Are you tired of endless Instagram “algorithm hacks” that promise the world but deliver nothing but wasted time and effort? You spend hours creating content based on the latest “insider tip” only to watch your reach flatline or even decline. You’re constantly second-guessing your strategy, wondering if you’re missing some secret formula that everyone else seems to know.
The truth is, most of what you’ve been told about the Instagram algorithm is either outdated, oversimplified, or flat-out wrong. That’s exactly what our guest today is here to help you fix.
Jenn Herman is a globally recognized Instagram expert, author of “Instagram For Business For Dummies,” and the mastermind behind Jenn’s Trends, a blog that Social Media Examiner has consistently named as one of the top social media blogs you should be reading. She co-hosts the Socially Confident podcast and has been at the forefront of Instagram marketing education for years, helping businesses cut through the noise to find what actually works for sustainable organic growth.
Social Pulse Podcast host Mike Allton asked Jenn Herman about:
- Algorithm reality check. Why most popular Instagram “hacks” fail and what the algorithm actually prioritizes for organic content.
- Sustainable growth tactics. Proven strategies that build long-term engagement rather than chasing short-term algorithm tricks.
- Content strategy evolution. How to adapt your approach based on real algorithm changes versus social media rumors and misinformation.
Learn more about Jenn Herman
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
Full Transcript
(lightly edited)
Mike Allton: Welcome back to Social Pulse Podcast, where we’re digging into the challenges, successes, and stories of social media and community professionals in the industry just like you. Subscribe to gain valuable insights that you’ll be able to apply to your own work and social presence from each and every episode.
Now you’re tired of endless Instagram algorithm hacks that promise the world but deliver nothing but wasted time and effort. You spend hours creating content based on the latest insider tip, only to watch your reach flatline or even decline. You’re constantly second-guessing your strategy, wondering if you are missing some secret formula that everyone else seems to know.
The truth is, most of what you’ve been told about the Instagram algorithm is either outdated, oversimplified, or just flat out wrong, and that’s exactly what our guest is here to help you fix.
Jenn Herman is a globally recognized Instagram expert, author of Instagram for Business for Dummies, and the mastermind behind Jenn’s Trends, a blog that Social Media Examiner consistently named as one of the top social media blogs you should be reading.
She’s one of my oldest and dearest friends and has been at the forefront of Instagram marketing education for years, helping businesses cut through the noise to find what actually works for sustainable organic growth.
Hey Jen, welcome to the show.
Jenn Herman: Yay. I’m on the show.
Mike Allton: You are here. This is amazing.
Jenn Herman: It is, and I love that intro ’cause yes, so many misconceptions with the algorithm. I can’t wait to talk about it.
Mike Allton: So let’s start with the elephant in the room. Social media is flooded with these Instagram algorithm hacks.
What’s the biggest misperception that you see people believing about how the algorithm actually works?
Jenn Herman: So the biggest misconception is how often the algorithm changes. People literally email me every day, and they’re like, Jen, the algorithm’s changed again. And I’m like, no, it hasn’t.
In the last decade, the algorithm has only changed six or seven times, and technically, how it operates today is almost identical to how it operated eight years ago, ten years ago.
Yes, we have new things, we’ve got reels, we have carousels, we’ve got sponsored posts and recommendations, and all these other things that go in there, and that’s what evolves with the algorithm, but as a whole algorithm doesn’t change. It doesn’t change month to month.
What changes is consumer behavior, what changes is content creation, and what changes is trends or what people are interested in, and that spurs algorithmic behavior shifts. It’s not the algorithm itself; it is designed to give you more of what you’re most likely to watch, share, comment on, and engage with, and it’s just ranking all this content for you as the consumer based on that criteria. So as a whole, it really hasn’t changed that much, and that’s what I wish more people understood.
Mike Allton: Yeah. It is this general misperception about social media that stuff’s just changing every single day.
And I’ve been writing, you’ve been writing about social media for a decade, and the stuff doesn’t really change that fast. In fact, AI came along and said hold my beer.
Jenn Herman: Exactly.
Mike Allton: I’m literally gonna change every single day.
Jenn Herman: And Instagram does a lot of changes. They probably give us three or four solid updates a month, and they test five or six other things a month, so there’s always like ballparkish 10 things that kind of change every month, but these are nuanced changes. It’s introducing a new sticker to your stories, it’s adding a little feature here, a lot of the meta AI changes, and those sorts of things.
But how the platform functions only goes through a handful of significant changes a year, like maybe five or six milestone changes, and those are things like we just had the profile layout update. That’s a big change. That’s something that, catastrophic to people’s content planning, reels rolling out, huge shift, right? There are those things, but in general, the platform itself is pretty stable. It’s what we do as consumers that’s always evolving.
Mike Allton: And for folks listening, who maybe, you guys don’t know Jenn. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, why you don’t know her, but if you don’t know her like I do, you gotta understand she’s been writing about every single one of these changes, either directly to Instagram or to her blog, or to her newsletter, or to her Facebook community.
Basically, since Instagram was born, certainly since I met you, what, like 2010? 2011. So when she says only six or seven algorithm changes over the past decade, this isn’t hyperbole, and she’s being accurate. So I know you’ve been studying this stuff.
Jenn Herman: Yeah.
Mike Allton: How has the algorithm actually evolved, and maybe what are some of the core principles that have remained consistent over this past period of time?
Jenn Herman: The most important thing to understand about the algorithm is that it is a one-to-one relationship.
Reels have a bit more of a popularity contest factor built in, but as a whole, Instagram is a one-to-one, meaning if Mike follows me on Instagram, and if he always interacts with my content, my content is at the top of his feed, regardless of how my content performs elsewhere.
It’s a one-to-one relationship in terms of how he consumes my content. If every time he sees my content, he scrolls past it ’cause he’s rude, then in that case, my content goes slower and lower in his feed because he’s not actively interacting with it. The same thing goes for suggested posts.
If you watch something on a suggested post, the algorithm goes okay, we’re gonna give you more of that. If you don’t interact with it, it stops feeding you that, so it’s not this popularity contest that we’re so programmed to believe from Meta platforms like Facebook, like reels. Things like LinkedIn even work on more of a popularity, meaning the more your content performs, the more these platforms show it.
That’s not how Instagram has ever worked, and reels is the only real portion of Instagram that does work in that capacity, where the more that content performs, likes, comments, shares, the more they distribute it to more people. But if you’re following me and you interact with my content, you are going to see my content.
Of course, on the flip side of me as the brand, if I’m not getting reach. That’s not on the algorithm, that’s on me, and that’s a big pill to swallow because yes, reach is down. There are all these issues with getting your content in front of more people, and I’m not here to say that it’s a hundred percent your responsibility, but if you are not creating the content that people want to interact with, Instagram stops showing it to them.
So we need to focus on, and we’ll talk more about this, but things like our insights and things like our engagement, comments and participation and knowing what our content is doing to produce more of what is actually delivering results, and then that snowballs over time as we do more and more because we have to serve our audience what they want and fun fact, what works for you doesn’t work for me.
The big misconception is that you have to do this many posts a week, right? Or you have to do reels, or you have to do this. I could show you my insights right now, and my top-performing posts are single photos and carousels; they outperform reels right now for me because that’s what works for my audience.
Your audience may consume reels by the boatload and ignore your photos, but it’s because it’s that one-to-one relationship that we need to focus on what our audience is consuming and do more of that to really get those results.
Mike Allton: Yeah. It’s funny because Facebook has now started to actually send me a notification about once a week or so telling me, Hey, we’re distributing your posts even more because they were getting engagement, so just to prove your point, Meta is not only doing exactly what you said, they just came right out and told me, they’re saying the quiet part out loud, folks, that’s actually happening.
Jenn Herman: Yes.
Mike Allton: One of the things we do at Agorapulse, and we’ve done this for years, you could go into the reports at Agorapulse, and you could see a recommended base preferred time to post.
Based on how your previous posts had performed with your unique audience, and then recently we implemented an AI version of that, which would extrapolate from, based on, other people’s posts and industries, and that sort of thing. But that, of course, is different from these viral posts that say posts at this time or use these hashtags.
Is that kinda like what you were talking about before, where those posts are based on that individual’s experience, or is there something else going on there?
Jenn Herman: Yeah, we hear all the time, right? And I get the question, what time of day should I post? Or, do I need to use certain hashtags or certain words, or do I need a certain hook or a certain filter?
The thing with gaming the system is that the game only works for a short period of time, right? So if you’re trying to do the right filter, or the right audio, or the right hook, or the right text, or whatever it is, once Instagram gets smart to that and everyone else gets smart to that, it stops working. So it works for a blip in time, and then you’re onto the next trick, the next hack, the next game that you can do.
The real key to success is to your point, looking at your insights, and it’s less about the time of day, it’s more about the day of the week, because again, the algorithm is gonna sort the content, right? So if I post at 8:00 AM, and you log in at 10:00 AM. It’s taking every post that’s been uploaded since your last login and ranking it in priority for your feed.
I could post at 8:00 AM, but you still may not see it ’cause I’m ranked 237th on your priority list. I could have posted yesterday at 7:00 AM, you log in today at noon, and I could be number one on your list because you always interact with my content. So it’s not about gaming it down to this finite time, it’s more about the day.
So again, if your audience is active on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, why are you posting on Monday and Wednesday?
They’re not gonna see that happy. If your audience is active Monday through Thursday, why are you posting on Friday and Saturday? That’s the bigger issue. It’s again, knowing when your audience is there and getting in content in a relevant timeframe, whether it’s 7:00 AM or 10:00 AM, isn’t gonna make a difference.
And it also depends on the frequency of your audience. Now I have a lot of people who follow me ’cause they go to a conference, you see me speak, they hear me on a podcast, something like that, and they follow me because they heard about Instagram, they did an Instagram session, they’re like, oh, I’m all in. I’m gonna follow Jen. But they’re really not all in on Instagram, and they only log in once a month or two or three times a month or once a week.
And so I have a very large portion of my audience that are low volume, which means if they’re logging in twice a month and they follow 500 people, how much content do you think they get served that one time they log in?
There’s no way they can get through everything, and so it again comes down to that audience behavior. It’s that you know their time on the platform. Are they logging in every day? They’re gonna see everything. Are they logging in once a week?
They might only see two of your posts if you post four or five times. So it’s less about the time of the day, about which hashtag you used, or again, what SEO keyword or those sorts of things. It’s playing the short game to get your content out in the relevant timeframes, and it’s playing the long game for search; that’s your two main goals with your content.
Mike Allton: I guess, folks listening, I guess you can decide, do I want to spend the next five years chasing after every latest trend and filter and audio background for reels, or do I want to create content that really resonates with my audience and focus on helping them? I think that’s a pretty clear choice.
But let’s talk about the new profile layout changes, and I’m saying it this way ’cause I hate them, but maybe you don’t, I don’t know. How do these impact how the algorithm evaluates and surfaces profile and search, and discovery?
Jenn Herman: Yeah, so as a whole, the new profile layout doesn’t have a significant algorithmic impact.
It’s an aesthetic impact forever, literally, forever, as long as we’ve had Instagram, we’ve had square photos. Everything cropped to a square on the grid, didn’t matter what format you uploaded in the feed. It cropped to a square on the grid. And square was the optimized, preferred format, but it didn’t give preference to if it was portrait or landscape, or square.
There was no real preference in terms of the content distribution, and the same thing is true now that we’ve gone to portrait, which is, for the sake of argument, very confusing. It’s basically a four by five in the grid, but it’s not really, it’s a three by four, but it’s a four by five. It’s a whole thing, but Instagram’s updated, and they’re finally catching on to the issues they made with the sizing and everything.
But that portrait, that three by four optimized, which is what most camera phones, if you open them, go to a three by four portrait mode, that is now the ideal size for Instagram.
Now, of course, this does mean changing your templates, and it means changing your graphics and things to fit in this new crop. Will they change it again? I honestly don’t think so now that they finally put the three by four in there, ’cause it was four by five, and that was just useless. So now that we’re at the three by four, this is permanent, meaning they won’t go to a nine by sixteen vertical photo. The nine by sixteen will remain optimal for your reels, and reels will always be distributed in nine by sixteen.
If you have a three-by-four or a square or a landscape, it’s gonna go in a vertical with the blank above and below. It’s always going to be distributed as a nine-by-sixteen. Your photos you can still do squares, if you want to do squares, you can just know it’s gonna get cropped off in the grid when someone goes to your profile grid, the sides will be cropped off to make it that vertical kind of portrait mode.
But in terms of what shows up in the feed, there is zero preference given based on size. Now, there are a lot of people who feel that the taller photos they get more landscape. Which is not landscape, it’s landscape in terms of actual space.
Mike Allton: Real estate.
Jenn Herman: But it gets more presence in the feed, right?
You get more time on the screen, so people want to go to these taller images because they want to take up that space, that real estate. And does it make a difference to the grand scheme? No. Can you put more into a vertical than you can in a square? Sure. Depending on the orientation of your photo.
If you were taking a wide photo, you’re gonna take less of it if you make it a portrait, right? So it’s really a matter of preference and aesthetics. For me, I’m fully adopting the three by four, which I still have a four by five crop in terms of upload, but they’re rolling out the three by four to more and more people, so that’s my goal is to adopt the three by four, have that be my standard format but it’s not for any sort of preferential placement, it’s just for pure aesthetics.
Mike Allton: I’ve been wondering about that because … first of all, did I mention I hate it? I hate it.
Jenn Herman: When it launched, all my videos were … we all knew how I felt about it.
Mike Allton: We were all there. I mostly published reels, and this is my concern is that the reels obviously look cropped on the main feed, on my main profile grid, and they’re either gonna have to change that, I think, or not have the reels on the profile grid either way, I think, but I’m not sold that they won’t change this again, I’m not sold on that but we’ll see. Time will tell.
Jenn Herman: Time will tell.
Mike Allton: But speaking of reels, they’ve definitely been this golden child of Instagram for a while now.
Are they still the favorite that’s in the algorithm that everybody else claims, or do you think that shifted, or that was never the case?
Jenn Herman: It has been the case a hundred percent.
Mike Allton: Okay.
Jenn Herman: When reels came out, it was reels, reels, and a lot of people jumped on that bandwagon and rightly so ’cause back in the day, I could try nothing and a reel would hit 20,000 people. Now I can put my entire strategy in a whole lot of planning, and I’ll reach 5,000 people, and I’m like, good god.
It was the thing for sure, but it’s evolved, and I think the key differentiation that people need to understand is what reels are good at.
Reels are really good at getting in front of new audiences. Reels are not good for conversions. Reels are not good for getting people to go to your link and bio and actually do something. Reels are really good for short form, or even if it’s a minute or a minute and a half, if it’s good entertainment or a good watch, they will watch it. But for the most part, reels are good for short form, still under a minute of content, and they’re good for reaching new audiences.
If you want to grow. If you want to reach more people, if you want new eyeballs on your content, reels are absolutely successful for that. No question. They get more recommendations, they get more shares, and they will get that placement when people are looking for your relevant keyword or those sorts of things.
So, reels are great for that brand awareness at the top of the funnel. If you want conversions, if you want to serve your existing audience, that’s where carousels and singular posts come in from the feed perspective, but ultimately, stories are always going to be your high, not always, not necessarily for you, but in general, stories will be the highest converting content because they go to your existing audience.
We tend to be more relaxed in our stories. We can put link stickers in our stories. We tend to see the highest conversion from Instagram stories, and those could be videos, they could be photos, they could be texts, right? They could be anything. But it’s knowing that hierarchy for your strategy.
So, do I use reals? Absolutely. Do I hate them? Yes. But I use them because I need them. I feel about reels the way Mike feels about the new grid. But I use them because they work, but they work for a specific purpose within my entire strategy. I will never go all in on reels. I will never go all in on singular photos.
Each one of these pieces of content have a specific purpose within your strategy, which in general is reels at the top of the funnel, carousels are great for secondary exposure, so they’re really good for like calls to action or sales type or things you really want people to follow through on. Singular photos are great for education, information, tips, updates, and those sorts of things, educating your audience with a longer caption, and then stories for your conversions, because you don’t have to make people work as hard from stories.
Now, of course, single-feed posts can be high-converting too, but it’s your strategy. It’s the comment link below, and we’ll send you the link or go to our link in bio or whatever it is. Don’t expect high conversions from reels. Some people will get high conversions, but in general, it’s understanding where each one belongs in your strategy that’s going to bring each of those types of content the most success.
Mike Allton: That makes a lot of sense. I love how you’re painting this picture, what we need to actually think about different kinds of content for different aspects of our strategy, and apparently, I should have said at the outset that this is gonna be a bit of a consulting therapy session, some drinking involved, make sure you’ve got your favorite drinks so you can commiserate along with Jen and I, everything that you dislike about this platform that we absolutely love.
Jenn Herman: We love.
Mike Allton: And I should mention, as an aside, Agorapulse will help you schedule all this stuff out. Yes. Including those link stickers, we’ve got this really clever feature inside of AgoraPulse that’ll help you schedule stories with link stickers. It’s pretty cool.
Folks, we’re talking with Jen Herman about how social media managers like you can actually achieve success on Instagram today, and I’ve got so many more questions for it.
But first, let’s make sure that you’ve got plenty of time available to dream up your next reel.
Advert: When I take a look at the biggest core benefit for Agorapulse, I have to look at two sides of the equation. I have to look at what it does for us as far as managing our community and all of the conversation management tools, which I appreciate so much, but from a far more pragmatic point of view, it saves us money.
It saves us a lot of money because of the productivity of the features that are built in, with how it manages those conversations, we don’t waste time. We’re efficient.
Agorapulse allows me to get through all my messages and my replies really quickly. That’s probably the number one reason for me wanting to use the tool: it saves so much time.
A big draw for me with Agorapulse was the ability to manage my YouTube comments. That is a huge feature for me, and here’s why: because up until then, I basically would have to go into my social media manager system to do everything there. And then I’d have to log out, go back into YouTube and do the same thing there.
Now, when you are managing multiple clients, this becomes a huge waste of time, right? And what we want to do is streamline that efficiency so we can log into one website. Now we can manage all of our major social profiles there, and we’re able to serve our clients with more clarity and purpose.
They worked with us, they helped train us on how to get everything up and going, and we were able to cancel out all the other tools that we didn’t need anymore. So it saved us a lot of time and a lot of headaches for my team members as they’re, now only have one tool that they can use to maximize their clients.
Mike Allton: So that was probably a little bit nostalgic watching that video.
Jenn Herman: It was.
Mike Allton: Folks don’t know those interviews Emeric and I conducted at Social Media Marketing World in 2018, and you, Jen, were part of those interviews. We’ve got a couple of different montages. You’re and some other ones, but those are all dear and fast friends of ours, so that was fun. I’m sure it’s fun for me every time I watch that.
Jenn Herman: I was thinking how young they all looked.
Mike Allton: Oh my gosh.
Jenn Herman: I’m like, wow, we have matured.
Mike Allton: Yes. Yes. We’ve grown in wisdom in many other ways.
Jenn Herman: Yes.
Mike Allton: So, what are some ranking factors that actually work?
What have you observed where they actually impact organic reach? Not the rumors.
What have you tested and proven?
Jenn Herman: So there are a couple of things that you have to consider, so the metric that I look at to understand what’s working. First is reachable. I look at my reach, not my likes, comments, shares, nothing.
First thing I do is look at reach, because reach tells me if that post is performing, if I know my baseline is a reach of a thousand, and I see a post reach 2000, now I’m digging into the results.
Why did that one perform as well as it did? If I have a baseline of a thousand, and this one reached 700 again, what did I miss? Where am I off?
So that’s the first thing I look at, but in terms of then knowing what’s performing, again, this is one of the most recent algorithm shifts, as Instagram has a big weight on shares.
Now this is very much in line with Facebook, LinkedIn, these sorts of things, where they want shareable content. They want content that people are sharing into from an Instagram perspective, direct messages, stories, those sorts of things, where people are sharing your content, that is a key indicator that this is top-quality content.
If you’re willing to consume my content, that’s cool. If you’re willing to consume my content and throw up a like or maybe a comment, okay, but it was good. But if you’re willing to share it with somebody, Instagram values this as this is high-quality content, meaning it will get more distribution, meaning it will get more opportunity for things like search, explore, those sorts of recommended posts, those sorts of things.
But I say this with a grain of salt because I have a lot of data that proves this does not work, so I have posts that will get 200 plus shares, and we’ll reach this tiny little fraction of non-followers, and I’m like, okay, Instagram I’m literally doing what you tell me to do and I’m still not getting the distribution.
And it’s because there are so many other factors that go into it, including the relevance of the post, the time of the post, so I have a post that just went out recently, and it’s a big Instagram update, a news-type thing, right? So I jumped on it quickly.
This is new to the industry; this is a breaking news type thing, so yes, it got a ton of shares, a couple hundred shares easy, but I’m competing with a lot of other people sharing the same information, right? Instagram is saying, okay, do I share Jen’s post, which got a ton of you in my audience, my existing followers, just not a lot of distribution to non-followers, but that’s because there’s probably 40 other Instagram experts out there sharing the exact same information at the exact same time.
Yes, mine should get more play, but whatever.
Mike Allton: Obviously.
Jenn Herman: It’s Instagram saying, okay, you’re more likely to like Jenn’s post, but this person’s probably more likely to like this person’s post, and so it has to disseminate all of this new similar content at the same time. So even though I have highly shareable content, it doesn’t guarantee it’s gonna go viral or that it’s gonna all of a sudden get 10 times what I would normally get for distribution.
So while shareable content is a key indicator of success, that can’t be your only goal because if you’re only going for shareable content, you’re not serving your existing audience, you’re not going to get conversions. Most shareable content isn’t conversion-driven, right? I’m not gonna share a post that says, Hey, come buy this new widget I have and have it be highly shared. But if I share something and I’m like, oh my gosh, here’s breaking news in the industry, probably gonna get a lot of shares.
But there’s no conversion intent behind it, so it can’t always be the goal to do shareable content that will get you more of the top of the funnel. Reels are highly shareable sales with tips, tutorials, and resources, highly shareable. Those are the types of pieces that are going to help you stay top of mind, help you grow your audience, but in terms of what you want for conversions, you’re looking at website clicks, you’re looking at links clicks in your stories, you’re looking at how many followers you got from that post.
That post that got all those shares, I got a bunch of new followers from it, and Instagram literally says, This person followed you from your post, and you go to the insights, and it says you gained this many new followers from this post.
So those are things that matter to me more than just the share value, and again, like we were talking before with the types of content, you can’t say there’s one metric for success because each type of content has a different metric in terms of what matters to you so create the shareable content, get the distribution, get people seeing your content a hundred percent but that’s a portion of your strategy.
We wanna look at, like I said, those conversion metrics or how many people are DMing you from a comment, If you’re saying, leave a comment below and I’ll send you a dm, or if you’re call to action is, send me a DM and we’ll send you the information, or if they’re responding to a poll, a question, a quiz, something in your stories.
These types of engagements are massively indicative of high-quality content with your audience and potentially even non-followers. Those matters are probably more than the shares because those are people converting, those are people doing what you need them to do to communicate with you. So again, it depends on your content purpose as to what your key metric will be.
Mike Allton: We did almost an entire webinar all about just how important the DMs are, how to encourage them. But if reach is our North Star…
Jenn Herman: Yeah.
Mike Allton: And you’re a business like me who’s struggling with decreasing organic reach, what’s the first thing you tell someone like me to look at in terms of auditing our current strategy?
Jenn Herman: So the first thing I’m gonna tell you to do is go look at your last six months of content, don’t go beyond six months, because everything that’s happened in 2025 is an evolution from what happened in 2024. Everything that happened in 2025 is way beyond what happened in 2023. If you’re looking at content from two years ago, it is irrelevant to what is working today.
So, look at your content for the last six months, whether today or three months from now, look at the last six-month window of content. You can go into your Instagram insights, you can go into your Agorapulse insights, and pull your top-performing content based on reach, so you can search for your parameter on Instagram and choose reach as your metric.
Go look at your top-performing content. What did the most reach? Is it real? Is it carousels? Is it educational? Is it entertainment? Is it personal, behind-the-scenes stuff? Is it product or service-based? What is your top-performing content?
Then we do more of that because we need to rejuvenate our audience. If they want the behind-the-scenes content, we double down on the behind-the-scenes content to boost our content back up, but you got, it’s not okay, so for the next week, we’ll post behind-the-scenes content. No, for the next six weeks, you’re gonna post behind-the-scenes content.
Not all of your content will be that, but you’re gonna double down and do more than you would normally do because you’ve gotta give time for people to start interacting with it and the algorithm to adapt and start showing them more, and it gets presence, it gets play, it gets engagement. They start sharing it with more people, right? Like it’s gonna build over time like a snowball. It’s not something you can do it for a week and be like, oh, it didn’t work. That’s just not gonna work for us.
You have to give everything a good four to six weeks minimum to recalibrate the algorithm whenever you make a significant change. So look and see what works for you and then do more of that. And then if you’re like, okay, Jen, that’s great, but our promotional content sucks, we’re not getting any engagement on it, but that’s what pays the bills. I get it.
How do you take your promotional content and make it look like the good content? Can you turn it into behind-the-scenes and get away from the overly processed, heavily edited, perfect trailer-type content and just have your staff sitting around a table in the back room opening a box if you’re in retail or give it to your kid and be like, here, play with this new product we launched, and have your kid doing stuff with it. Boom. There you go. You can still create your product sales, promotional content, but we have to start putting it in a way that people choose to consume it.
We can’t give them what we want them to have; we have to give them what they’re telling us they want, and we have to get creative within that sphere.
Mike Allton: Now, is it safe to say that if it’s somebody like me who’s basically just posting the same stuff every single week, like I do, clips from my podcast as a reel, that’s pretty much all I post to Instagram.
Jenn Herman: Yeah.
Mike Allton: So I think it’ll be a little more challenging than looking back at six months and finding something that stands out if it’s basically all the same. Should we throw in some carousels?
Jenn Herman: Yes.
Mike Allton: Regardless of the data, throw in some behind-the-scenes, throw in some different categories of stuff, and if so, what would those categories be?
Jenn Herman: Yeah, so one of the biggest challenges is if you’re always doing the same thing, people get tired of it, right? If, literally, all I did was post an Instagram tip three times a week, every week, for six months, my engagement would drop my views would drop because people get oversaturated.
They get tired of the same thing; they want different things, right? They wanna see what your desk studio setup looks like, they wanna see your fingers whizzing across the keyboard as you’re in editing mode, they wanna see, take a clip like from the green room, right? Something that’s not the polished perfect here we are recording, No, you know it’s been edited. The ums and ahs have been cut out, that sort of thing, they wanna see the reality of it, they wanna see when the camera falls over.
These are the things that people want to see, and it’s not the stuff that sells, so it’s not the stuff we typically put out.
And Mike, you and I know this, I’m preaching to the choir when I say this, but people don’t come onto social media to see what a brand is doing that day. They come on to see what their friends are doing, their family, what’s going on, trending in whatever industry that they like, whether it’s fashion, beauty, tech, movies, or whatever. They want what’s going on today, not being sold to, not being said here’s another thing in your face here, no, they want entertainment, they want fun, they want relaxed. They wanna tune out from the world. So we gotta mix in the things we wanna push at them.
With the more casual content, and like I said, that could be the behind-the-scenes type things, but it could be taking what we talked about today. You have your editor, whoever, pull out two or three sound bites, turn ’em into a carousel, put it into Canva , and now you have a carousel with three or four kinds of hot tip soundbite-type things in an eight or nine-slide carousel.
And, go to the link and bio to watch the whole episode because again, you take someone like me who doesn’t really consume reels, I’m getting better about it, but I’m not a video person. I don’t like watching videos. I wanna read, I wanna swipe that carousel and skim really fast, I wanna read your long caption.
So if all you’re serving me is real, I’m not watching because it’s not how I choose to consume content. Now, of course, I do watch Mike’s because it’s Mike and I love Mike, but in general, if all you’re doing is posting reels, you start to alienate a portion of your audience, and so you have to find ways to mix in this other content that serves them in a way that they go, oh, yeah, I do wanna watch that episode or the next time you put up a reel, they see it and they’re like, okay but I know that last one they did was really good so let me watch this real ’cause maybe this one’s really good too but you’ve gotta mix up the content in this like a little rollercoaster otherwise it’s just a downhill slide if it’s the same thing over and over again.
Mike Allton: And I think that’s why this kind of conversation is so important, because we all need that constant reminder to get outside of our own heads and try to think about our own audience, ’cause like you talk about, people don’t want to do the same thing over again.
You’re talking to the guy who’s listened to the Star Wars: Andor soundtrack a hundred times over the past 30 days, and we’ll keep listening to it because I like that repetition. I don’t want change, but I’m not my own audience.
My own audience is different from me. They have their own interests and wants, and desires, particularly when it comes to social media content.
And we gotta talk about AI before I let you go.
Jenn Herman: Yeah.
Mike Allton: ’cause I’m wondering how AI is rolling out on Instagram, I don’t know if it’s impacting search, is it impacting how content and creators should be thinking about optimizing for discoverability? How should they be approaching it from that perspective?
Jenn Herman: Great question, and we have to talk about it, right? I don’t think we can have conversations these days without incorporating AI into the conversation because it’s so prevalent and it does impact in a few different ways on Instagram.
Instagram search has never been the most robust, let’s just be real, but Google is not a competitor, but if you went to Instagram and you searched, you could do like a short keyword search, right? So you could say, like San Diego restaurants, you could say, new movies, you could say kids’ crafts, whatever it is.
You could put in a couple keywords, and Instagram would choose and sort a bunch of content relevant to your keyword search based on the number of criteria, that hasn’t changed, that still work the same, and you still want to be optimizing for those keywords that people are searching for, because again, there is an algorithm that’s AI-generated that’s searching for this.
So if you’re in real estate and you’re not saying real estate homes, houses, listing your local communities, names and streets, and parks and things, AI’s not gonna put you in those search results, right?
So you need to make sure that you’re using those relevant words that your target audience is searching for, not the fun words we come up with in our own head, but what people are actually looking for, what AI is doing as a shift, we know Meta AI is prevalent on all the meta platforms, is if somebody puts in a longer-tail keyword search, so they could do something like, things to do in San Diego, that is a long-tail keyword search that’s not gonna populate Instagram or post for you to go look at.
That’s gonna launch Meta AI in a chat that’s gonna come back and be like, sounds like you’re looking for things to do in San Diego, if you’re a first-time visitor to San Diego, here’s some great things you should do, go to the San Diego Zoo, go to Coronado, and it’s this AI prompt that gives this huge, long answer, so you’re going away from any Instagram results and being served essentially a ChatGPT response but it’s Meta AI and so this is a shift, right? Because this is now taking you off the Instagram platform.
So you’re looking at that going, okay, so I’m gonna, it’s my first time visiting San Diego, I should go to the San Diego Zoo. Are you more likely to back outta the chat and look for the San Diego Zoo on Instagram? Or are you more likely to go to Google and go look San Diego Zoo tickets up? Probably gonna go to Google, go to the website, go to the options for tickets, these sorts of things.
So it pulls you out of the platform, not necessarily for everyone, but in a lot of situations it’s gonna do that, and that could have a negative impact on distribution, on consumption time on the platform, and things like this. These are things that you have to consider as a whole, but the newer thing that Instagram has been testing, and they rolled it out and they rolled it back, but it’s still there, so we don’t really know what they’re doing.
But if I put up a post that’s talking about, I went to dinner at, let’s say, a local restaurant, if I put up a post about that restaurant, and maybe I had an amazing Italian dish.
What’s gonna happen is when you open up, not when you look at it in the feed, but when you open up the comment thread for that post, there’s a little magnifying glass and keywords, which is Meta AI, going through it is scanning your content, and that little search is gonna say something like Italian dishes or San Diego restaurants or something that is a relevant keyword search to what your content is about.
You have no control over this. You have zero ability to tell ’em what the search topic is, It’s scanning it based on your content, the problem is that if I, as a consumer, see your brand content, I’m on your profile, I’m looking at your content, your post reading, your comments, or people that love comments on your post, and I see this little magnifying glass, and I click on it, I leave your content, I go to a whole new search dialogue, which is all these Instagram posts, all related to this ideal search topic.
So maybe again, you’re on my posts all about Instagram, right? You’re learning about Instagram tips and tutorials and things you can do to improve your Instagram strategy.
And you go to look at all the comments, and you see there’s this little thing that says Instagram tips. You’re like, oh, that looks interesting. And you click on it. You’ve now left my profile, and you’re going to see thousands of other people’s posts, and most of them are very popular. So this isn’t beneficial to small businesses.
This is very beneficial to large creators and big brands, and you’ve left my content, and now you’re in a sea of other people’s content. So, when I could have had you go look at 3, 4, 5 more of my posts, I’ve now sent you away to go look at a whole bunch of other people’s content, and I have no control over it.
There are these things where we’re still in these very early days. We all know this, right? AI is new enough that we’re still like the wild west, even though we’re starting to get a little bit more stable, and these are the things that, as Meta rolls these out, they have the best of intentions, and these are intended to serve the consumer, right?
Not the brand, but the consumer, the person’s experience on the platform but as these happen, they’re gonna start to be like, oh maybe that’s a problem, or maybe this is being misused, or maybe this is producing the wrong results, so it’s going to evolve and we can’t overreact to, we don’t like this feature today, or this isn’t working, this is a bad idea because these are going to evolve repeatedly over the next six months to two years, but it is very prevalent on the platform, and it is definitely drawing attention from creators that want to optimize for these things.
But my best advice is to optimize for that search SEO, make sure you’re using the right keywords, and make sure you have good descriptive captions. If you’ve got reels, make sure you have either the caption sticker on there or good audio, or a good long caption because the more we give context to our content, the better it’s gonna do in search results and that’s where we wanna focus our AI content focus should be on that for search in general, not specifically for these other little AI components that are still in development. Let’s call it.
Mike Allton: No, you’re absolutely right. We are literally just at the infancy of AI, so everything’s going to get better, everything’s going to change.
Don’t worry about that stuff, this will evolve and change over time, which means we’re gonna just have you back, probably just do a whole another episode about Meta AI and AI’s impact on Instagram, but for now, we’re out of time, and I know folks are gonna be buzzing. I’m buzzing with ideas.
If they’ve got questions, obviously, they should follow you on X. Tell ’em where they should go to reach out.
Jenn Herman: So I’m pretty much everywhere as Jenn’s trends. It’s jennstrends.com. It’s Jenn_trends on Instagram, Threads , all the places, but if you go to the website , you can find all my resources on there, all my social media links, my membership program , my Facebook group , everything is there.
But yeah, if you want to learn all things Instagram, please send me a follow, send me a direct message, even over on Instagram, let me know you heard me here on the podcast. Happy to answer questions, and my Instagram is full of tips, tutorials, breaking news, and my unfiltered opinions, which tend to get very colorful on all these different things.
If you want, I’m on LinkedIn and Facebook , but I share the real updates, news, and everything always goes on Instagram, so that’s the best place to catch up.
Mike Allton: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Jenn.
Thank all of you for listening, we’ll have all of Jenn’s links in the show notes. As always, follow on Instagram, pay attention on Sunday, she does this live thing, it’s fantastic. She gives a deep dive into a question from one of you, so ask her.
Don’t forget to follow and find the Social Pulse podcast on Apple. Drop me a review, let me know what you thought of this episode. And don’t forget, we’ve got an exclusive community on Facebook Social Pulse community , where you can join and network with literally thousands of other social media professionals.
Until next time, see you then.
