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Today's episode is brought to you by Shopify, the number one e commerce platform in the world for building your business and selling your products. More about them later. Also later I'll tell you a little bit more about our newest sponsor, which has me super excited, which provides weekly nutritious, wholesome meals that help you hit your goals in less time, energy and effort. Plus, they taste great. Today's episode is also brought to you by Notion, which is so much more than just a task management platform. It truly manages my whole life and with Notion agents, it can now do things for for you. But more about them later. The Instagram train never slows down and according to Adam Mozzeri himself, the algorithm is changing on a daily basis. And so in today's episode, I'm gonna share with you all of the recent Instagram news, the platform updates, new studies that have come out, new features that have been announced, and even some things that are still in testing. And I'm sharing all of this with you so that you can get ahead of the curve and continue to grow your brand or small business on Instagram you can. Which by the way, if we've never met before, hello, my name is Brock Johnson and it is my full time job to do exactly that. It's my job to help you get better results, whether that's more views, followers or customers directly through Instagram by keeping you up to date with the latest strategies, tips and breaking news. And so if you're trying to grow a brand, business or a community, consider hitting that subscribe button. Because every single week on this podcast, I put out helpful tips and videos to help you do exactly that. And from the outset of today's episode, I want you to know that the new updates, new features and studies that I'm going to be sharing with you today are the ones that are most relevant and going to make the biggest difference for you, at least in the near future on Instagram. If I wanted to make a video covering every single new change and tweak that has come out recently, number one, that video would be three hours long, and number two, it would include a lot of information that is just not necessary or helpful for you to know and it would ultimately just confuse or overwhelm you. And so in today's episode, I've tried to distill this information down to the eight biggest and most important updates. And as a precursor to these eight updates, I think it's important to understand the state of Instagram or kind of like, where are we at right now, now? And the stats that I'm about to share with you come from a study titled the State of Social media engagement in 2026, and it was a study that analyzed over 52 million posts. I will link up the full study in the show notes below this episode, but here are some of the key takeaways. Number one engagement across the board on Instagram has decreased by 26% in the last two years. That's a pretty massive drop. And not to get too lost in the weeds, but I believe the primary reason for this is that there are a lot more people posting a lot more content and there's not necessarily a lot more people consuming or the amount of time that people consuming hasn't necessarily increased. Basically, if we're thinking about this in terms of supply and demand, supply is way up and demand is relatively stagnant. The second thing that you need to know about the state of Instagram right now is that it kind of performs like two different platforms at the same time. And what I mean by that is that on the Instagram feed, reels and non reels, also known as carousels and photos, are treated almost completely differently both by the algorithm and by the audience. Reels on average get 36% more reach than carousels, but carousels get 12% more engagement. And usually those two things are a predictor of each other. The more engagement you get, the more reach you will be rewarded with. The more reach you are rewarded with, the more people are likely to engage. However, this shows us quite clearly that Instagram is favoring reels in terms of what is going to get the most views. But the average audience member, your average follower, is more likely to engage with your carousels or your photos. Not only are carousels getting more overall engagement, they also have a significantly higher, higher engagement rate. The median engagement rate for carousels is 6.9%, while the median engagement rate for single images is 4.4%. And the median engagement rate for reels is just 3.3%. So less than half the engagement rate that carousels receive. So as I always say, there is no one size fits all approach to growing on Instagram. But I do believe that a healthy Instagram strategy includes at least some reels and some carousels. I think that if you're in a season where you're trying to really maximize views and exposure, maybe you want to focus more on reels. And if you're in a season where you're maybe selling, trying to generate more trust or trying to generate more of a community engagement feel on your instagram then I would lean more into carousels. And I really believe that once you figure out carousels and you can kind of unlock ways to make them more creatively and more uniquely, they can be a serious driver for your Instagram's overall growth and reach as well. By the way, just a few weeks ago I put out an episode with eight helpful carousel ideas. These are original, unique ideas that aren't just cookie cutter, stale, overdone ideas. So if you want, I'll link that up in the show notes below so you can check that episode out. But with all that being said, let's get into the eight Instagram updates that you need to know. And number one directly relates to carousels, and that is that finally you have the ability to reorder your carousels. This feature is one that many users have been asking for for a very long time, and Instagram has finally given us the ability to do so. All you have to do to reorder the slides in your carousel after posting is tap on those three dots in the upper right hand corner and then long press or hold down your finger on any of the individual slides and you'll be able to then drag it to the right or to the left to move its position within the carousel. Now, why might you want to do this? Number one is the obvious reason, which is you made some sort of mistake, or maybe Instagram had some sort of glitch. You meant for one slide to be in position number four and it ended up in position number three. And so now after posting, you want to swap the order rather than having to delete the entire post and re upload it. The second use case for this feature is deleting calls to action that are no longer relevant. For example, we recently had a launch of our Instagram membership, the Insta ClubHub, which is the number one Instagram community and resource in the world. I'm very proud to say that. And by the way, if you want to check it out, we will put the link in the description below so you can join for two weeks for just $7. But we had a big webinar coming up that we were trying to get a lot of people to sign up for. Once the webinar happened though, I was faced with a dilemma. Do I delete or archive the posts that were promoting the webinar, or was there some other solution? And thanks to this feature from Instagram, what I was able to do is I was able to go to some of these slideshows, some of these carousel posts, and delete Just the last slide. Because it was only on the last slide that I was talking about the webinar and telling people comment this keyword for the link to the webinar. So by deleting that final slide, people were still able to enjoy the carousel. The carousel was still able to get reach. The reach and engagement that the carousel originally received still counted on my account. But the final slide, the call to action, was no longer there. And so people weren't getting confused with outdated information. The third use case for the ability to now reorder your carousels is you could come up with some sort of interactive game. Essentially, you would use your first slide to introduce the game and tell people the instructions. You, you could say something like, here are 10 selfies that I've recently taken and I'm trying to decide which one is going to be my new profile picture. And so based off which one you like, which one you actually double tap on, that one will be moved to the first position, that one will be the first slide in the carousel, and that one will be ultimately what I make my new profile picture. So you could kind of gamify people's interaction. And ultimately what this relies on is a feature that you may not even realize existed that Instagram rolled out about a year ago, where Instagram will tell you how how many likes each slide has received. So once you've posted your carousel, if you tap that button that says View Insights and you scroll down, Instagram will show you slide number one got 13 likes, slide number two got 47 likes, slide number three got 36 likes. And that will tell you directly when people are engaging. And that directly leads to my fourth, final, and I believe most powerful use case for the new ability to reorder your carousel. And it's what I'm going to call the hook swap strategy. This strategy is going to be most effective on carousels where the sequential order doesn't matter. The sequential order does matter if you are telling a story or using your carousel to teach step one, step two, step three in a process. But if you do what's called a curated collection carousel, that is, for example, a carousel with multiple different memes, and maybe all these memes are related to the same topic, but they don't necessarily interact or talk to each other. Like, you don't have to see the first meme for the third meme to make sense. You don't have to see it in the exact order of Slide 1, 2, 3, or 4 for any of them to be funny. Another example of a curated Collection carousel would be a carousel where each slide has some sort of motivational quote or some sort of image that's very inspirational. You don't have to necessarily see the fourth image after the third image for the fourth image to make sense. And so what you can do here is a few hours after posting, you can check your Instagram insights and they will tell you which slide is getting the most likes, which slide is actually making people want to get double tap and like this carousel. And what you can do is you can then reorder the carousel and drag that slide. Let's say it's the fourth slide that is getting the most likes to be the new first slide in your carousel. That means instead of burying what has been proven to be the most effective or most engaging slide as your fourth slide, it's now going to be front and center. It's going to be the first thing that people see. You could also do that, and I would recommend also doing that with whichever slide is getting the second most likes, and I would put that in the second position. Now, basically, you are just maximizing the effectiveness of this carousel based off what people have already been engaging with. The second Instagram algorithm update that you need to be aware of pertains to Instagram stories, and it is an updated best practice for getting the most possible views on your Instagram stories. Now, this is actually something that I've been talking about for a while, but we finally have confirmation from Adam Mosseri himself. Most specifically, this recommendation pertains to the practice of sharing your new feed post to your stories, something that a lot of people do to get more attention on their feed posts. As soon as they post a reel or a new carousel, they will share it to their story and encourage their story viewers to click on it and view their feed post. And while this is definitely an effective strategy for getting more clicks and views and engagement on the feed post, this has been shown to decrease your story views. According to Adam Mozzeri himself, they do not automatic suppress stories that have new posts added to them. But also according to Adam Mozeri, those kinds of stories typically tend to get less views because they're just not quite as interesting. We don't suppress stories about new posts, but in general, those types of stories are often not quite as interesting as other stories. Basically, for most people or most accounts on Instagram, they want Instagram stories to be Instagram stories. They don't want Instagram stories to just be a billboard promoting whatever your latest new post is. If your goal on a particular day is to maximize your feed post views, AKA you want more views on your reel or more engagement on your carousel. Then on that particular day, share your carousel or your feed post or your reel, whatever it may be, to your stories. However, in doing so, you need to understand that it is likely on that specific day your story views will be lower than they usually are. So if your goal is not to maximize feed views, but on a particular day, you want more story views, maybe because you're doing some sort of sale on your stories, maybe because you have a question sticker that you want a lot of responses to. For whatever reason, if you want more story views on any particular day, do not on that day share any feed posts, whether they are your own or someone else's, to your stories. If your goal is to maximize your story views, I'll put a link in the description of an episode that I uploaded last month almost exactly a month ago today. That is how to maximize your story views in less than five minutes. But again, the big takeaway here is that if you want more story views, do not share any feed posts to your stories. Algorithm update number three that you need to be aware of is another one that I've been talking about for a while that we finally have confirmation of from Adam Mosseri, and that is that you are allowed to re upload your own posts as many times as you want. Essentially, recycling or reusing any post that you have posted in the past is allowed with one exception, and that exception is trial reels. If you have previously posted a reel to your feed or as a trial, you are no longer allowed to upload it a second time or a third or fourth time as a trial reel, I should say. More specifically, you're allowed to do so. Like, Instagram won't stop you from posting a reel a second time as a trial reel, but when you do so, you just likely won't get any views. Basically, Instagram will suppress the views on that specific trial reel, not allow it to reach new people, because Instagram flags it as a duplicated video. But if you're just trying to like post the same reel 10 times as trials at the same time in order to try to work around our systems and get more reach, we see that as spam and we're gonna try to shut it down. Imagine this. It's Tuesday around lunchtime, but it feels like Friday because you've already had to wear 17 different hats as an entrepreneur already this week, between shuttling the kids around, writing emails, coming up with reels, it's a never ending job. 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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 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 connect connected workspace for teams. Notion brings all of your notes, docs and projects into one space that just works. 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Notion.com byt Back in 2016, when I started my first real online business, I remember that my head was filled with so many what ifs. What if no one buys this? What if I'm an imposter? What if there's no market? What if I can't sell? What if, what if, what if, what if this is all just a big waste of time and I'm just banging my head against the wall. But what I wish someone told me back then is just like you can imagine all the negative what ifs, there are just as many, if not more positive what what ifs? What if this works out? What if this is my breakthrough? What if this is what sets me financially free? And thanks to one of today's sponsors, Shopify, it's easier than ever to turn those positive what ifs into reality. 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Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling on Shopify today@shopify.com tribe. Again, that's shopify.com tribe. So if you're someone who uses and or relies upon trial reels, basically every single trial reel that you post needs to be unique and different from anything else that you have ever posted to your feed or to trial reels in the past. But the same does not go for your Instagram feed. And this boils down to the strategy that I like to call upcycling. Taking stuff that you've previously posted and reusing it. You're a business owner, you're trying to grow a brand or a community. You're not probably a full time content creator. You don't have hours upon hours every single day to constantly be creating new posts. So what I would suggest for you is exactly what I do for myself, which is that for every post I make, once 90 days have passed, I post it a second time and then 90 days after that I post it a third time. And I do recommend posting everything at least three times in order to give it an opportunity, in order to give it a chance to reach new people. Sometimes it won't perform well the first or the second time, but then on the third time it will go viral. Sometimes it will go viral the first time and then the second time it will flop, and then the third time it will do really well. So for every post that you create, as long as it is evergreen, as long as it would make sense in April and in January and in September, post it three times. And if it does well at least one out of those three times, then post it a fourth time. And if it does well one out of those four, then post it a fifth time. Basically continue posting it until you have three consecutive posts or three consecutive uploads of said post that all don't perform well. If three times in a row it doesn't perform well, it flops, it fails, then you can go back to the drawing board and figure out why. Is it not performing well? Is it the hook? Is it the way I'm structuring the video? Is it something in the visual that just isn't working right, but I want you to give it at least three strikes before it strikes out, and again, space each of these posts out by at least 90 days. That's my personal recommendation. Adam Mozzeri himself actually recently said that you could re upload your posts or recycle your posts every single day if you wanted to. The algorithm will not punish you for doing so, but he would recommend against it and I would recommend against it as well. Because it's likely that if you're posting the exact same thing on Monday as you are on Tuesday as you are on Wednesday, your audience is going to get annoyed or bored. But most of you are probably concerned with your audience getting annoyed or bored every 90 days when they're not. Most people are seeing thousands of posts every single day. And so if your video is uploaded once today and once 90 days from now, your audience has seen tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of posts in between the two that you just posted. So they probably don't remember. Many of them probably didn't even see it the first time. And the few who did see it the first time and do remember it probably wouldn't mind seeing it again because it was probably memorable because it was that good, it was that engaging, it was that insightful, it was that funny or relatable. And so they wouldn't mind seeing it again. So if you want an easy strategy, an easy hack if you will, for posting more and thus growing more without having to significantly increase your input or your time spent, I want you to start upcycling every post you make. Everything you make posted at least three times. Now, that perfectly segues me. It's almost like I wrote the outline for this episode into the fourth algorithm update, which is that Instagram is cracking down on what they call aggregator accounts. Aggregator accounts are meme pages. That's the easiest way to think of these accounts. They're accounts that don't really create their own original content. They just kind of collect the best content from around the Internet and re upload it on their own account. And for many years, this was a very effective way to grow on Instagram. Some of the biggest accounts on Instagram are aggregator accounts. Even accounts like SportsCenter or ESPN are technically aggregator accounts because they're just taking popular clips from around the web from other people and re uploading them to their own profile. This crackdown was something that Meta and Instagram and Facebook originally announced actually back in the summer of 2024. But we've yet to see it implemented very stringently and we've yet to really get any updates on what the guidelines are. That is, until now, Meta has added new specific language to outline what is considered an aggregator account and what they are going to be cracking down on. This is account A taking a reel that account B has already posted and reposting it or re uploading it as their own on account A, kind of like stealing content. Whether they got the permission, whether they got the approval or whatever from account B, they weren't the original one to upload it. And so Instagram is cracking down on them for doing so. And there's basically two different levels to these aggregators. The first one is obvious. It's duplicate content Essentially what I've already described, posting an exact copy of something that someone else has already uploaded, or even taking multiple videos or multiple clips from other people that other people have uploaded and putting them together into one video without significantly changing or modifying them. That would also be an aggregator. So basically, if you're making compilation videos, that would be an aggregator and that would be suppressed by Instagram. The second category is what they call low effort edits. And this is a common way that aggregator accounts have tried to trick the algorithm after this news was made. Basically, they will take the original video and they will add a border, or they will add closed captions, or they will change the text labeling the situation, but it's basically the exact same content. It just looks maybe a little bit different. Maybe they'll add a watermark for their company logo. That is a low effort edit and that is going to be suppressed by Instagram. Additionally, they're going to be cracking down on low effort reaction videos. Now, the key word in that is low effort reaction videos. Low effort reaction videos are the ones where someone says, you've got to watch this and then it just plays someone else's video. Or they're like, check this out. And then it just plays a reel that someone else posted. There's not a high effort there. There's not a high amount of originality. 99% of the content is what someone else posted. All you've done is said, watch this or check this out. Those are being cracked down on. What is not is the high effort reaction videos. Like my daily reviewing one of my followers reels every single day videos, which if you haven't seen over on my Instagram, Brock11Johnson, please follow me. By the way, I'm almost at 900k and I want to hit a million this year. One of the things I'm doing is reviewing one of my followers reels every day until I reach 1 million followers. And so what I am doing is I'm yes, sharing someone else's reel that someone else has already posted, but I'm adding commentary. I'm breaking it down. I'm giving them feedback, I'm giving them ideas of things that they could change. And so that's a high effort reaction video. And that is okay per the Instagram algorithm and their latest updates. These next two algorithm updates come from a Social Media Today study of about 10,000 reels. And they found some really interesting statistics about what is in the reels and what predicts whether or not they're going to perform well. And this first One, which is algorithm update number five, might surprise you, and that is that speech based videos. So basically reels where there is either someone speaking directly to the camera or there is a voiceover in the background, Those get a 5.6% higher engagement rate than music only videos. So if all of your reels are just the 7 second trending audio with a B roll video and some text on the screen style reels, consider including your own voice, whether that's you speaking directly to the camera or adding some sort of voiceover in the background. Additionally, including human speech in your reels increases watch time by almost 25%, up to about 10 seconds as the average watch time. So if you want to retain your viewers for longer, which you should, because that's something that the Instagram algorithm really prioritizes, then consider including human speech in your reels. The second thing that we learned from that study, which is also our sixth overall update in today's video, is that when there's a human face or at least a person appearing within the first three seconds of the video and being on the screen for at least one second, retention improves by 10%. So basically, put a human face in the beginning of your video, put a human face in your hook, have your face on the screen at the beginning of the video and people will be more likely to keep watching and engage. Our seventh Instagram update that you need to be aware of is another what we're going to call finally feature. One of those features that Instagram finally gave us after years of asking for it, and that is the ability to pause reels with a single tap. In the past, if you tapped on a reel, it would mute or unmute the reel. But so many people have been asking for the ability to pause reels. Now you can. Whether you are viewing the reel in full screen mode or in the condensed in feed viewer, if you just tap once a single time on the reel, it should pause the reel. This could be used for a lot of different features. This could be used for some gamification. I'm sure you've seen the style reels where there's an object moving across the screen and the creator will say tap on this reel to pause it. And if you can pause it at the right moment, you're going to get some sort of discount or you're going to win some prize or something. Those style reels are going to be even more effective now that people can just tap a single time to pause before I share the eighth and final update with you, which might actually be the biggest and most important of all three features that I want to make sure that you're aware of that might help you out as a business owner, but if nothing else, I just want them to be on your radar. Number one is a new kind of Instagram stories, which is going to be called Spin Stories. These stories are only available for people who have the meta glasses, but essentially what it's going to allow you to do is if you take a video using the meta of glasses and you go to post them on your Instagram stories, you're going to be able to turn on this spin feature, which will allow your viewer to kind of rotate their phone or spin their device and thus view different angles of your story. It's kind of like virtual reality. The second bonus update that I wanted to share with you is yet another one of those finally features, which is that you are finally able to edit your comments after posting your comments. Now, not everyone has this feature just yet, but Instagram is beginning to slowly roll it out and, and theoretically all you have to do is long press on any comment that you have left, press the edit button, and then you'll be able to correct typos, reword grammar, or delete that emoji that you didn't mean to add. And then the final bonus feature that I want to let you know about is something that's still in testing. But if this comes to Instagram, if this becomes an actual feature, it's going to be a flippin game changer. Like it is going to revolutionize. It's going to be one of the biggest updates in the history of Instagram. And that is that they are testing allowing links in captions, or I should say clickable links in captions. Now, of course you've always been able to add a link into your caption, but the problem is no one's been able to click on it. And so since they haven't been clickable, there's been no point in adding a URL into your caption. But what Instagram is currently testing is allowing meta verified users to add clickable links into your captions. Some people are allowed unlimited links in their captions. Some people are allowed three a month, five a month, 10amonth. There are rumors that it might be tied to the monthly fee that you are paying, but I just want that to be on your radar. I do think that metaverified is worth it. I think it's something that's generally more helpful than it is harmful. And so it's something that I do recommend but ultimately that's up to you. And last but arguably most, the eighth Instagram algorithm update that you need to be aware of comes directly from Adam Mozeri himself, and that is a confirmation as to which forms of engagement are most effective. To say it another way, if you want to reach more people and get more views and thus more engagement on Instagram, what should you be prioritizing? Should you be making content that gets a lot of comments and gets people talking? What about posts that are super educational and get a lot of saves? No, it's neither of those and it's actually not one clear answer, but different answers depending on what your goal is. Adam Mozeri has said that if you want more disconnected reach, which is the term that Instagram uses to describe reach that comes from non followers, if you want more views and more engagement from people who do not already follow you, then you should prioritize share worthy content. Content that gets more shares will help you reach more new people. I've done an entire episode on what is share worthy content in the past and how do you create it more efficiently without having to be some dancing clown. And so if you want to check that out, I will link that up in the show notes below. But the other kind of engagement that is very important, that is actually more important if you want follower reach. If you want your existing followers to see what you are posting, then you should prioritize likes the kind of content that quite simply is getting people to double tap. And like your post is more likely to reach more of your existing followers. And thank you so much for watching today. As always, happy networking.