Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades

Episode 132: The Weekly Scroll: New Reels Changes Explained (+ Creator AI Tools & Pinterest Growth)
Air Date: February 26, 2026
Host: Katelyn Rhoades
Theme: Practical, real-world tools and updates for ambitious women navigating the creator economy – focused on Instagram Reels changes, creator AI tools, and Pinterest growth.

Episode Overview

This episode of "Call Her Creator" is a Weekly Scroll edition, where Katelyn Rhoades delivers a tactical roundup of major social media shifts. She breaks down Instagram's latest updates (especially around Reels), shines a spotlight on Pinterest's quiet surge as a product discovery platform, and introduces listeners to cutting-edge AI tools for content creators. The episode closes with a direct, actionable assignment for listeners to try out in their own content strategy.

Key Discussion Points

1. Instagram Algorithm & Reels: The 2026 Shift

The Mini-Drama Storytelling Trend ([02:05])
- Instagram is copying TikTok's "mini drama" format—emotional, story-driven Reels with strong hooks, cliffhangers, and serialized content ("Netflix in 30 seconds").
- Carousels were hot, but a 50/50 mix with Reels is now optimal. Solely relying on carousels is decreasing reach.
- “People are not watching content for information only anymore. They’re watching for emotion. Storytelling.” – Katelyn ([02:51])
New Instagram Design Update ([05:32])
- Instagram is testing a redesign where users may open directly into Reels instead of their usual home feed.
- “This would be a massive shift… discovering new content would be the priority… reels becoming the main growth tool.” – Katelyn ([06:20])
- Instagram is also testing "Your Feeds," allowing users to customize their Reels experience (Following, Friends, Saved, Suggested, etc.)
- The platform is being fundamentally redesigned around Reels and short-form video.
Strategic Advice:
- Double down on Reels. The algorithm and user experience now both revolve around short-form video.
- Katelyn recommends keeping up with trends via her Club Influence membership, which curates viral Reels, trending audio, and Canva templates for creators.

2. Pinterest's Big Moment

([12:27])

Platform Growth & Opportunity:
- Pinterest just hit 619 million users, $4B in annual revenue.
- 80 billion monthly searches with high buyer intent—users actively type in keywords seeking ideas and products to purchase.
- Katelyn shares her personal workflow for using Pinterest (e.g., home design inspiration, festival outfit ideas), reiterating how easily it converts discovery into purchases, especially through Amazon affiliate links.
Quote:
- “If you’re sleeping on Pinterest, now is the time to get over on there. … They’re also adding AI-powered recommendations and search tools.” – Katelyn ([14:28])
Strategic Advice:
- If you sell physical products, services, or digital offers, Pinterest should be integral to your strategy.

3. Creator AI Tools: Stanley AI

([16:40])

Feature Overview:
- Stanley AI, by Stan, is an AI-driven creative assistant that connects to your Instagram and analyzes your content.
- Learns your past posts, content style, and provides personalized viral Reel ideas and content suggestions.
- How it works: Connect your Instagram, and Stanley AI scrapes your Reels and carousels, then suggests high-performing, on-brand ideas.
- “Stanley promises to deliver you at least, at least minimum, one high-quality content idea per week. But honestly, … it will give you a high-quality content idea every day.” – Katelyn ([17:50])
Personal Testimony:
- Katelyn credits Stanley AI for accelerating growth on her own podcast account and eliminating hours of manual analysis.

4. Concrete Content Assignment: The “Expectation Breaker” Reel

([20:32])

Format Overview:
- Quick, low-edit, talking-head Reel that subverts audience expectations and builds immediate curiosity.
- “The easiest type of content to make that’s performing very well is what I like to call an expectation breaker reel. These go viral because they challenge assumptions.” ([20:40])
Step-by-Step:
1. Film a simple talking head reel—no editing. Make it as if FaceTiming a friend (see Reese Witherspoon’s viral example).
2. Start with a hook: “I know you’re not following me for X, but here’s something you need to hear.”
3. Share one insight: Teach a single perspective shift, not a list.
4. Template suggestions:
  - “I know you’re not following me for [X], but if you want better results in [Y], you need to understand this.”
  - Creator/business/real estate/product versions provided.
Why it works:
- It’s authentic, interrupts predictable scrolling patterns, and Instagram is currently boosting talking head, opinion, and pattern-interrupt videos.

Memorable Quotes & Moments

On adapting content strategy:
- “Even myself, I was a reels girly till the end. But me and the team started posting carousels… We’ve started shifting back to the 50/50 of reels and carousels because I’m seeing a dramatic shift in views.” – Katelyn ([04:03])
On Pinterest buying behavior:
- “Typically I’ll find something, I save it to my board, and later on I’ll go back, and it takes me straight to the link to purchase.” – Katelyn ([13:07])
On creator tool efficiency:
- “Stanley AI just kind of cuts that time in half because he does it for me.” – Katelyn ([18:54])
On creating viral reels:
- “It’s low effort too. Low effort, high reach. Let’s go.” – Katelyn ([22:41])

Important Timestamps

Intro to Weekly Scroll and algorithm context: [01:05–02:20]
Instagram Reels and algorithm shift: [02:20–07:25]
Instagram’s New Reels-Centric Redesign: [05:32–08:47]
Pinterest’s Growth and Strategy: [12:27–15:54]
Stanley AI introduction and benefits: [16:40–18:54]
Content Assignment: Expectation Breaker Reel: [20:32–24:05]

Tone and Language

Katelyn’s tone is encouraging, direct, practical, and a bit playful—rooted in experience but always focused on what’s actionable right now. She consistently uses real-world examples, brings a “no-fluff” attitude, and closes with tangible next steps.

Summary Takeaways

Instagram is now Reels-first—adapt your strategy accordingly.
Pinterest’s growth is a quiet but vital opportunity for business owners—add it to your playbook.
Embrace creator AI tools like Stanley AI to simplify your workflow and generate custom content ideas.
For immediate impact, try the “expectation breaker” Reel: it’s fast, authentic, and algorithm-friendly.

Action Step:
Film and post an “Expectation Breaker” Reel this week, using one of Katelyn’s templates to authentically grab your audience’s attention.

For more tips, resources, and to join Club Influence, check the show notes and links in the episode description.

Transcript

A (0:01)

This episode is sponsored by Brevo, Collective and Shopify. Brevo is your all in one marketing and CRM platform that helps you turn attention into actual revenue. From email marketing to automation to CRM tools, Brevo keeps your audience warm without you manually following up 24. Seven and Collective helps you handle the business side of being a creator or entrepreneur. From bookkeeping to taxes to compliance, they make sure you're structured correctly and and not leaving money on the table. And Shopify your commerce engine. It's how you actually sell the thing. Whether that's digital products, physical products, or services. Shopify gives you the tools to build, market and scale your store all in one place. If you're serious about building a real business, not just posting content, these are the tools behind the scenes. Get started with brevo@brevo.com Creator save with kollective@collective.com CHC and launch with Shopify. Shopify.com CHC

B (1:05)

welcome to another episode of the Weekly Scroll. Here to break down what's trending on social talk business and get a little personal with you guys.

A (1:13)

So every Thursday, I drop a new

B (1:15)

episode just like this one today called the Weekly Scroll. This is where I handpick the most important social media changes, updates, algorithm changes that are going on and, and I break them down into plain language and tell you exactly what they mean for your growth right now. This episode is brought to you by Club Influence, my monthly membership for creators who want to grow on Instagram without spending hours researching trends. Each week, my team and I, we supply you with viral reels, ideas, trending audio content prompts, and canva templates so you can focus on creating, on posting and building that real momentum. All right, let's dive into the biggest social media shifts that you need to know this week. Now, before I get into new updates, I have the most important algorithm shift that we've had for 2026. I just want to highlight it one more time. It's actually on the last episode of the Weekly scroll, which was episode 130. So you might want to pause this, go back and listen and then come back to this one or listen to this one and then go back and listen to that one. But it's very important. Okay, if you' seen less likes, less shares, maybe your views are cut in half. I'm. I'm truly seeing like 50% decrease in views and likes. Then we need to talk. Instagram is officially copying one of TikTok's fastest growing formats, which is the mini drama storytelling. Okay, this is like the point of view reels or like those emotional hooks that, that hook you in and keep you watching. Or they've got that cliffhanger content at the end that makes you want to wait for part number. Or it's like a serialized reel or content like day one of 30. Getting my life together. You know what I'm talking about? You know what I'm talking about. Basically, this is content that feels like Netflix in 30 seconds. People are not watching content for information only anymore. They're watching for emotion. Storytelling. Sure, they still want to learn something, but you need to pull them in with some kind of emotional story. And if you were one of those that leaned hard into the carousel trend, because for a while carousels were getting all the love on Instagram. Even myself, I was a reels girly till the end. But me and the team started posting carousels on a daily basis because they were blowing up. We've started shifting back to the 50, 50 of reels and carousels because I'm seeing a dramatic shift in views when I just post carousels. So I've had to bring back in reels. Reels are performing really good again. So if you want to learn more about the mini drama storytelling reels and why they are so viral worthy, then go to episode 130 and I'm going to link it in the show notes for you as well. Speaking of reels, Instagram is currently testing a new design update. And what this is going to do is it's going to put reels even more at the center of this app. And honestly, I'm not surprised by this update. This could be why reels are getting more traction. I mean, it makes perfect sense why we're seeing better views if this is what they're pushing. Right? So short form video is where people are spending most of their time on Instagram right now. Some report say 50% of time on Instagram is spent watching reels. And then there's billions, not millions, but billions of reels getting shared daily. So Instagram is like, hey, this is what the people want. Let's give them what the people want. So they are redesigning the app around how people actually use it. So what does this look like? So the first redesign here is that when you open the app directly, it's going to go right to reels. So instead of opening up to the normal home feed that you're used to, some users may open the app and just immediately land on reels first. Now this will be a massive shift if this happens. I think we will see more views on reels. And again, this could be why there's a shift right now with views increasing on reels because maybe this is getting rolled out to more people than I think it is. So that would be a massive shift because this would mean discovering new content. That would be the priority is you're gonna land on new content when you open up the app. New creators, getting more opportunity and then reels becoming the main growth tool. Let's, I mean we're taking it back to circa what, 2021. That's when reels were blowing up. That's how I grew my account to 200,000 followers, is because I was an early adopter to reels. So Instagram is also testing something called your feeds. This would let users customize how they watch reels. So inside of that section you could switch your reels viewing to a different feed. So maybe it's your following feed, maybe it's your friends, maybe it's the latest reel that has been shared, maybe it's all the reels that you've saved. Maybe it's your favorites reels or it's reels that are suggested by the algorithm. So basically Instagram is giving users multiple reels feeds instead of just one. So I mean this all makes sense, right? The takeaway here is that Instagram isn't just prioritizing reels in the algorithm anymore. They're redesigning the app around reels. They're redesigning Instagram around reels. That's a huge signal because platforms design around what they want you to post, right? And right now they're wanting short form video. And that's why it's so important by the way, to get inside Club influence. Because I built my club influence membership around the reels trends. I knew from the early beginning when I was growing my page, that reels were the way to grow. So our whole membership, like we're gonna give you trendy reels that are working that week. Every single Monday we handpick the most viral worthy reels trends and we send them to you. And then we've also got Canva templates in there. Viral True tried and tested carousel posts for you to use stories. All the things are inside of Club Influence so I hope you will check it out after listening to this episode. Next update. I really wanted to highlight this print. Pinterest is quietly growing and that's big for businesses. Pinterest just reported strong growth reaching 619 million users and bringing in over $4 billion in revenue last year. Which shows that the platform is becoming a major player in shopping and product discovery. If you are a business that is mainly product focused, Pinterest should be on your radar. Pinterest users are doing about 80 billion searches per month, which means people aren't just scrolling on the app, they're actively typing in a search keyword and looking for ideas and products to buy. I'll raise my hand right here. We're in the middle of building our dream home. I am on Pinterest every single day, looking up paint colors, looking up cabinet ideas, looking up decor, looking up how to decorate a room, all the things on Pinterest. And typically I'll find something, I save it to my board and later on I'll go back and it takes me straight to the link to purchase. And what I will say too is I'm seeing a lot of Amazon affiliates using Pinterest to drive traffic to their Amazon store. I, as a buyer, love how easy it is for me to go. Like we went to a music festival the other day and I had no idea what to wear. We do not go to music festivals. But we did it as a little Valentine's treat to each other. And I went in there to search, like, music festival. I got some ideas of clothing, I clicked on it and it would take me to the Amazon storefront of that creator and then from there I could purchase directly what I wanted. So it makes it so easy for me and it makes it easier for the creator too, to make money. So if you're sleeping on Pinterest, now is the time to get over on there. They're also adding AI powered recommendations and search tools that will help people find products even faster. So it's a no brainer here. The big takeaway from all of this is that Pinterest is positioning itself as the go to platform for people who are ready to not only discover new things, but shop. So if you sell products, services, or digital offers, Pinterest is very, very important. And you need to get on there. Stop sleeping on Pinterest. Okay, next update. This one's really fun and I should talk about this one more, and I'm gonna start talking about this one more because it's changed how I create content. So my partners at Stan have unveiled Stanley AI. Now, he's been around, but they, they kind of kept him quiet while they perfected him. But Stanley AI is your AI powered creative sidekick. Okay? So you connect it to your Instagram account and then what it's gonna do is it's going to give you viral reels, ideas, it's built just for creators. Stanley learns from your content. You connect it over to whatever you know. Instagram is what I've got mine connected to. It learns what I'm posting about. It understands my vibe, it scrapes all of my reels, all of my carousels, and it helps me move faster with less, like, second guessing and more creating because it's there to be like, hey, girl, this performed really well. Why don't you do an episode or a reel based on XYZ and it will give you a specific idea. So I think this AI tool is really cool. You can connect it to Instagram, it'll scrape your socials, and then it's going to tell you what to post. Like, in a nutshell, that is what it does. And I've got a special link in the show notes if you want to test it out yourself. Stanley promises to deliver you at least, at least minimum, one high quality content idea per week. But honestly, I'm telling you, if you want to use Stanley AI every day, it will give you a high quality content idea every day. You just chat with them. I love me some Stanley AI and I'm using it right now, actually, to help me grow. Call her creator podcast account. We're at like 9, 400 followers over there. So I just need 600 more followers to hit my 10,000 goal. And I am going to continue to use Stanley AI to help me do that just because it takes the guessing out. Like, I do a lot of analyzing, analyzing, analyzation, analyzing of content. And Stanley AI just kind of cuts that time in half because he does it for me. All right, to end today's episode, I want to give you a content assignment, right? So it's like I give you all these updates. You get off here. You've got so much. It's like, what do I even do with all the information she just gave me? So let me give you homework. Let me give you a content assignment that you can take after listening to this episode and you can go execute on and you can get results. Okay? So today's content assignment is. I know you're not following me for XYZ post. What does that mean, Caitlin? Well, if you only post one thing this week, I want to make it this. Right now. The easiest type of content to make that's performing very well is what I like to call an expectation breaker reel. These go viral because they challenge assumptions. Okay? They create curiosity in the first two seconds. They also feel honest and human, which Instagram is rewarding right now. And the best part about this, they take like 30 seconds to film. So here's how you're gonna make it. Okay, step one, we're gonna film a simple talking head reel. No editing needed. It's like you're FaceTiming your best friend. Just talk to the camera. Reese Witherspoon did this the other day and it went mega viral. Okay? So if you need an example, you can go to Reese Witherspoon's Instagram. Just look for the one of her where it looks like she's FaceTiming somebody. And then you're going to start with this hook. I have two options for you. First, one, I know you're not following me for, but here's something you need to hear. Or I know you followed me for, but this might be the most important thing I tell you. This works because it creates that curiosity, it feels personal, it builds trust, and it stops the scroll. So step three here is you're gonna teach one insight or perspective shift. You're not giving them 10 tips, okay? You're not walking them through five steps. You're just doing one main thing. And the reason this works is because one, Instagram is pushing talking head videos. They want authentic delivery, they want pattern interrupts, they want opinion content. And this format hits all four of those. So it's low effort too. Low effort, high reach. Let's go. So here's some plug and play, fill in the blanks that you can use to help you make this content. Okay, so just the generic overall universal version is. I know you're not following me for xyz, but let me tell you something. Or but if you want better results, you need to understand this. Okay, I know you're not following me for xyz, but if you want better results in xyz, you need to understand this. So creator version, I know you're not following me for mindset talks, but the reason your content isn't growing has nothing to do with the algorithm. It's because you're posting when you feel motivated instead of posting consistently. Or the business owner version. I know you're not following me for business advice, but most small businesses don't have a marketing problem. They have a consistency problem. Or a real estate version. I know you're not following me for real estate advice, but the people who sell the most homes aren't the best agents. They're the most visible agents. Product based version, I know you're not following me for business tips, but the brands that grow fastest aren't the ones with the best products. They're the ones people see the most. Hopefully that gets your wheels turning on what type of content you could be posting. But this is that content that delivers that authenticity but it interrupts a normal pattern that they're used to. All right, if this episode helped you understand what's happening on Instagram right now, you're going to love Club Influence. It's the action step to this podcast, guys. Every week I give you exactly what to post, what hooks are working, what's trending so you can grow without guessing and you can join anytime. I've got an invitation link for you right in the show notes. I hope you will join us inside and till then, I will see you next week on Call Her Creator Podcast. Do me a favor, send this to a business friend or a creator friend or a colleague. Help us spread the word on Call Her Creator Podcast. Thanks so much guys.