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You clicked on this because you don't have very much time to spend on growing your Instagram, but you know that you need to grow your Instagram in order to grow your business. Well, I am going to give you the five things that you need to be doing in 2026 to grow your Instagram in less than 10 minutes per day. And let's get right into it, because the first thing that you need to be doing is actually a setting that you need to turn on just once. It's not something that you're going to have to do every single day. But this setting is going to make a huge difference to growing your following and engaging your followers. Both of these settings are available through ManyChat and they are, number one, the follow to DM. This is a brand new feature that was just launched at the end of 2025 that allows you to instantly and automatically send a message to anyone the moment they follow you. So once you turn this on, if someone new visits your profile and they click that follow button, they will get a message from you right in that very moment. Now, as you can imagine, this can become very spammy and very overwhelming and very off putting for new followers. So I do not recommend using this feature as a way to sell or get people on your email list or even as a way to get them a free download. I know it's free, I know it's super valuable, but they just followed you. So to use a dating analogy, don't propose on the first date. Take your time a little bit. Instead, use this feature as a way to welcome them and just say hi to. Thank you so much for being here. Hi. I appreciate you following me. Hey, I appreciate you. Becoming a follower means a lot. Something super simple and super kind like that is all you need to do. But this is a great way to familiarize your new followers with number one, getting direct messages from you. Because you hope that in the future they're going to be direct messaging you, you're going to be direct messaging them. It's just a great way to kind of break the ice. Speaking of, you could say, hi, thank you so much for following me. And you could say if you want more info on blank, you could check out this post. I do think it's okay if you want to link them to one of your posts or maybe tell them to check out the pinned post on your profile. But again, I would not try to sell anything. I wouldn't send them to any links. But the second thing that this feature does is it engages the new followers so that they are more likely to see your future posts. The second setting that you need to turn on is also a feature within manychat and it has kind of the inverse name that this is the DM to follow. And essentially what this automation is is an automation so that if someone requests a link from you, they comment a keyword, or they direct message you with some specific trigger word. Manychat will check if they are following you first, which of course most people are. If they're asking for your ebook, if they want to sign up for your course, if they want to check out your newsletter, they're probably following you. But in case they aren't. But not to get too far ahead of ourselves, we are going to talk about trial reels later today which are shown to non followers. If someone wants one of these things from you, if they interact with your DM automation and they're not following you, it can automatically check that they're not following you and then send them a prompt asking them to follow before sending them the ebook, the link, the guide, whatever it is that you were promoting in the first place. All you have to do to set up the ManyChat new follower automation is to go to the homepage of ManyChat and then click on this button that says say hi to new followers. Then in the upper left hand corner you can see that it says when someone new follows you, you can set a time delay. I do recommend using a time delay because I think it would be frustrating and maybe even a little bit annoying if the second you followed someone you got an instant message. So I'm gonna do a five minute time delay and then I'm gonna click on next to set up what is going to happen next. As you can see it says they will get and then it has an opening dm. This opening DM would be a great way to send them a message if you wanted them to have multiple messages sent or kind of like opt into your Instagram DMs. But that's not necessarily what I recommend doing. So instead we're going to turn off the opening DM feature and we are not going to turn on the ADM asking for their email because again we're not selling, we're not trying to get them on our email list, we're just trying to say thank you. So then we hit next it says and then they will get but obviously there was nothing there got in the first place. So then they will get this message, a DM with a link. But we're not going to add a link, I'm just going to say thanks so much for the follow, I appreciate you. All right, and that's it. That's literally all we are doing with the welcome message. Then we just press go live and we're done. This next automation can also be found on the manychat homepage. And all you have to do is go on the homepage and then click on Explore all templates. And then I want you to scroll down and click on this one that says follow first, then freebie click set up template. And now as you can see they have this pre built template with notes. These little yellow bars are notes and it will walk you through. So you could turn this on for a specific post, you could use this for all posts, you could use this for your next post. And basically the way it will work is that they will trigger the automation by commenting on your post or reel. Then they will receive this message automatically and instantly from you, making sure that they follow you before you send them the free guide, the free course, the download, whatever it may be. Then this is where the magic happens. As it says in this condition, ManyChat will automatically check if the person is following you. If yes, we will send them the offer, we'll send them the free guide, whatever it was that they wanted. If no, we will ask them to follow you. If yes, boom, they can get the free guide. If no, then there's a follow up message basically saying, wait, are you sure? This is a little embarrassing. Something went wrong. This is a very powerful way to not just give people the links that they are looking for, but but also make sure that they are following you in the process. The second thing that I would recommend doing if you only have 10 minutes per day to grow on Instagram, is posting five trial reels. Like I mentioned a moment ago, trial reels are a kind of reel that only reach non followers. They are not shown to your existing followers. And so they can be a really powerful tool for growth. But Instagram has some unequal rules as to how many trial reels each of us is allowed to post per day or per month. But according to the most recent reports, the lowest ceiling possible is five trial reels per day. And so what I'm recommending for you is to post no more and no less than five trial reels per day. And now I know at this point you are scratching your head because I know you're like, how the flip, Am I supposed to post 5 trial reels every single day if I only have 10 minutes? I mean we're only a few minutes into this episode and according to this math, you have at most two minutes per reel. Don't worry, I've got you covered. We have an upcoming episode of Build you'd Tribe coming out in the next few weeks. That's going to be my entire formula that I actually just created and went through myself that allowed me to create over 150 trial reels in less than about 15 or 20 minutes. And so essentially what that upcoming video is going to walk you through is how to batch your content. How do you make a bunch of trial reels so that every single day you just have to post them? Unfortunately, there's currently no way to schedule trial reels. Adam Mosseri has said that they're working on that. And so hopefully in the future, this isn't even something that you have to do manually each day. But of the five trial reels that I recommend that you post per day, four of them are batchable. Four of them could be made ahead of time so that you can do maybe an hour of work once a month or an hour of work every couple of months, and then you can every single day just take a few seconds to actually press the post button. But as I just foreshadowed, there are five different kinds of trial reels that I do recommend posting each day. And they are as follows. Number one, the this is a trial reel. Trial reel. This is a style of trial reel where you straight up call out the fact that this is a trial reel. You call out the fact that the viewers do not follow you. You call out the fact that this is reaching them because they've never seen your content before. And, and then you use that as an opportunity to introduce yourself or introduce your page or your content and invite them to follow. This is a very simple and easy style of reel to create. And even if you didn't batch this ahead of time, this is something that probably wouldn't take more than a few seconds. Pick a random audio that you like, grab a random B roll of yourself that relates to your niche, and then slap some text on the screen that essentially says this is a trial reel. You're seeing this because you don't follow me. And every single day I post healthy gluten free recipes that you can make in less than 15 minutes. Hit follow if that's something you're into. The second kind of trial reel that I recommend posting every single day to maximize your growth on Instagram is recreations of your past best performing content. Now, unfortunately, Instagram no longer Gives views to content that is a direct duplicate of something you've posted before. So unlike the past, where you could take a reel that you've previously posted that went viral and and then just keep repeating it over and over again, uploading the exact same reel as a trial reel, now what you have to do is make a recreation, make a re edit, or tell the same joke, but in a new setting, refilm it. Basically you have to modify or create an entirely new reel so that it is distinct from the original creation. But it's totally fine to use the same joke, tell the same story, start with the same hook, or cover the same topic. For example, one of my best performing reels that I post every few months, honestly is a video of me holding up an emoji trophy. And then I add text on the screen that says this award is for blank. And maybe it's people who haven't used whatever the super popular trend is right now. Or maybe there's some sort of sarcastic comment. Or maybe this award is for anyone who doesn't own a labubu. Something that's kind of silly, fun, and also relates to my niche. And so I take that B roll video and I just change out the text to update whatever the new award is or whatever's trending right now, or whatever sarcastic joke I wanna make. And that is a repeatable formula that works really well. And that is one of my five daily trial reels. The third kind of trial reel that I recommend posting every single day is, let's call it low hanging fruit. This might be a cap cut meme template. This might be a trend. This might be a popular lip sync or voiceover audio. This might be a viral reel template that everyone is using right now to recap their 2025. Basically, the goal here is not to spend a bunch of time, energy or effort to create a super awesome reel. Because the reality is most of your trial reels will not get that many views. They will not be shown to that many people. Maybe you'll get a couple hundred or a few thousand views if you're lucky. But there's no point in spending more than a few minutes making your trial reels because usually the reward is not worth the investment. So the third kind of reel is just something that you can make quickly. And again, that one is totally batchable. You could go to Capcut and scroll through their meme templates and just create a bunch of them at once. And you could scroll through Instagram's list of trending audios and just pick out a bunch that you want to use or a bunch of templates that you want to recreate. Or you can sign up for our email list where every single week we send you five trending audios and five meme ideas. If you wanna do that. It's totally free and super helpful. I know a lot of Instagram memberships that cost 2030, $50 a month for what we send out every single week in our email newsletter. So I'll put that link down in the Show Notes below, but if you wanna type it into your Browser directly, it's Instaclubhub.com forward/newsletter. Daily trial reel number four is a trial reel with DM Automation. A lot of you might be familiar with DM automation, which is the thing where creators will say comment the word blank and you'll get this thing. It's one of the best, if not the best way on Instagram to increase engagement, which increases views, which can increase sales. And of course we've been talking about trial reels, so you're familiar with trial reels. But what a lot of people might be having a light bulb moment about right now is that you can actually bring these two things together, but by slapping a DM Automation call to action onto your trial reel, just like you would any other reel that you share to your normal feed. You can use ManyChat for DM automation on your trial reels. And when people comment that keyword, like I mentioned in the first point today, they will receive an automatic message that checks if they're following because it's a trial reel, they're probably not. So they will be prompted to follow you and and then once they do, they can get that free download, the guide, the PDF, whatever it is that they wanted in the first place. This is a super powerful tool. I used this recently on a trial reel that ended up getting over 1 million views, which again, that's a million views from non followers only. And I added DM Automation to that. And so I got thousands of keyword hits, thus thousands of leads for our business from one single trial reel that honestly only took me a few seconds. It was that daily trial reel is batchable. The final daily trial reel that I would argue is probably the toughest one to batch, the one that you may not want to batch, and that is using trial reels as they were intended. Basically, the fifth daily trial reel is a true test, a true trial, a true experimentation. Maybe there is a certain meme that you're just not sure if it's going to hit. Maybe there's a joke that you're still kind of figuring out how you want to tell it. Maybe there's a new style of content that you want to experiment with. Maybe there is a certain way of phrasing things that you just haven't quite figured out yet. You're not sure how to say it concisely yet still in a way that makes sense. That's what the fifth kind of trial reel can be used for. Basically experimenting or trialing your different ideas. And I realized that we've made it through this far and I haven't even talked about what you should post for your actual followers. We talked about trial reels which reach non followers, and we talked about setting up things so that new followers or new potential followers get automatic messages. But what should you do for your existing followers? Right, because the purpose of Instagram is not just to grow a following, but to nurture and connect with your existing followers to hopefully turn them into customers. Well, if you have a very limited amount of time, like 10 minutes per day, then I would suggest focusing on low hanging fruit reels. Now I think carousels can be a really great way to grow on Instagram and I think that carousels are really going to have a resurgence in in 2026. According to a metrical study from the end of 2025, carousels do get more engagement, a higher engagement rate, and more views from your existing followers than reels do. But with all that being said, reels have a significantly higher amount of views and reach from non followers. To say it another way, if you want to reach new people, if you want to grow your audience and also serve your existing followers at the same time, reels are probably your best bet. But not all reels are created equally. Literally. Some reels take hours to create and some reels take a few seconds to create. If you have a very limited amount of time, rather than spending, let's say 10 minutes today, 10 minutes tomorrow, and 10 minutes the next day, so 30 minutes in total, working on one single really highly produced great reel that you think is just going to knock it out of the park and go viral, I would instead focus on spending 10 minutes each day day. So a shorter amount of time getting an actual reel posted. And I believe this is more effective for a few reasons. Number one, how often have you made a reel that you were like, this is gonna go viral. This is so good. This is like the best reel I've ever made. Maybe you spent a long time, maybe even hours editing it and then you post it and it absolutely flops. It's crickets. Like you were so excited to post it, but then when you did it just didn't perform well. Yeah, me too. That happens to me all the time and so that should be evidence for yourself. That's evidence for me that we're not very good judges of our own content. And it's usually the content that we spend the most time, energy and effort. Are you ready to take your business marketing to the next level? Meet Brevo, the all in one marketing and CRM platform built to connect you with your customers, boost engagement and grow your business smarter. With Brevo, you can manage all of your customer interactions in one place, nurture leads with their built in CRM, reach your audience through email and SMS and keep them coming back with powerful automations. But here is where it gets really exciting. Meet Aura, Brevo's AI Assistant. Aura helps you craft smarter campaigns by suggesting personalized content, optimizing send times, and even analyzing performance data to improve strategies in real time. It's kind of like having a marketing expert on your team 24 7. And of course, Brevo offers advanced analytics, seamless integrations and AI driven personalization. It's basically everything you could need to create seamless multichannel campaigns that hit the mark every single time. Get started for free today or use code TRIBE50 to get 50% off the starter and standard plans for the first three months of an annual subscription. Just head to www.brevo.com tribe and take your marketing further with Brevo and Aura. For the last few years I've been using Notion to basically organize my entire life. It's so much more than just a to do list app. It's truly a one stop shop for organizing and any area of your life or business. And it's not just great at organization, it's also great at automations as well. There's so many complex things that you can do and build that can happen automatically and instantly within Notion. And now for the first time they are introducing Notion AI agents. The new Notion Custom Agents will allow you to automatically perform advanced tasks without you even having to lift a finger. For example, I built a Notion custom agent that automatically pulls the link to any reel that I have posted and and then it pulls out the text that I say or the text on the screen in the first few seconds of the reel. Basically it pulls out my hook and then it's able to look at how that post performed and compare it to the hook which allows me to see which hooks are actually working so that I can reuse them and tweak them for future reels. Notion is an AI powered connected workspace for teams. Notion brings all of your notes, docs and projects into one space that just works. It's seamless, flexible, powerful, and with AI built in, you spend less time switching between different apps and tools and more time creating great work. Now with Notion's custom agents, busy work that used to take hours or, let's be honest, didn't really get done at all runs itself. The easiest way to think about the difference between a custom agent and normal AI is that normal AI requires you as the human to prompt it, but custom agents work for you 24, seven behind the scenes without you having to lift a finger. But don't just take my word for it. Notion is used by more than half of Fortune 500 companies and some of the fastest growing companies in the world, like OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Try custom agents now@notion.com byt that's all lowercase. Notion N O T I-O-N.com by t To try custom agents today. And when you use my link, you're supporting our show again. Notion.com byt Editing and refining and script writing and filming and critiquing and gimmicky edits and all this crap. It ends up doing the worst. And we don't need to get into why that is because. But let that be one reason that you embrace low hanging fruit, that you embrace just pressing posts, that you embrace not overthinking, but intentionally underthinking what you're creating. I'm also a proponent of spending 10 minutes on three separate posts rather than 30 minutes on one post. Because statistically speaking, the more you post, the more you grow. I get asked all the time, Brock, how much should I post? Do I need to post every day? Do I need to post multiple times a day? What happens if I miss a few days? And I always respond with the same eight words. The more you post, the more you grow on Instagram, the more frequently that you post to your feed. So we're not talking about stories, just reels, photos and carousels. The more you grow, the more followers you gain. Multiple studies have shown this, and the head of Instagram himself has even confirmed it recently on one of his own Instagram stories. Now hold up. Does that mean that you need to post every day or even multiple times a day? No, not necessarily. But it does behoove you to do so. And I believe that one of the Ways that you can achieve a higher frequency of posting without burnout or overwhelm is instead of trying to make a post that is the quality level of something that takes 30 minutes but do it in 10, just make a post that's low hanging fruit. Make a post that would take you 10 minutes in 10 minutes. Basically, however much time you have, that's how much time you have. And that needs to be. That has to be good enough. And the final reason that I'm a big fan of increasing your quantity or posting 1B minus post every single day instead of 1A post once a week is because reps practice. The more times you post, the better you get at posting. Now if you're just posting throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping it sticks, that ain't gonna work. I'm never going to encourage anyone to intentionally lower their quality, but I believe most of us stress out way too much over quality, overanalyzing, overthinking, we're gonna come back to this point later. And instead they would benefit way more from just taking a deep breath and pressing post. And just so we're clear, when I say low hanging fruit, that's going to look different for everyone. For some people, they can make B roll reel super fast. For some people, they can make cap cut memes really fast. For some people, they can see a trend or find a popular audio and come up with an idea or a way to fit it into their niche super quickly. These things take practice and with time they get more efficient and they get faster. But ultimately my advice remains the same. Focus on the easier content rather than the stuff that's gonna take you a long time. Before we get into my ultimate and favorite time saving hack, there's something that you might have clicked on this episode expecting to hear about, and that's engaging with your followers, engaging with your followers, responding to DMs, answering comments. That sort of thing has zero algorithmic benefit. And what I mean by that is that Instagram does not reward you for interacting with other people. I don't care how many comments you send, I don't care how many pages you go like and engage with. I don't care how many DMs you respond to. Instagram's not like, oh, Susie was a good little girl and she was super engaged today, so let's push her posts out to more people. No, that's not how it works. Now, human nature might increase the likelihood that if you send someone a dm, they're like, oh, hey, well what's Susie up to. And then they click on your profile. Or if you leave a nice comment on someone else's page, they might go and check out your profile. There is reciprocity. Is that the right word? I don't know why I'm trying to sound fancy right now. There is goodwill, right? So people will be more likely to interact, engage, view, and maybe even follow you if you engage with them first. But that's like maybe the 17th thing I would put on your daily Instagram to do list. Yes, it's important to treat people like people, and yes, it's important to build community. But if you only have 10 minutes a day on Instagram, you would benefit way more from posting than you would on spending five minutes answering your DMs or spending 15 minutes engaging with other accounts. Again, just to make myself clear, algorithmically, no benefit. Human nature might give you a small benefit, but because of those two things, it's not really worth your time unless you have a good amount of time. But without further ado, the fourth thing that I would recommend doing if you only have 10 minutes or less per day to spend on Instagram, is what I call upcycling. Upcycling is essentially a strategy where you take any post that is more than 90 days old and you post it again directly. Same caption, same audio, same everything. Or you make a slight refresh modification, maybe re edit, maybe you rewrite the caption, maybe you change out the audio in the background, but it's essentially just a slight recreation of something that you have previously posted. Now, there's two updates to this strategy that I need to make the first one, and I kind of alluded to this earlier, you cannot upcycle trial reels. So if you've previously posted something as a trial reel, unfortunately you cannot post it again as a trial reel. And from our understanding, if you post a normal reel, you can no longer upcycle that as a trial reel. So basically, trial reels are off limits if that post exists anywhere else on Instagram. The other update that I need to give you is that in the past when I've talked about this strategy, I've told you to take your best content from 90 days or more ago and post it again. But now my recommendations have changed. My recommendation is to take any content that is more than 90 days old and post it a second time. And to take that a step further, I recommend posting every post at least three times before you decide to retire it. Basically, just because it didn't perform well the first time doesn't mean it won't perform well the second time. And inversely, just because it went viral the first time doesn't mean it's guaranteed to go viral the second time. Go back to like summer of 2025 and take some of those posts, posts that would still be relevant today, right? Like, don't post a post with you on the beach in the middle of winter. Don't post a post about like seven Fourth of July recipes in the middle of February. But as long as it's still relevant, as long as the content of the post would still make sense today, post it a second time. You do not need to delete the original. You do not need to archive the original, you do not need to edit the original. You do not need to say this is a repost. You don't need to do any special hashtags or any special tricks. Literally, just post the post a second or a third or a fourth time once the post has not performed well for three consecutive appearances. That's when I would allow you to retire the post. At that point, you can say, hey, maybe this topic is off. Maybe the way I'm presenting it is off. Maybe the editing was bad. Maybe people just don't like this post and so you don't have to necessarily figure out why. But at that point you can shelf it. You can say, hey, I'm not going to post this again, but it needs to have at least three attempts before it strikes out. And last but not least, maybe actually the biggest time saver of all is to feck perfection. And I hope you can figure out what I'm saying there. Stop trying to make perfect posts. Stop overthinking everything that you create. Stop spending so much time, energy and effort script writing and trying to come up with the perfect editing and adding all these gimmicky transitions. And then you're going to add fancy closed captions. Then you're going to do this, and then you're going to think about it for another few days, then you're going to edit some more and then you're going to overthink. And then you're going to think, oh, is I should really, really post that. That kind of reminds me. Just press post. Stop overthinking your damn content. No one's paying that close of attention to you. No one's going to remember what you post, I would say a few days later, but honestly, no one's going to remember what you posted a few hours after you posted it. So please just press post. Stop overthinking. Stop overstressing. And lean in to underthinking. Lean into imperfect posts. Lean in to the raw, real, imperfect content. That's what we say we all want on Instagram. We all scroll through Instagram. We're like, I wish there was more people being real and honest and authentic. And they stopped filtering and photoshopping and trying to make everything perfect. Be the change you want to see. Create posts quickly. Click post. Sometimes without spell checking, I do that. Sometimes I make spelling errors, I make typos, I forget to turn on automations. I make posts that flop. I make posts that fail. I have a great idea and I'm going to whip it up really quick. And sometimes it absolutely bombs and does terribly. Just press post. That is how you learn. That is how you grow, that is how you improve. That's how you get more efficient, and ultimately, that's how you have success on Instagram. Thank you so much for listening today. Don't forget to hit subscribe, because every single week on this podcast, I upload new episodes about growing on social media with the most efficient strategies possible. Because everything I do is driven by three words in less time. I want to help you grow and see results and get more views and get more engagement and have success in your business in less time. Thank you so much, and as always, happy networking.
Host: Brock Johnson
Release Date: December 22, 2025
Podcast Theme: Social Media Growth and Strategy for Entrepreneurs
In this episode, Brock Johnson delivers a 2026 update on the most effective, time-efficient methods to grow your Instagram—assuming you have only 10 minutes per day. He breaks down five actionable strategies, focusing on automation, new Instagram features, and a mindset shift toward quicker, more imperfect posting. The episode is direct, tactical, and framed for busy entrepreneurs and creators looking to maximize growth without spending hours daily.
Follow-to-DM Automation:
DM-to-Follow Automation:
How to Set Up:
On Welcoming New Followers:
On Frequency vs. Quality:
On Perfectionism:
On the Algorithm and Engagement:
“Thank you so much for listening today. ...Everything I do is driven by three words: in less time. I want to help you grow ... in less time. ...Happy networking.” (35:00)
This episode is direct, motivating, and loaded with the exact priorities for Instagram growth in 2026, especially if you’re time-strapped but looking for real, data-backed results.