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Social Media Marketing Talk Show
Instagram Updates: Trial Reels, Algorithm Reset, Broadcast Channels, and More
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Before we get started with today's episode, I thought I'd share a special recipe for cooking up marketing success in 2025. Here's the ingredients. Two cups of AI marketing know how one heaping portion of Instagram growth strategies. A generous serving of Facebook Ads mastery 3 tablespoons of networking opportunities. A pinch of San Diego sunshine Mix all the ingredients together at Social media Marketing World 2025. Here's what Laura Kashla said. This was honestly the best conference I've attended in my professional life. Save your seat at the table today by visiting social media marketing world.info.
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Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Talk show, your guide to the ever changing of social media. I hope you're ready for this. On today's show, we're going to explore the most important Instagram updates we need to know as marketers. And there are a lot as we head into 2025, including Instagram's new Test Reels feature and how we can take advantage of it as marketers. If your account has Instagram story highlights, there's some changes coming where you might want to go back and see what's there if you haven't looked at them in a while. Some big updates about broadcast channels, DMs, and a whole lot more. My name is Jerry Potter, host of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, A Social Media examiner production. We break down all the latest social media news and what it means for marketers like you. All right, so Instagram has launched a new feature called Test Reels. And I gotta be honest, when they first announced that, I said, I don't get it, what's the point? But I've had a really fun time brainstorming ways to use it all week, which I'll share in just a second. If you have not seen this announcement, it's a new feature that allows people to test their reels with non followers before sharing them with your main audience, your followers. So I've seen them called Test Reels and Trial reels and it looks like Trial reels is going to be the official word for it. So if you have access to this now, when you go to publish a reel, you'll see a little toggle that says trial on it. And what happens is it remains private to you, so it doesn't appear on your profile grid, your Reels tab, or in your Followers feeds and Reels sections. But it will start to go out to people who do not follow you yet. Okay. And then from that, after 24 hours, you'll be able to see Views, likes, comments, different things like that, then you're going to be able to decide, okay, do I want this to become a public reel or not? So the other thing they're going to have is the ability to look at these trial reels and see how they have performed compared to previous trial reels. So once you've used this a few times, you might have a little bit more that that you can do with it. So the way it'll work is you can go in and manually share the successful trial reel with your followers or you can set up automatic sharing based on what happens with views in the first 72 hours. So you could say, if this gets 500 views, go ahead and make it public when we get to the 72 hour mark. Okay, so this is available on professional accounts, so both business and creator profiles. Now, first, I didn't get it. And the reason for that is there's a couple. One, I look at everything as a test. I look at everything as a trial. Right? We are doing everything we can to make great content every time. Sometimes we get it really, really right and sometimes we get it wrong. For those of you watching this on YouTube, I have test tubes on the wall behind me as a reminder that like everything's an experiment. And I've also always hated the idea of creating a piece of content knowing it's not going to work or that I'm going to take it down if it doesn't work. Like that's what social media is. It's this big testing ground. However, once I kind of thought about it because I saw a lot of people getting excited about this and Instagram's take on this is it's almost for mental health. You don't have the pressure of everything's gotta be a big hit. You can put it out there, see how it does and then decide if you want to move forward with it or not. So that being said, here are some ways that you can take advantage of this as soon as you get it. First of all, and this came up with the social media examiner team A B testing try the same video with different hooks, different on screen text, different music in the background, different things like that. Now that is a little bit more production. I think the on screen text, like an on screen hook, would probably be the easiest way to. You could make two versions really, really quickly and maybe you release them both at the same time, or maybe you release them a day apart. Again, these are things that we'll still have to test once we actually have access to it. But a B testing built into reels. What a concept. Another thought, maybe you have older videos that your existing audience has already seen, right? So maybe it was a big hit, maybe it was viral, maybe it did okay, but now you could publish it to people who definitely are very unlikely to have seen it and see how it does again. One of the things I like about this is we have the ability to create new content, specifically speaking to non followers. Now, again, if it did really well, it's going to go out to followers eventually, right? You're going to want to do that. And in general, reels are designed to reach non followers. But with this, you could get very, very specific in the way that you speak or the copy that you write for these. Another one, if you're only reaching your followers with reels, use this to shake it up. You know, I have a friend who has a massive account. Unbelievable engagement, maybe the best engagement I've seen on Instagram. But she told me her reels only reach followers. So I said, hey, try this out. Just see if you can start getting in front of some new people. Because again, it won't go out to your followers. At least start a couple more ideas here. This is for Instagram's new trial reels feature that they just announced. If your current audience isn't all the perfect people, because maybe your brand or the brand you manage has pivoted or changed direction over time. You know, Instagram's been around for over a decade now, right? So if you have an account that's been on Instagram for a lot of years, things may have changed. So I saw this, and this is true for my account. I saw this as a great opportunity to take a new piece of content, knowing that some of your audience, maybe it's friends and family or whoever that has followed to support you is not right for it. And help Instagram on the back end figure out exactly who it's for without any sort of interference. Because we know how the algorithm works, right? Essentially, if some people start engaging with it, they show it to more people like those people. So I think there could really be an advantage, especially if your audience is not ideal. The followers you built up to getting it out there in front of other people, that's the one I'm most excited about. And then the last idea I had this week was to hold a secret contest for non followers and basically just say, hey, we're going to do a drawing for everyone following us by noon on Saturday or whatever it might be. And I would think you would still do the Drawing from all of your followers and follow the Instagram, of course, guidelines for contests. But imagine how many followers you could build up by doing that. Assuming the video, it still have to be a good video. It still have to be entertaining so that Instagram would actually deliver it to enough new people. But that would be one you'd never take out of the trial phase. You would just have it in there so that you could reach new people and get them to come and follow you. As a reminder, and I think most of us know this, always give away a prize that only your ideal person would want. Remember back in the day when people would grow Facebook business pages with a drawing for a free iPad and then all of a sudden nobody engaged with their content because they were a doctor's office or, you know, whatever it might be. All right, lots more Instagram updates we've got to cover in this episode. But imagine real quick immersing yourself for two full days of cutting edge AI marketing training in sunny San Diego. I was so excited when I heard that we were announcing this. And that is the all new AI Ticket to Social Media Marketing World 2025, designed for marketers to elevate their marketing with AI. With your AI Ticket, you'll get access to all of the sessions in the AI marketing track. You get to learn from leading AI marketing experts, attend all keynote presentations and experience the live event in San Diego along thousands of other marketers on a similar journey. So this is a great opportunity to join us at Social media Marketing World 2025, focusing solely on the transformative power of AI marketing and without breaking the bank, it's at a lower investment than the all access ticket. So if you want to learn all about this, just go to SocialMediaMarketing World right now to get your AI ticket again. Social media marketing. All right. Instagram is testing a way for people to reset the content recommendations. If you've seen this. Basically anyone can go into their profile and reset the content for Explore Reels and feed when they want a fresh start. Again, something else that Instagram is doing, I think for the mental health side. But it could be that you may see a nice boost from this if people do get reset and start, you know, seeing new stuff they weren't seeing before. I don't think we're going to see a diminish from this as marketers because we know if somebody stops engaging with our content, Instagram's pretty good about taking it out of the feed anyway. Another update, Instagram is removing the option to follow hashtags with AI and the algorithms getting smarter. Hashtags are just not as relevant anymore. And then this is an exciting one. And I think this has both consumer and marketer applications. Instagram is stopping what they has been calling the rug pool. If you've ever opened Instagram and whatever was up on the screen because it was from there earlier or whatever, you look at it and you're like, oh, this is interesting. And you start watching it if it's a video, and then all of a sudden it refreshes and it's gone. You're scrolling down, trying to find it. Well, they're taking away the rug pull that disappears with videos while you're watching them. So now they'll wait for you to scroll before they show you any new content right after you open the app. I think that's potentially great for brands because I know I have opened it sometimes and it might be a product or a brand I'm interested in, and then it disappears. And I don't even know what to, like, search for to figure out what it was anymore. All right, another update. Instagram has added a deactivated account category for your followers. So if you click on your followers now, you'll see a few different categories. One of them is deactivated accounts, allowing you to remove them as followers and clean up your follower list. Now, I do want to remind you that I forget what it is. I don't know if it's 14 days or 30 days, but deactivated accounts could be activated again. So just something to keep in mind before you just, you know, dismiss everybody off of there. All right, this is one of those questions that came up, and Adam Masseri, head of Instagram, answered it. And most of us as marketers are like, are you sure? And somebody said, hey, if something is labeled as a paid partnership, do you kill the rank? Do you hurt the reach of that piece of content because you want those people to be buying ads? And Adam and Siri says, no, it does not happen at all. And it's just one of those things that we could never really prove very well because even if it is a paid partnership, but it's an amazing piece of content. It's always going to do really well, right? So, but he says, officially that doesn't happen. If you are interested in reaching more people with money on Instagram, I think this is a pretty cool update. This is not using Meta's Ads Manager. This is the boosting promotion interface. But they've now expanded that option to more post types. So before, there were certain things for copyright reasons that you couldn't put money behind. But now posts made with gifts and stickers can now be boosted. So if you had a really popular post that the main image was a gift from a popular movie or a TV show, apparently technically, now you can put money behind that. Still can't put it behind posts with copyrighted music in them, but you can go in and they'll let you swap out the music for what they call a boost eligible sound, or basically music that's not copyrighted. So definitely an opportunity there. If you have an organic post that did really well previously, you couldn't put any money behind it to reach new people. Now you will be able to do that. All right. Broadcast channels, we've been looking at these things for a couple of years and they're working well for some people and others they get set up and they get abandoned. Well, apparently broadcast channels are now being used with 1.5 billion messages a month being sent. And they're adding three new features to broadcast channels. Okay, first one replies. Now you might have seen this already if you follow broadcast channels, but replies is basically where someone can actually reply to whatever you broadcast and then other fans can reply back and forth to each other while maintaining the focus on the creator's content. So it's kind of separate from the main thing that you are broadcasting. All the replies are organized in a nested format within the messages. So my first thought when I saw this was, wait, I'm going to just open up broadcast channels. I'm going to see this endless feed of craziness. But no, they've actually organized it pretty well, which is neat. If you want to manage replies and enable them through your channel controls, you can just go to the channel name and then select channel controls to do that. They've also introduced what they're calling prompts for broadcast channels. And this is. It's essentially asking a question, but similar to sometimes when you do this, like an Instagram story and there's a bigger graphic on there, you'll be able to do this now inside of your broadcast channels. It'll offer suggested topics that you can use as well. Shows in bigger text, almost like a big graphic. And basically the cool thing about it, I think, is that fans can respond with text or photos for 24 hours and they can like other members responses, which I assume theoretically will sort of vote them up. In the screenshot example, the prompt was what are you grateful for today? I think, you know, when you are thinking about questions to use for your brand, think about the questions that other people would want to read the answers to. Okay. This is always the way to go because you're getting that multiple engagement happening when that happens anywhere on social media. Right. So if it's a yes or no question, unless it's really polarizing, then it's not really that interesting to read the responses to. But what are you grateful today, for example, or what song are you listening today? Or what do you want for your holiday gift? Or, you know, different things like that where people will be interesting to read other answers. That's the stuff that's probably going to perform the best. To create a prompt, you just, you know, go to your channel, tap the plus symbol and select prompt, and you should be able to do that. And new metrics inside broadcast channels to track your performance, including total interaction, story shares, and poll votes that you can use that you can access those by going to your channel name, selecting channel performance, and then choose see all for all of the detailed metrics. All right. Even DMs are getting updates. And like I said, there's been a lot lately. And Instagram is starting to test moving the DM button, the direct message button, to the main navigation bar. So we've seen these screenshots where the message button is right in the middle of the bar at the bottom. And that's not too surprising. The part that kind of surprised me was it replaces the new post button, the plus button that's usually there to create a new post, a new reel, a new story, anything like that. Now, we know as marketers, we are sort of on the creator side of Instagram, and most people on Instagram are consumers, right? There are far more people consuming the content rather than posting. And Instagram has said how DMS and sharing among people, you know, is the future of Instagram. That's where they see everything going. So not surprising this is happening. But it does mean if you get this and they roll it out wide, you'll have to go to your profile, then click the plus button at the top there to put things up. If you're putting up a post a day or a reel or whatever, you know, probably not that big of a deal, but if you're somebody who posts 7 to 10 or more Instagram stories, that's certainly going to get way, way less convenient. All right. Speaking of Instagram stories, specifically story highlights, Instagram is testing, showing recent story highlights within the native stories experience. So when you're watching Instagram stories, all of a sudden you'll see a story highlight something that's not from the last 24 hours that you've added to your story highlights. So I think this is a great opportunity for us as brands to extend stuff a little bit. I'll be honest, I haven't used Instagram story highlights much. Mine are probably old and embarrassing right now. But this is an opportunity again, because it's only going to be recent story highlights to potentially extend something. So rather than having to recreate something over and over again, theoretically, as long as it kept performing, you could save something to highlights and then get some more reviews on it. That next 72 hours. For example, I can see this being especially useful if you had something that was a limited time thing, but it was more than 24 hours, so we'll see. Now, these are designated so somebody knows that it's not something from the last 24 hours. It has a quick story highlights text on the first story in the collection and then they also have a highlights from whatever the brand account is labeled at the top, along with information of when the highlight was created. Meanwhile, back in November, Instagram started removing story highlights from your main profile for some people and moving them to their own dedicated tab. So this is something we've seen screenshots of going out there. Basically, you know, on your profile you've got a tab for the grid, a tab for reels. Well, now there's one for stories. And the only thing this makes me wonder is what are they making room for? What are they making room for that they've decided this needs its own tab because they take up a substantial portion of what shows up on the profile. So it'll be interesting to watch and see if something does end up taking up that space at some point or if they're just cleaning it up in general. Overall, though, whatever brands you manage, I think it's probably worth going in and just looking at your Instagram story highlights, seeing what's there, what should be removed, perhaps maybe things that should be re added because you want them to get re featured again in stories as a story highlight in the current stories. All right, some other tests. Instagram appears to be testing a different iteration of its suggested reels feature in the feed. So normally what we've seen when you're scrolling the feed and when reels come up, they are a carousel where you can kind of swipe through them. Right? Well now we're seeing what they do with YouTube shorts, which is where they're stacked two by two. This is how YouTube does it, and I'm sure they're testing to see if more people will click through to them. But it's a really nice prominent display. So keep that in mind when you are creating your thumbnails for your reels. It is just a great, like, it looks awesome. So again, I think thumbnails, not that they haven't been important already, but this is another reason for them to, you know, maybe customize them when you are making your reels. All right. We reported recently on the show, was it last week? It was on the last show when we were talking about Facebook, I think Australia recently announced a ban on social media for anyone under 16, which is kind of crazy. And they basically said you're going to get fined if anyone under 16 is using your app. So Instagram is planning to use AI to catch teens lying about their age. And they say it's going to do all kinds of things. It's going to know if you can't fake it by having people wish you a happy birthday and different things like that. So it'll be really interesting to see where that goes. There's also been talk about requiring somebody to upload an id and so I don't know, we were sort of joking around on the team, like, are people going to get fake IDs to get on Instagram? Like, so what do you need this to say? That you're 18 or 21? No, no, no, just 16. I just, I just want to use Instagram in Australia. So we'll see where that goes. And one more thing to know, this is going to be really important for your website in case you are using this. Instagram's basic display API access ends for third party apps. This was something that they announced in 2023. They said it'll end on December 4th, 2024. So we just wanted to give you a heads up. This is where developers can switch to their new APIs, but just go to your website if you're not very active on your website and if you have one of those embedded tools like Spotlight or Snap widget where it displays your recent posts, just make sure it's still working because otherwise it looks really weird if all of a sudden there's just a gap there on your site or it's not working in some way. All right, just a quick reminder. Learn all about an AI ticket to social media marketing world today. Just go to social media marketing again, social media marketing world. And if you want to add another podcast, your listening lineup two for you to check out the social media marketing podcast as well as AI explored available wherever you get your podcasts until next time. May you be wise with your marketing decisions. Thanks everyone. Bye. The Social Media Marketing Talk show is a Social Media examiner production. For more social media insight, visit social media examiner. Com.
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Make2025 your best year ever. Grab your discount tickets to Social Media Marketing World right now by visiting Social Media Marketing World dot info.