in the upper right hand corner, you will see three little profile pictures of three people you follow. Theoretically, these aren't just going to be three random people you follow. They're going to be three people whom you follow and interact with often. Basically three people who Instagram thinks you have a strong relationship or a strong connection to. If you tap on those three profile pictures, you'll be taken to, again, what I'm calling the follower feed, or the friends feed might be a good term for it. And it's just going to show you reels that your friends, your mutuals, who you've interacted with, reels that they have engaged with, reels that they have liked. So it's going to be a way to kind of tap into your community and see what your friends are engaging and interacting with on Instagram. Now, this is something that isn't necessarily going to directly impact the way us business owners and content creators use Instagram. It's more of a way for the average person, the average consumer, to get more connected with the people they're already connected with. For example, when I tap on that tab, I'm going to see the reels that Tay, my wife, is liking. And so I'm able to kind of feel more connected to her in a sense because we're watching similar content. I do think that this is going to lead to long term more growth and potentially more followers and more exposure for us as content creators and business owners because it's showing our reels to people who are like the people who already follow us. It's basically finding an adjacent audience or an audience who is similar to our own, at least friends with the people who are in our own audience and letting them watch our reels and consume our content. So I don't think it's going to be a huge difference maker. I don't think it's going to result in like hundreds of thousands of new followers overnight. But I do think it is going to be a beneficial feature for all of us in reaching new people. Now, I do want to say there's nothing special that you have to do to have your reels show up on this page. There's no special criteria you have to reach. It seems kind of random. We're not quite sure yet exactly what informs the Friends algorithm. For example, if Tay, my wife, likes 50 reels in a day, how does it determine the order? Like, how does it decide which of the 50 to show me and in which order? That's not quite clear yet. But again, I just want to say that this is hopefully something that's going to be beneficial for us content creators and business owners. All right, next up, number three on our list. One of the biggest changes coming to Instagram is 3 minute reels announced by Instagram's CEO himself. We are now going to be allowed to post reels that are double the length that we were previously allowed. In the past, you have only been able to post reels that were up to 90 seconds long, so a minute and a half. And now we're going to be able to post three minute reels. Now, what I'm about to explain is going to be a little bit confusing. And I know it's confusing. It's very confusing when Instagram first made this announcement. So stick with me for a second and hopefully I'm going to be able to demystify this whole thing. Because you might be thinking, as many people have commented on my post recently. Well, Brock, we've already been able to post reels that are longer than three minutes. Yes, you have. But there's a distinction and let me explain. So about a year ago, Instagram made a change in terminology so that now any video that you post on Instagram, with the exception of stories, is called a reel. So if you post a video to your profile grid, even if it's not like technically a reel, like it's not full screen, it's like a cropped in little horizontal video, it's considered a reel. And in the past, into this day, you're able to post videos that are up to 10 minutes long in some cases. Some accounts can go as long as 10 minutes. But those, while they're called reels, they're not treated as the reels. The feature that was announced in 2020, that feature reels that we're used to. So they're called reels, but they're not Treated like reels. The only things that have been treated like reels are actual reels. Reels that are 90 seconds or less and that are posted in the full screen vertical format. And what do I mean by that? What do I mean by treated like a reel? What I specifically am referring to is receiving the benefits that reels receive. And those benefits are increased reach to non followers on average. On Instagram, the kind of post that receives the most reach, AKA the most views to non followers is reels. So while you could post a video in the past that was five minutes long and it would technically be called a reel, it was not eligible for that expanded reach. It was not eligible to reach those new people. Now you're able to post videos, AKA reels that are up to three minutes long and still receive that reach to non followers, still receive that reach and recommendation to people who do not already follow you. Of course, this likely begs the question, so what should we do? Should we start posting 3 minute reels? How long should our reels be? Well, let me teach you what we teach in the Insta Club hub, which is called the miniskirt rule. The miniskirt rule is as follows. Your content should be long enough to cover the important bits, but short enough to hold attention. Hopefully you never forget that term, miniskirt rule. But essentially what I'm saying is, is that there is no magic length for your reels. There's also no magic length for captions. There's no magic length for number of slides in a carousel. It doesn't matter how long it is. What matters is can you hold people's attention. And so the mini skirt rule is hopefully a good way to keep in mind that hey, if you need 17 seconds to communicate an idea thoroughly, then use 17 seconds, but don't force yourself to make it a minute long and just keep repeating yourself and saying the same sentence over and over again and wasting time because that's going to bore people. You're going to lose their attention and they're going to stop watching. So as long as it needs to be. But no longer is another way to think about it. So should you start posting three minute reels? I mean, sure, you could experiment with it, but chances are if you struggle to get people to watch a 10 second or a 30 second reel, it's going to be much tougher to get people to watch a full three minute reel. Ultimately, just keep the miniskirt rule in mind and you'll be fine. All right, number four on our list. Another massive change to at least the way Instagram visually looks is a change to our profile grid since the dawn of Instagram. When you look at someone's profile, everything in the grid is a square. So it doesn't matter if the post itself is a vertical reel, a horizontal landscape, sunset picture. It doesn't matter what the size of the post is. When we look at the grid, everything is cut into equal one by one squares. Well, now Instagram is changing to have a rectangular grid. So we're going to see three rectangles that are taller than they are wide, and those are going to fill up the grid rather than squares. If you're familiar with TikTok and what the TikTok profile pages look like, it looks very similar to that. Now, what does this mean for us business owners and content creators? First of all, it means anything that you have posted in the past now might look a little strange on the feed. If you are someone who has really spent a lot of time curating an aesthetically pleasing feed that fits together geographically and looks really visually appealing and pretty, take a look at your feed because it might look different. Now, I know that there are some celebrities, specifically some musicians, who do these really intricate designed curated feeds in order to announce new songs and new albums. And it was quite funny after this announcement was made to see the way their profile grids suddenly looked so different and so wonky and so not put together. Now, Instagram has created an easy way for us to go back and edit those past covers in order to make them look right and look visually appealing on the grid. All you have to do is go to the post in which you want to change its cover, tap the three dots in the upper right hand corner, and then you'll be able to edit the COVID itself. However, I don't think this is necessary. I mean, sure, you know, if you're a famous musician and your whole grid looks like mismatched puzzle piece, you could do that. If you're someone who really cares about the aesthetics of your grid, you could at least go back through maybe the most recent six or nine posts. But I wouldn't scroll all the way back to posts from three years ago and worry about fixing them and updating them. Because a Most people, like 95% of people, are never going to scroll back that far. And the 5% who are, are likely not going to care. They're not going to think it's that big of a deal. Because soon we'll all come to an understanding that, hey, Instagram made this big change and so they can't expect us to go back and change the covers on hundreds and hundreds of posts now. This change in cover size has caused a lot of people to ask, well, do my posts now need to be a different size? No, not necessarily. Your posts can still be whatever size you want them to be. Your posts can still be full screen reels, you can still post a 5x4 photo, you can still post a carousel that's in landscape and it's wide. It doesn't really matter how big the post is, because no matter how big it is, the COVID on your grid will be a 4 by 3 ratio, 4 being the height and 3 being the width. So if you are someone who custom makes your covers and you do design them, that might be something to consider, keeping in mind when you are reformatting and designing covers in the future. But generally speaking, this isn't going to affect that many of us on the day to day. Just make sure that you're aware that instead of fitting in a tight square box like you used to have to, now you have a little bit more space vertically and below you. While the people who have spent a lot of time curating an aesthetically pleasing feed are definitely unhappy about this change, the general feedback and consensus seems to be that it looks cleaner, it looks a little bit less busy and distracting because when you had squares, you could obviously fit more squares on the screen at one time, but now that they're a little bit taller being vertical rectangles, it puts less posts on the screen at one time, thus creating a little bit more of a calming sense and not making the profiles feel so busy and chaotic. All right, so everything I've talked about so far has already taken place. It's a change that has already been implemented. That doesn't mean that 100% of accounts have access to these changes, but it does mean that 100% of accounts should have access. It just takes time to reach all 2 billion Instagram users. We're all on different devices, we're all in different countries with different regulations, we're all on different softwares. It takes a long time for Instagram to have these updates reach everyone. I know for myself personally, I have some of these updates. Like I have three minute reels, I have the Friends following feed, and I have the removal of fact checkers, but I don't have the rectangular grid yet for myself. But a lot of people who can look at my profile see it on their end. So it's again just a change that's going to take place over time, but everything I've mentioned so far is a change that has already been implemented. If you do not have access to any of these changes, don't worry. It's not like it's going to limit your growth or anything like that. I would just, you know, keep updating your app regularly, keep refreshing, make sure that you're on the latest software and just be patient for these updates to reach you. Now, the three remaining changes are official. They have been posted about by Instagram and confirmed that they are coming out in the near future. But for two of the three, we don't have exact dates. We know that it's coming likely within the next one to two months, but sometimes there are delays in the software being rolled out, so we'll see when these actually take effect. But the final three changes that I wanted to talk to you about today are, number one, highlights are moving to their own tab on the profile grid. So when you look at your profile grid right now, or at least before these changes have taken place, you see your bio, and then right below your bio you see those little circles, those are called your highlights. Those are essentially a collection, a curated collection, a compilation, if you will, of stories that you have previously posted. You get to select what stories go on, what highlights, how many highlights you want to create, et cetera, et cetera. You can include stories going all the way back to 2019, even 2018 if you want to. But Instagram has found that over time people have looked at and used highlights less and less and less. We've been reporting here at Build you'd Tribe that highlights just aren't that important. And so they're not really something that you should focus very heavily on because usually only about 1 to 2% of new followers will even look at your highlights. So it's never been something that's important and that's why Instagram is moving their location. Basically, Instagram deemed that having such a prominent focal point at the top of your profile, right below your bio and above all of your feed content wasn't the best use of space. So they're moving it to its own tab on your profile grid. So if you look at your profile, you can see the leftmost tab shows you every post that you have made to the feed, whether it's a photo carousel or a reel. The second tab shows you all of the reels that you have posted. And then if you have a third tab, it is likely anything that you have been tagged, but not everyone has access to that. Depending on whether or not you choose to show your Tagged posts, essentially. Now there's going to be a fourth tab, which I believe is going to go in between the Reels tab and the Tagged tab. And this is going to be a tab specifically for your highlights. It's not exactly clear yet exactly how it's going to look, how it's going to function, but it's just moving locations and that's really all you need to know for now. Now I know a few times today I've brought up the Insta Club Hub and you might be wondering, what is that? The Insta ClubHub is the Instagram resource that my mom and my co created and co run, where we give you everything that you need for Instagram. We tell you exactly what you need to know in the most concise and helpful way possible every week, so that if you only have like five minutes to grow on Instagram, boom, we give that to you and you're good to go. We also give you a personalized content calendar every month. We have a really massive team who is able to help us with these. And so every single member of our club gets a customized content calendar telling you exactly what to post with scripts and hooks and hashtags every day of the month for all 30 days of the month. We also offer a free profile review to any annual members. So I just wanted to let you know a little bit more about that. I will say last year our average engaged Insta Club Hub member grew by about 15,900 followers. And so the results really speak for themselves. If you want to check that out, we'll put the link down in the show notes below. We do offer a $7 two week trial. So if you want to jump in the trial and just see what the club is like for the next two weeks, that would be a great way to test the waters and to see if the Insta Club Hub is really all it's cracked up to. But okay, back into the list. The sixth big new change coming to Instagram and this one I think is going to be massive. I think this is going to drastically impact the way that we think about our feed and the things we're posting. And the change is we are now going to be able to customize and reorder our profile grid. Now this change is kind of crazy because just a few days ago Instagram CEO answered a question on his stories about this. Someone said, are we ever going to be able to reorder our profile grid and put the posts in the order we want them? And he was like, yeah, you know, that's a good idea, but there's a lot of challenges like how would we do that? What happens when there's a new post? Does it go to the top? Do you get to pre select like where it goes in? How does all of this work? How do we tell people where the recent posts are versus what the order you want them to appear is? And so those questions are still not answered. But the answer we do have is that coming soon, you will be able to reorder drag around your posts on your profile grid and make them look however you want. This is a first of its kind feature on social media and I'm really interested to see the way it impacts our use of Instagram and the best practices around what to put where on your profile grid. It's going to be very, very interesting. Of course YouTube has the ability to customize your YouTube channel page. You can put like different playlists and organize what playlists show up in what order. But on any other social media, TikTok, Twitter, anything like that, you haven't been able to customize how your posts show up. Like, yes, there are pinned posts on Instagram that's been around for a while and there are pinned posts on TikTok, but after that, after the three pinned posts, everything else is just in reverse chronological order. And so it'll be very interesting to see how this is implemented. And as soon as it is rolled out and as soon as we do have best practices to report, of course we will share them with you here at Build you'd Tribe. And I should say first and foremost, we will share them with our Insta ClubHub members in the club. So that was second to last, last but not least. And I do have kind of like a rumor that I want to tell you after this seventh one, so stick around for that as well. The seventh new update coming to Instagram is actually not coming to Instagram itself. It's coming from Instagram and it's a brand new app. It's basically Instagram's way of competing with capcut. For those of you who don't know, or maybe a lot of you found out when TikTok was banned is that Cap Cut is owned by the same company that owns TikTok. So a lot of people who were like, meh, I don't care if TikTok is banned, they suddenly cared because Capcut was banned alongside of it. So as opportunist as it may seem, the day Cap Cut was banned, Instagram announced their new editing app called Edits. It is going to be launched in March of 2025. So it's about a month or two away from being rolled out. But essentially they're deeming it as an alternative to capcut, not necessarily a direct competitor, because they say it's not going to have some of the features that Cap Cut has, like templates, which is one of the reasons that people really love Capcut. Instead, it's going to be an editing app that is very integrated with Instagram. It's going to have trending audios from Instagram. It's going to have an analytics system where it can tell you why certain reels performed well or didn't perform well and kind of give you feedback, which I think is going to be fascinating. It's also going to have a editor, an editing platform, an editing interface that very much aligns with what we expect of Instagram reels. So it's really going to be a buddy, buddy app for Instagram. And I highly doubt that reels edited in the Edits app are necessarily going to perform better than reels edited anywhere else. But I could be wrong about that and that could change when Edits does roll out. I'm going to check on it, I'm going to download it. I have already pre ordered it from the App Store and I recommend that you do the same just to try it out. But if nothing else, I want you to be aware that this app is coming. Now, I mentioned a rumor. Now this is a rumor, but I also can confirm that it is, at least in testing, so it's not just a completely fabricated rumor or some story. I can confirm that this is something that Instagram is working on. Whether or not it becomes official has yet to be seen, but there is rumored to be a complete redesign of the Instagram app. Instagram has found that the number one most used area of Instagram is. Wait for it. Take a guess in your mind what area of Instagram is used the most. It's not stories, it's not reels, it's not the feed. The most used area of Instagram is the DMs, and so Instagram wants to make the DMs more of a focal point. So the rumor is that DMs, the button to access your DMs, is being moved from where it currently is in the upper right down to the center middle, which is currently where the plus sign, AKA the post button is. Also a part of this test is that the Reels tab and the Explore tab are flip flopping places. So that now the Second button going from left to right is going to be the Reels tab instead of the Explore tab. And the fourth button is going to be the Explore tab instead of the Reels tab. Now, is this necessarily going to impact your growth, your sales, your business? No. But it's likely going to be frustrating. I understand that Instagram wants to make DMs more of a focal point, but they're kind of destroying our muscle memory. And this is just my personal opinion at this point, if our muscle memory is that DMs are in the upper right and that's where we go to tap and enter our DMs, moving them to the bottom center is going to have somewhat of a learning curve for it. So it might even be that for the first few days or weeks after this change is rolled out, if it is rolled out, people are going to struggle to find their DMs, they're going to struggle to find the Reels tab and the Explore tab because everything is just not intuitive. And so that's just something that I want you to be aware of moving forward. So if you ever do open your Instagram app and the DMs have moved and all these other but buttons have flip flopped and changed places, just know that this is something Instagram is testing. And as soon as we know it's official, we will let our Insta Clubbers know. We will let you know here at Build you'd Tribe. And if nothing else, I'll see you next week. And as always, happy networking.
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