← Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Ep 46: Instagram Updates for 2025: What You Need to Know to Grow Your Account
00:27:03
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What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Call Her Creator, powered by Stan. I am your host, Kaitlyn Rhodes, and today we're going to be talking about some Instagram updates that are happening right now. Some of them happened a little bit ago, but I thought that we should talk them over because I always tell you guys, when there's new updates that come out on Instagram, this is your time to test them and be early adopters, because that's what the CEO wants. He wants us to use these features and your account will get pushed out more if you jump on these new features and utilize them. So if you're new here, I would love for you to download today's podcast that will alert you each week when a new episode comes out. And I would greatly appreciate it. I'd also love to hear your guys's thoughts on. If you're loving the podcast, leave me a review. I'd like to spotlight some of you guys who are leaving me reviews. So. So let's get those in and maybe you'll be on next week's episode. So I had to bring my notes to today's podcast because there are a lot of updates going on right now. All right, so Instagram continues to be a powerhouse when it comes to social media. There was a study out couple weeks ago and there were actually more users over on Instagram than there was on TikTok, which I was like, haha, yes, love this, because I don't really get on TikTok too much. We've started posting my podcast snippets over there and then the girls at the agency started an influence account and they're having fun with the trends over there, but I just don't get over there enough to utilize it. So I always get excited when more people are showing up on Instagram just because that's where I am at. Now we've got some stats here. According to Social Media examiner for marketers and Instagram creators here, here are some recent stats that you guys should know about. These are pretty important. So 90% of Instagram accounts follow at least one business account. Okay. 70% of users discover new products through Instagram and then 50%, that's over. That's half of all of the users visit a website after seeing an Instagram ad. Now I can tell you this much. My, my traffic from my stand store and my website, it all mostly comes from social. I have a few direct, I have some visits from Google, but a majority of my website visits come from social media. So if there is any reason to start today, that is what you guys need to hear, is that Everybody's on there. 50% of people are finding stores and products because of it. So if you're not talking about it, why the heck not? All right, so there are some new enhanced story features, there's some new reel capabilities, there's some updates with broadcast channels, and then there's also some AI updates with Instagram. So we're going to explore around four to five of these new features and I'll try to walk through what I think about them, how you can utilize them to better serve your business, to grow your account. So let's just hop into them. So the first one on the updates is going to be new Instagram Stories features. Instagram Stories continues to be a huge focus on Instagram. Of course, I already knew that because I've noticed my Instagram Stories views are popping up. I don't know if you guys are like, where I'm seeing less reels views, I'm making them up. Not all the way, but making them up a lot. Over on my Instagram Stories, people are popping through there, they're watching, they're clicking. So don't sleep on the Stories. But this recent update has made it a little bit easier to engage with your audience. So this update for Stories is going to be the comment on Stories. So I don't know if you guys have seen the little pop up, but whenever you get this feature on your Instagram page, you'll get a little note that says, leave a comment and show friends some love. You can now comment on Stories. Comments are visible to anyone who views the story. Now this is a catch 22. Like, no, that's not the word. It's not a catch 22. It's like a. It's like a double goodness whammy. Y'all know I can't talk sometimes and I still have foggy brain. I was out all last week with the flu. What I'm trying to say is that this is good for both sides. It's good for you as the poster and it's good for you as the story watcher. So let me tell you why. Let's say that you post a story and someone leaves a comment on it. That's really good. The algorithm is going to see that and say, oh, Caitlin's story is pretty engaging. I should keep showing it to more people because so and so commented on it. The flip side of that is, let's say you're the commenter and you comment on a bigger creator story. Guess who's going to be shown whenever people watch through that story, your little name, leaving that little comment. So it really is a win win for both sides. Whether you're getting the comments or giving the comments, it's going to help both of you. Now Social Media examiner says pro tip. If you're concerned about negative comments, you can actually set up comment filters to automatically hide comments containing specific words or phrases. So that's probably more so for like celebrities where they get all the hate and the bashing over there, I would definitely set up some words there. I mean, even me, I might want to set up some words as well. If there's things that people tend to say that I don't want to see and I want to help protect my mental health. You can always set up those filters for comments. But using the comments on Stories features to gather immediate feedback on products, test your ideas, or you could just encourage community discussion around your content. This can be particularly useful for marketers looking to engage their audience a little more publicly, a little more interactively. So Comments on Stories. Big new feature. Love it. Want you guys to try it. Feel free to head over to the Kaitlyn Rhodes and leave me a comment on my stories, the next feature, which I have not seen yet, but I'm looking at a picture and it looks super duper cool. It's called the Reveal sticker. So what happens here is this new sticker blurs out your Instagram story content until viewers interact with it in one of two ways they can interact. So one, users can let users tap the sticker to reveal the content, or you can set it up so that viewers have to DM you to reveal the content, potentially increasing your direct dms, your direct messages, your direct interactions. Use the Reveal sticker to create anticipation for product launches, exclusive offers, behind the scenes content. A good example here would be like a clothing brand and maybe they're teasing a new collection. So you use that Reveal sticker there and they have to DM you for early access. Love that idea. And I mean that could be for any product, digital product, brick and mortar store, whatever it is, you can use that Reveal sticker for either of those. Now, Pro tip here from Social Media Examiner. The Reveal sticker can be particularly powerful when used with ManyChat, a popular chatbot platform. If you're using ManyChat, you can set up automated flows triggered by specific keywords sent in response to your reveal sticker. So this allows for scalable, personalized follow up with interested customers. So let's just say that you had that Reveal sticker. Hiding up. Covering up the new collection that you're launching, you could set up a word in manychat so that if anyone were to write the word reveal, not only is it going to reveal that story, but it's also then going to set up an automation from manychat so then you can keep that interaction going. So I absolutely love this great feature for us. I have not seen it, but I've also not been looking for it. So I think whenever I get off here, I'm going to go see if I can see the reveal sticker and then if I can, I'll test it on my own Instagram stories and you guys can play around with it if you want to. Next feature is new fonts and stickers, which we all love. For the longest time ever, Instagram had these same fonts and the same colors, and they still have the same colors, but there's a lot of new fonts available. There's a lot of new effects available with those fonts. I don't know if you guys have tried it, but like the typing or the sparkle effects whenever you put your text. I personally love it and I have used it not only in my Instagram stories, but also on my reels. So Instagram has added more creative options for customizing your stories, including new fonts and stickers. There is the add your sticker, which was actually enhanced to include music, allowing users to share the song they're listening to. So I think that's pretty cool. Pro tip here. Use the add your sticker to create community driven playlist or to align your brand with specific music genres. So this is just an easy way for you to jump on this new feature. I told you guys, as long as you're jumping on new features, the algorithm will continue to push your content out. All right, next update we got here is enhanced feed post features. So Instagram has introduced several updates to improve our feed post. Thank God, because we know that those were getting a little crusty dusty over there. So. So the functionality has changed. It's going to make it easier for marketers or creators to create compelling content directly within the app. So what does that mean? There's a few things in here that I want to go over. First is that they've extended carousel posts. So you used to be only to upload 10 photos at a time. If you were doing a carousel, now you can include up to 20 slides. This is a big jump. Basically doubled it. While this change has been in effect since this year, the extended format is perfect. For in depth storytelling, comprehensive products, showcases, or recapping events in detail. Now there was a big brand, Kali. I wish I could remember who it was. They wanted to jump on this new feature as soon as it came out, which was super smart. I don't know who their social media manager was, but kudos to you out there. But they did a bunch of hot dogs. And if you can remember what this brand was named, I will shout you out on next episode if you want to DM me. But it was a carousel and it said something like, how many hot dogs can you fit on something? And you just kept scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling until you got to the end of the 20 and then it told you how many hot dogs there were. It didn't really necessarily tie into their brand or like do anything for their brand, but that post got so many interactions, it probably helped them gain some more following. And of course their engagement rate probably shot up because it was just this stupid post. But it was genius actually. So the way that you guys can jump on this 20 post carousel, there's a couple different ways. One, create many tutorials on maybe how to do something that relates to your digital product or your services that you offer. You could also do like a how to guide. I don't know if you guys remember, but Instagram used to have Instagram guides all over the profile, but now they got rid of those. So this is a way to bring back how to guides. So if there's something that your customers DM you a lot about, like there's a big frequently asked questions you're always getting, you could always do a how to guide and then pin that to the top of your profile. You could also showcase before and after transformations. I'm thinking like hairdresser, you know, we see the before the haircut, after the haircut. But what if you did like before the haircut, during the haircut, all the steps you took and then the after. So it takes them a little bit longer to see that transformation and it keeps them on your posts a little bit longer. Love that idea. And then sharing customer testimonials with product images. So maybe you kind of crowdsource your customers and ask them for photos of them using your product or tuning into a training of yours, whatever it might be. Take all those photos and then do one big carousel showing off your customers. That's a really cool idea. Now, speaking of carousels, you can also now add text overlay in app on those photos. So we used to have to go into canva or whatever graphic design tool you use and edit stuff that way manually. But now you can upload all of your photos and then edit right there in the app using the app editor. Now, while this feature is more basic than dedicated tools like Canva, it's perfect for quick on the go content creation. And there's actually a trend going on right now. It's kind of old at this point, but it's actually still working. And I see it all the time in my feed, where you'll have like the same carousel picture over and over again, but they're using black and white, like font to write a story, and then you just scroll through. I know that I have one on my page where I was talking about how I had lost a lot of followers that month, but it's still been my biggest revenue month. You could watch that too, but those are trendy right now. People read them, they're storytelling, they help you connect to your audience. So they're a really good way for you to use this feature. This update also includes a scheduling feature as well, allowing users to plan their post schedule. While the current version is relatively basic, Instagram could add more templates and design options in the future, making it an increasingly powerful tool. That's what Social Media examiner says, and I totally agree with them. It is a very basic editor, but I mean, it's working. So until they're ready to change it up, I think. I think we're fine there. There's a bunch of fonts, and the good thing about it is it's not going to take you forever to do something right to create content. So if you're in bed and you're like, oh, I forgot to post today, you could easily just tell a story, maybe about a win that you had that week, or tell us a story about a customer who came to you dissatisfied with xyz and you helped turn that around by giving them ZYX polls and prompts. So we've got new interactive elements that can be added to feed posts. So we know that you could do polls inside of Instagram stories, but now you can add polls to the end of your reels to the end of your posts, making them a little bit more interactive. They appear as small visual icons in the white font at the bottom corner of the post, potentially showing how many people have participated. Now, I believe that this kind of gives off a little bit of FOMO for people. When they do see you have a poll and other people have voted, it makes them want to jump on it and vote on it. Too. So I think it's a super fun, engaging way to interact with your audience. You can use these polls and prompts to gather audience opinions, increase interactions, gain valuable insights from your followers, and then you can also pin your polls to the top of your profile to engage viewers immediately when they land on your profile. So love that update. Product tags are another new feature. I don't necessarily use product tags, but we do have some clients in the retail space that use product tags. This feature streamlines the purchasing process and enhances the platform's e commerce capabilities. I bet they're doing this because TikTok shop is blowing up right now. So Instagram wants to make it even easier for people to shop on Instagram. So business accounts gotta be a business account can now add product names, prices, direct purchase options directly to their post, making it easier for users to shop in the feed. This can be especially effective for businesses with physical products, like I said, or those looking to drive direct sales through Instagram. So this can be a game changer for you all, especially with Black Friday coming up. Right now is the holiday season, so if you don't know how to use product tags, now is the time to figure that out. This kind of gives me an idea. I probably should do a product tag podcast episode because not a lot of people understand how to do that. I know we've had some people try to hire us at the agency to put that stuff together. We don't really offer that service because it's kind of a one off, but I think if people realize how actually easy it is to do, they could do it themselves. Reels, features. We know I love some reels. So Instagram continues to invest heavily in reels. Obviously that is what is keeping people on the app. So the first update here, which I have not used yet, and I'm curious to know if you guys have used it. Multiple audio tracks. You can add more than one audio to your reel. I'm not really sure why they did this. I mean I can see where it helps. I have seen people use this, so I guess don't knock it till you you try it. And I'm going to give you guys some ideas here, but you can add up to 20 different audio tracks to a reel. That's where I'm kind of just like, okay, 20 is a little too much. I could understand maybe two or three, but 20 is a lot. But this feature allows for more complex and professional sounding audio in your reels. You can use multiple audio tracks to create more dynamic, engaging reels, incorporating Sound effects, voiceovers, music to enhance your storytelling. But Social Media examiner gives you these ideas, which I want you guys to consider testing. The first one is create a day in the life reel with different background music for each part of the day. Love that idea. I think I might do that tomorrow. Layer sound effects over product demonstrations. Love it. Yeah, because, I mean, if you think about it, when you're doing a product demonstration, there are different sounds or experiences that you feel when you're going through the motions of that. So that could be. That could be smart. And then the other example was use multiple voiceovers to showcase different customer testimonials in one reel. Okay. Love that too. All right. See, don't knock it till you try it. Still don't think we need 20, but maybe you have 20 different customers and you want to do one big testimonial reel. Try to do that in under 60 seconds. We'll see how that goes for you. Another update in the reels feeds, which I'm actually just noticing, too, in here. I don't know if y'all have noticed, but they've switched where the undo button is when you're posting a reel. And I find myself. The undo button is now where the play button used to be. And I keep undoing my edits whenever I'm editing a reel. So it's really frustrating. So make sure you watch out for that update that's not listed here. That's just something that I've noticed in the past couple of days when I've been editing reels. But drafts, duplication, and other enhanced editing features are now available for reels. They've added new tools that include the undo redo button. So I told you all, they just switched the area where it was. But you've got that there now to help you with editing. The ability to split your clips, that was very much like TikTok. So if you. Or actually I use InShot a lot. And so it's exactly like in shot. But if you've got a reel and you want to chop it up a little bit to help with the transitions, y'all know how I tell you to move within three to five seconds? I'll take one long video, and then I'll just split it up and, like, trim it up a little bit so that it. It's one big video. But it really looks like it was like five little baby videos. But all you do is when you have the reel in there, you'll just click on the video part, and then you'll see a function Or a feature that says split and then that will just split the clip into two clips. You can also. Let me see here. You can also edit your reels after posting, including changing the COVID image and editing frames. Love that. Have not tried that yet. That's gonna be. That's gonna come in clutch for me because I like to rush sometimes and post things and then I'm like, oh crap, I need to edit that. An exciting editing feature is the ability to save reels as drafts and create duplicates of existing reels, making it easier to iterate on your content. So maybe you post a reel, it perform really well. You wanna post it again, but change something up on it. That's your way, baby. Duplicate it. Now there's a pro tip. Use the drafts feature to prepare content in advance and use duplication to test different edits or versions of your reels without starting from scratch every time and losing engagement on an already published reel. I don't know, I guess that's cool for like someone who's kind of a beginner, but if it were me, I would just record the reel and save it to my camera roll so I can come back and edit it again later or like use cap cut or inshot. But I guess for people who like, don't use all these different editing features, if you wanted to duplicate your reel and test it, like maybe run it this week with a new hook versus last week when you ran it with a different hook, it would be easier on you to do that now with the duplication button. Another update on reels that I love is that you can now tag more collaborators on a reel. So now you can support up to five collaborators. Expanding opportunities for cross promotion. I love to do collaborative reels. I think they help get you in front of more eyes. They help you and the person that you're collaborating with. Bonus points if you can collaborate with someone that has a bigger following than you, because then you're gonna get in front of even more people. But I think I'm gonna challenge myself to try to find four other creators that would collab with me so we could do the full five collaboration. That's gonna reach a lot of people. If you think about it, if we all. If it's shown in all five of our feeds. So that's a good idea. Live video features. Desktop live streaming is now available. Love that. Definitely going to start utilizing that. I don't do live video as much as I would like to, but I know that when I used to do it, I would sell out my Reels challenges. I would get people to sign up for my memberships because there's something about a two way conversation on a live people trust you. You can answer questions right then and there. So if people are like iffy on if they're going to buy or not, you're able to kind of help them out right then and there. Highly suggest doing live Instagrams and even more so desktop lives. You can also go live and broadcast channels. I don't have a broadcast channel. I wish I did. I had one when they first started and then it was just like another job for me so I couldn't keep up with it and I just decided instead of wasting these people's times, I was just gonna delete it. So I got rid of my broadcast channel. But if you do have a broadcast channel, that'd be a really good place for you to do exclusive lives with people that are in there. So maybe that's even a way get people into your broadcast channel is hey, I do exclusive lives just for people that join my broadcast channel. Come in here and you can have a mini tutorial on X, Y, Z. And then that's something that no one can see unless they join that broadcast channel. So love that big huge feature that I'm not using enough. I'm curious to know if you guys are is meta AI. So I don't know so much about it. So I'm going to read here around these notes what it says so that we can kind of dissect what's going on. But it's says Instagram has integrated Meta AI, a conversational AI assistant, into the platform. This tool can help market with various tasks directly within the Instagram app. Users can access meta AI through the Explore page to ask questions and get information. It appears as a search option with a purple and blue ring icon. You can use meta AI to research hashtags quickly, get content ideas, find information relevant to your marketing efforts without ever leaving the Instagram app. Okay, I just had a brain fart because I actually have used this and I was, I was fairly impressed with what it gave me. I was asking it about what are some of the top trends right now on Instagram and it actually ended up giving me some pretty good Instagram reels trends. So if you haven't used this yet, you could totally ask it stuff like that like hey, I want to jump on and a recent trend. Can you give me an idea that relates to and then talk about your industry and then see if meta AI gives you any good practice there some accounts may have access to a feature that creates custom AI chatbots for the profiles that basically is going to allow you to make an AI version of you. I've seen this on another bigger creator's account and I think it's so cringy because I've tried talking to it and it just goes overboard a little bit like picking up on the little things that this creator does. But I guess if you want to try it, be my guest. Maybe I should try it and just see how it works. But I do remember it kept it kept saying this one word that this creator always says, but it said it in like every sentence and I was like, oh my God, this is cringy. But whatever, it's a good, it's a good little start for Meta to help offload some work for us by giving us a little Meta AI chat bot. So why not try it? And then the last feature I want to talk to you guys about is the Reveal Bot for Instagram ads. So Reveal Bot is an automation tool that allows you to create advanced rules for your Instagram ads. I've never used it before, so I'm solely going off of what this article says. It checks your ad performance every 15 minutes. Wow. Compared to Facebook's 30 minute checks. And you can make adjustments based on your predefined rules. It can help you maximize your ad spend by making data driven decisions faster than you could manually. For example, automatically pause underperforming ads, increase budgets for high performing ads, adjust bid based on real time performance ads. Pretty cool Reveal bot for Instagram ads. That's something I'm definitely going to check out. I don't really run ads around this time of year because it's the holidays and you're going to spin an arm and a leg trying to compete with the bigger corporate bands brands. I say this every year, but big corporate brands right now are trying to finish off the rest of their ads budget for the end of the year. So you're going to start seeing a lot More ads this Q4. If you're a small business, you want to run ads, cool, that's fine. But just know that you might be paying a premium price for this holiday season just because everyone and their mom is doing that as well. And with that, organic posting will probably be down for you these next couple of months as well because there are people paying money to get seen. So if that happens to you, don't get down on yourself. It is what it is. It happens every year. Just, just keep trucking along and find that sweet spot. If you get a little tired of posting, go back and find some top performing posts that you have done already and repurpose them and try to work smarter, not harder for yourself. So those are all of the updates we have over on Instagram right now. I'd love for you guys to give me some feedback. Let me know if you've seen any of these updates, if you've used any of them. If you recommend any of them, I'd love for you to shoot me a chat over on the Kaitlyn Rhodes or call her creator. I'd be happy to answer your comment or suggestion publicly on my stories and then get other people talking about it so we can just help each other out with these new features. But that is all I have for you guys today. I really hope you loved today's episode. Do not forget to download today's episode. Like I said, when you download the podcast, it alerts you for next week whenever I drop a new episode, which is every Wednesday. All right guys, thanks so much. I will see y'all next week.