Head of INSTAGRAM reveals secrets to GROWING in 2025

three of the top priorities for us are it's just not an important thing for for reach I got a lot of hate for this why am I not getting the views I feel I deserve does Instagram Shadow ban I'm sure a bunch of people are just steaming hearing me say it really disappointed in myself when you ask that question yeah I'm s I'm sorry for asking it can be hard my DMs and my comments can be pretty dark yeah I can imagine I should double check before I answer cuz we're being recorded we want to

be the best platform for creators hello and welcome to today's episode of build your tribe I'm your host Brock Johnson but I'm not going to bore you with a long Preamble because you didn't come here to listen to me talk you clicked on this episode to hear directly from the head of Instagram himself I do want to say that I feel so honored and humbled to represent all of us content creators and small business owners in this conversation I hope you learned something and I hope you walk away feeling a little bit more at peace

with growing on Instagram without further Ado here is my full interview with of Instagram Adam [Music] moseri you might be the most visible head of a social media app that I can think of and so at least in terms of showing up putting your neck on the line posting content addressing concerns what led to that decision uh I don't know if I'm the most maybe the there might be more famous ones there definitely more famous ones but in terms of Po on the platform up showing up putting yourself out there so I used to work

on Facebook for a long time I worked on the Facebook app for almost 10 years and I remember maybe about this might have be 10 10 years ago now MH there's more and more as we're getting really big there's more and more concerns and questions and scrutiny and my take was that the conversations were clearly going to happen about fa Facebook and social media more Broad with or without us and it would make more sense to be part of the conversations than not even if it would be sometimes difficult or a lot of work or

sometimes really unpleasant I spent a lot of time on Twitter back in the day talking to journalists and some of our most uh Avid critics but I just thought it would be better to be part of it than not so I kind of built up that that that habit or that sort of part of my job and so then when I transitioned over to Instagram it just made sense to keep doing it uh and then over the years I've tried to focus more and more on not trying to reach everybody most people don't care what

I have to say um but for people who are using Instagram uh to make a living or as like or as a Creator I wanted to make sure that I was speaking to them so um and it was a lot it was a lot you know it's a lot of fun at times it can be hard it can be hard it my DMs and my comments can be pretty dark yeah I can imagine but in general um I just think it's good to be out there speaking of those creators and the people who want to

make money on the platform what are your biggest goals or priorities for them in 2025 I mean there's a lot of stuff going on right now I mean we want to be the best platform for creators and in some ways um I think you could make that case uh in other ways we're behind but there are a lot of creators on Instagram probably more than any other platform so if you look at how many people we think are creators are on the platform that looks like a bigger number than YouTube channels or you know um

most other platforms but you know you never know for sure and we know that there's a lot of competition and we know that there's a lot of scrutiny and a lot of um concerns about our platform from the Creator Community as there are about all platforms and so what we're trying to do is better understand the broad group's needs and then meet those needs the things that matter most as far as we can tell and you should tell me because you probably would know better than I I certainly Reach people always want more reach um

and so figuring out but it's not just about how much reach it's about stability which is very hard I think any platform that guarantees you stable reach is probably Ling uh but certainly there's more and less stable uh but there are other things too like I really want us to do more as a priority um on helping small creators break out which is actually from a engineering perspective a bit more difficult um I want us to do more to reward original creators and identifying who's creating original content is also an interesting trick I want us

to do to be um better at Trends it takes still too long for things to pop on Instagram yeah um so this those are maybe of maybe three of the top priorities for us are um valuing original content helping smaller creators break and also having Trends um just happen quickly H makes sense in terms of helping smaller creators something a lot of people have noticed recently is the pie chart of where their reach is coming from is really increased in terms of uh the disconnected or the unconnected reach as you call it the the reach

from non-followers yeah so I'm curious what motivated that change trying to grow the pie yeah so basically the if you look at how people share on Instagram creators aside for a second there are more photos and videos not including text shared in DMS than there are in stories every day and there are way more photos and videos shared into stories than into feed every day so yes feed is for average folk to share photos or videos that they're really proud of but it's it's a very small percentage of average folk who actually post a feed

Post in a given day um whereas for creators it's much higher so it's becoming much more of a uh public domain whereas stories and DMS are much more about where your friends are though obviously creators are in all of those places in different ways but because the amount of content being shared into feed was decreasing for a long time um we've needed to figure out a way to that meant that the amount of time people were spending in feed was decreasing and so that was a negative feedback loop because there's less time being spent there's

less reach to go around there's less people like and comment less then people post less and then there's less content to see so then people spend less time and they like and comment less and it was going in a circle so recommendations was really just an um the only viable way to maintain feed as an important Place gotcha and it is the most important place for creators to post stor are awesome but your average crator reaches way more people in feed mhm and so recommendations was a way to from a just aure brass tax business

perspective maintain feed and Grow Feed as an important part of Instagram and we try to do so in a way where it would help people discover creators and other accounts that they would love but might not even knew existed um and so you've seen that play out and you've seen I made it I pushed really hard to make sure people could see the difference between their connected and unconnected reach MH um because they should know where it's coming from and what to optimize for you know might be different or how to think about it might

be different so it was a it was a business need and then a user need um and we tried to that's what we're always trying to do is figure out something that's not only good for creators but also good for average folk and also good for Instagram and then you know at the overlap is where the good stuff happens people are always freaking out over algorithm changes and updating there's this new algorithm you answered recently on one of your Friday ask me anything which are awesome um you said that you're constantly tweaking and working on

the algorithm but oftentimes in small ways that we might not even notice is that a daily thing that it's being tweaked and work on worked on gotcha small changes go out every day gotcha uh it's very rare that there's a massive change and how we do something it's much more common that we're just trying to get a little bit better one day at a time gotcha um if you see a huge swing in what's going on it probably isn't there was a huge change in how we rank content it's probably more there was a huge

change in the world gotcha it might be you know Mother's Day everybody's posting pictures of their moms tell talking about how much they love them that's actually content for you to compete with as a Creator um or there's seasonality you know like if you have predominantly young people who follow you and schools out you know you see time spent on social media is going to grow um holidays same thing um if if people are off work you know they're going to spend more time online so if there's a big swing in a given day um

it's probably more likely the world changed um but also the thing think one piece of advice I give a lot that I don't know I'm good at giving is don't overreact to any one post because something might have been weird that day look for the patterns so for for these types of posts how do they do for this other type of post how do they do and then you know double down on what works and maybe rethink what doesn't um talking about messaging which I know you believe is a central part of the platform and

I would agree that it's one of the real strong suits that Instagram has over other platforms um there's been a lot of mixed messaging no pun intended around DMS recently and specifically DM automation uh so I'd love if you could clear the air about automation through approved Partners obviously um and whether that's allowed on Instagram or you know specifically the whole uh if you comment this word you'll receive this automated message oh interesting so I think it depends so we certainly we have an API it's it's allowed um but sometimes there are some providers that

are doing Shady things so like one thing is like don't ever give anybody your password if anybody's asking you for your password like that's not probably like a trusted partner yeah but actually most accounts that are compromised so that are self-c compromised last time I checked um so that happens a lot um so we do want to support this part of the ecosystem uh we know it's important uh but make sure you are working with someone who's reputable uh it's possible sometimes we mistakenly catch good actors when we're trying to catch Bad actors I'm sure

that happens um but yes there there are apis there are tools that are supported and allowed gotcha okay um in terms of SEO on Instagram um it seems like you guys are really working to improve the discoverability of profiles and posts um can you talk more about the future of how Instagram might work as as a search engine showing us what we're looking for and having Instagram results pop up when we are searching for things so I mean two different sides one yes we're trying to do better at helping at having content from creators on

Instagram surface in search results for you know Google and other Searchers providers um because I just think that's a win-win for everybody so we're starting to try to figure out what the opportunities are there that team has been doing has been lean and mean and mighty for a long time um but they're doing some good work um but we're also starting to invest more in search on Instagram um because there's so much amazing content and quite frankly what we call content search search as opposed to searching for an account actually searching for some type of

content it's not very good on Instagram uh and that's not a knock on that team that team has been really small for a very long time so we've strengthened that team recently and I'm pretty excited about some of the ideas um that will hopefully and improvements that are going to go out over the next well next few months and few years um it's a long road um but I do think that could also be really good one for people who are looking for things you can imagine whatever you use Instagram for it' be great to

be able to find that more easily but also for creators because it should allow content to resurface so that you don't kind of get all the value in those first 24 48 Hours um but we'll see gotcha one thing one of those little features that might be that something that that team worked on that I noticed recently was at the top of the comments section there was a recommended search yeah um can you tell me more about that feature and what determines what that recommended search is so we're working on it actually the latest version

is not out yet um but what we're looking at is both the the contents so the the real or the carousel or the photo but what we also need to look at is the comments below okay because sometimes and that's not out yet but I think that's coming out sometimes where the real interesting context is is not in the piece of not in the video that someone uploaded but in the context around it which is is almost always in the comments and so what we're trying to do is you know surface that more easily um

and then you can go and find out more so if you saw I don't know Walton gogins face and SE uh not Severance um White Lotus this week was like a big meme yeah you could maybe you see that maybe you haven't maybe you don't watch the show and there's a picture or a real of that and you'd be like why why do this guy looks so confused yeah uh but in the comments you might find you know the context between this crazy Sam Rockwell sort of monologue in this Barn in a hotel in Bangkok

or whatever it was and then that might be it might this the pro The Prompt might be something like you know I don't know you know White Lotus episode 7 or whatever it was and so then it would give you context and then if you clicked on that you might get a whole bunch of other content that put it in context gotcha uh our hope is to sort of create a little bit of fun and Delight by connecting the dots right because the real might be funny on its own or the meme the comments might

be good to read if you've got time you may or may not search for it but if we can connect the dots all of a sudden you know maybe one plus one plus one can equal four instead of three gotcha um so I know you said comments are coming soon right now it's primarily looking at the content itself so does that mean the caption the spoken audio the actual like analyzing of what is in the video all of that all of those things are considered but this the technology we're using to actually understand those things

is going to get much better over the next couple months so um so the way this works for any provider is you know this is to another platforms too is you don't actually you basically take key frames from the video so you might look at 16 or 128 or even as many as you know I think I think YouTube is probably more like up to like 512 different frames from the video to try to understand that what happened you also will transcribe the audio into text um and then try to un use that and extract

any understanding from that um comments um coming soon if not already out and then from all of that you try to come up with a uh a search that might be interesting and we try and if we don't come up with anything we think that's interesting we just don't show you the prompt sure um so what you'll see is those prompts will get more they'll happen more often as we get better at understanding content um and context and then and we're more confident in the recommendation makes sense I think it's very helpful for creators to

know that it's everything it's all of those things yeah yeah uh to be aware of yeah and it's going to be like right now it's disproportionately looking at the caption relative to the video relative to the audio relative to the comments in that order but that's going to change because as we get better to understanding all the pieces we'll integrate them um so definitely just assume we're trying to understand the full context um because that's that's where we're going that's what we're working on gotcha you've talked about kind of the three metrics that are best

or that you would recommend focusing on the most for increasing reach what do you tell people when they ask you what focus on shares yeah because I think shares at least algorithmically speaking of course they're helpful but it's a sending a post to another human so even if the algorithm was optimized for saves a share would still be the way to reach another human being yeah that's how I think about it but speaking of this conversation of shares of course human to human all shares are not equal if I send a post to my wife

that's one additional viewer if I share it to my story that might be hundreds or thousands of extra viewers algorithmically speaking are all shares created equally or are different shares weighted more heavily oh that's a really good question I I I think they're valued relatively equally um because it's true that like if you send a message to one person there's less views than if you send it to your stories and maybe thousands of people are going to see your story MH um but they might have seen your other stories that day anyway and your wife

might out have open Instagram that day and when you send her a message her phone's going to Bing and she's going to open it up most likely hopefully I don't know yeah um and but also because if you just think about it from a from a from the perspective of the of the person receiving it like it's kind of more meaningful if you send me something you're like I think you'd be really interested in this that is a lot more meaningful than I thought everyone might want to know this thing in addition to all the

other things I thought they all should know today yeah yeah um so we look more it sends gotcha um and then the third metric if you will has to do with the time the amount of time people are spending with the content yeah I want first of all clarification it's watch time so the amount of seconds that people are spending with that piece of content not necessarily watch rate watch be correct watch rate being the percent that you watch yeah the percentage of completion we look at both um but we we try not to we

look at both because if you watch something all the way to the end that's a good sign but we definitely don't want to just you know penalize things because they're longer okay and so you know if you watch 20 seconds of a 21 second video and 20 seconds of a you know 10 minute video like it's not like those two things are equal um so we do look at both okay um but it what matters more is just the over amount of time watch we're not trying to optimize for time this is a common misconception

is I was like oh these platforms they just want you to spend more time they're just trying to optimize for time time that is that is not quite the case for us I think if you look at you know Netflix from what I can tell they optimize for time YouTube time Tik Tok time plus some other things around originality and and and breaking content um we are a place to be to to be entertained to entertain yourself to find stuff that to explore your interests but we're also a place to conect with your friends and

if we just optimize for time what would happen is you would you could just you would just show longer and longer and more and more videos but then for every five minute video you watch that's maybe 50 things you didn't see from other other people including your friends so we're much more in the like short video focus it doesn't mean there's a perfect length for video but one of the reasons why you know the the primary flows only allow for up to three minutes it's like we are you know a place where we want you

to easily explore a bunch of interests send a couple things to a friend maybe talk to your friends about them and short video is way more uh like close to that friend Connection use case than long video because long video becomes much less participatory and much more I'm just gonna sit back and watch right Y which is awesome it's not a bad thing but that's not our thing mhm I don't think you can really have a lean back experience that's also one where you talk to your friends you know you kind of have to pick

two of the three you can either be long form and short form or short form and friends it's really hard to be long form and Friends makes sense um speaking of hashtags while we're on the topic of algorithm and increasing reach um I know there's been a lot of changes with hashtags over the last few years I believe you can no longer follow hashtags the recent section of hashtags is no longer a thing um and I know you've said a few times now that I got a lot of hate for this I'm sure yeah I

know you do um uh is that hashtags are no longer a primary way to increase your reach on Instagram they don't significantly increase your reach on Instagram gotcha contr to popular belief yeah um it's just not an important thing for for reach um so I don't know I I can say that all I want people I mean I like hashtags there's nothing again hashtags we moved away from following hashtags because it wasn't really being used that much and just recommendations in general were kind of handling that uh we moved away from the recent tab which

I know people really like because it just was uh a safety and a Spam it was getting abused by Bad actors I would imagine yeah it's just much harder to to to um to manage the safety risks and the spam risks because you can just if it's just determin I know everyone's just like just do go cry deterministic recent hashtag recent feed but for hashtag specifically if you just do that it's really easy just to like post a thousand bad things that don't quite violate our community guidelines but almost do and just take over that

page and so it just became like not worth it um whereas if you allow us to rank we can then filter out things that are problematic or spammy or repetitive or unoriginal um and we don't have that ability if it's just a Chrono thing um and it just was getting abused too much um so I get it I'm sure a bunch of people are just steaming hearing me say it um but that was I want to be honest uh I'd rather tell people why and have them disagree then just like yeah pretend it wasn't an

intentional decision is there a day where hashtags are removed from Instagram completely I don't think so um I think there's a probably a couple interesting ways we could evolve it um we'll see where search goes over the next year or two but there's no plan or just remove them gotcha staying on the topic of hashtags there are some banned hashtags hashtags you can't use what happens if you use one unknowingly on one of your posts will that affect the post will that affect your account will that be a Content violation it's not a Content violation

and basically what will happen is it just won't turn into a link got uh and so we basic so you know we try to make sure we're not encouraging people to discover unsafe content right so you know anything related to self harm for instance or uh that's the kind of thing that we would just basically block the tag um it's not a strike uh I don't know if it would affect your distribution or not I should double check before I answer because we're being recorded um I don't think it would but I would I'd like

to double check that um but mostly the main thing is like we just don't want to make that a link you didn't know maybe you didn't mean it sometimes they actually seem like benign names because a lot of people try to work around these systems by using codes for these different things um and so you might bump into one of these terms by a mistake gotcha um speaking of you know banned things and obviously there are certain like self harm related or curse words that might be um frowned upon let's call it um Are there

specific words or phrases that the algorithm can detect in our content um and then downrank us or our content because of it it's not quite that direct okay so there's not like a list of words that you're not allowed to use and then you're going to get down ranked um but we do have things like um you know we have you mean there's two there's two sets of rules at a high level there's what we call Our Community standards which is like what can and cannot be on the site you know you not allowed to

post you're not allowed to like celebrate violence you're not allowed to you know post nudity you're not allowed to you know post a series of things but then there's also our recommendation guidelines which is content that we feel comfortable or not comfortable recommending and the reason we have those is even though it's complicated is because if you're seeing something from someone you follow then if you find it offensive that's on the person you follow right if you just post something offensive and I follow you it's like that's on you yeah and it was and it

was your decision follow me exactly so we don't we try not to get between people and people they follow um there are I think at this point zero safety um like zero of these like recommendation implementations for connected content we do not downrank content from people you follow because we think it might be offensive okay ever um but if we just show you a post for some Rando you've never heard of and it's really offensive yeah that's not really on that random person it's more on us okay uh so we have more responsibility there so

we take more uh precautions there and so it's possible if you write really aggressive content there might be nothing wrong with that maybe you are advocating for a cause and you're mad and you have a right to be that's okay um but it might get caught up in oh this isn't harassment but it's borderline it's aggressive and we won't recommend it so it's possible that sound like this is specific words but if you are posting something and it's getting close to MH one of our rules um it's it it will be less likely to be

recommended nud is another example if you post something that is like like borderline nudity but not actual nudity so we will not take it down because you are you know exactly where that line is and you're not Crossing it you're going right up to that line um the chances are you're not going to have that content recommended because we're going to see that as probably not appropriate for to recommend to people who haven't decided to follow you but we will not get between you and your followers gotcha okay I do feel like the account status

area in settings is very helpful um being able to check and see is my content recommendable am I in good standing um I'm curious though are there ever times where people are not recommendable or not able to have this disconnected reach and yet it doesn't show up in the account status so basically this is what people would say does Instagram Shadow ban yeah if there are there are very few okay um there are there are a couple real edge cases for the most gnarly potential harm you can think of okay where we might want to

be careful not to let someone know that we are like looking into something um but those are the minority cases so our hope is to put all of it in there um everything at the account level right it's possible that one piece of content might get caught up but your account is fine so that won't be in there um but at the account level we try to have everything be in there the only exceptions I can think of are for the darkest of dark which I hope nobody watching here feels like they could possibly fall

into that category yeah that makes sense that makes sense and I what I also often tell people is a ban is a ban all social media has their guidelines and they have the right to downrank your content or not recommend your content but it's not a shadow ban especially in Instagram's case when they're telling you yeah the word Shadow is not involved because it's in the light you're telling them yeah and that's the thing that I try to explain and I'm not always that good at it but um I want people to know it's in

our interest for people to know if you know what the rules are and if you know what the content is that we're trying to reward then you're going to probably make more content like that and that's good for you and for us it's not in our interest to like in the shadows like make decisions and and you know now look sometimes we make mistakes um most of those mistakes I hope are reflected in account status so you can go there you can see if content is taken down you can appeal you can see if you've

got any recommendation issues you can appeal or remove those pieces of content uh but I want people to know because I think it's in our interest for people to know um sometimes things are broken um but usually usually not usually um it's a been us going on gotcha uh recently in one of your ask me anything Fridays you answered a question I thought made a lot of sense around uh taking a break and essentially if you take a long break and say eight months without any posts on Instagram and then you come back the algorithm

doesn't have much data that it's been recently trained on and so it's very likely that that new post won't perform all that great yeah that's true I don't like that that's the case so I'd love us to figure out a way to do it I just want us to be honest about the fact that that's the case do you have any idea is it like a sliding scale and that the longer time you spend off the less recent data there is or is that the once it hits 3 weeks then it's no longer considered recent

data it's it's between the two so basically I think if you I don't think there's a big difference if you take off three months or four months okay I think once you get to about a month part I should I'll double check on exactly how long we retain some of these signals for it's not that we have no signals right like if I follow you and you post again we've got some signals on my interest than you but we've got more signals on my interest than other people because you've been off for a month or

two um but it kind of I think you probably realized most of that unfortunate loss in that first month or two um but it's definitely not by Design gotcha it's a it's a byproduct of how we build things and that doesn't mean I'm happy about it um it's something I'd like us to figure out how to address I think there's probably other things that are more important to address um like getting better at recency and originality and some of these other Concepts um but it's it is I've experienced it like I've gone off for a

month you know I don't know I went a recharge I had a kid and I came back and I was like oh yeah I gotta work my way back yeah yeah um in terms of consumption and like the interaction component if I'm a Creator and I create about this one Niche topic uh rock climbing but I only consume content or primarily consume content relating to a completely different topic like cake baking do those two things affect each other at all do they interact with each other or not necessarily not necessarily okay that'd be kind of

cool actually um we don't really use I'm trying to think even in inferred I can't certainly know not explicitly but maybe not even inferred we don't use your consumption patterns as a signal of how interesting your content is for the people who are interested in your content makes sense um we do look at things uh like you know are there groups of people who have interest and interact a lot Etc so there there might be some way it seeps in but if you if you only post about rock climbing and you only like watching bacon

videos that's great like we got there's there's nothing wrong with that what about activity specifically around the time of posting so I have a post I'm going to make it 10:00 a.m. and so from 9:45 till 10:00 a.m. I'm active and I'm responding to stories and I'm engaging and then I make the post and I'm staying active does the algorithm reward me for that activity not directly indirectly it could happen right CU if you're on there a bunch and you're messaging people and replying to comments or whatever they might see that and they might then

tap on your profile and then interact with that content uh and so indirectly it could help but the way the ranking system works is it doesn't know that that's why that's happening got it's just like oh if this thing is getting more engagement it's more engaging it's going to do better and if you're active in a way that is getting people to engage more with your content then yes that would help but it's not try something that we're trying to reward I don't want people to feel like they got to get on there yeah I

schedule posts all the time same um I schedule mine for early because I we're here on the West Coast so a lot of my followers in the US and I want to get my posts out before the California's awake and before like New York is really into their day yeah um and I'm not up at 5:00 a well actually I'm offing up at 5m. because I got little kids but I'm not on I'm not on my I'm not on Instagram at 5:00 a.m. when I scheduled these posts yeah I I used to be the same

way living in California wanting to post so the East Coasters could enjoy it and yeah this was before I scheduled and I'd wake up and make the post and oh my God a stressful way to wake up before we schedu post I said alarms like 4:30 I get up like my wife like what I'm like I gotta post this gotta post a real um I want to shift gears into some new features some things that are upcoming maybe plans for 2025 uh first I want to talk about live is there any new exciting features anything

that you can share about changes coming to live in 2025 no I wish I had something for you on that I feel really disappointed in myself when you ask that question I'm s I'm sorry for asking no it's okay I just you know with the rise of popularity of live on other platforms live shopping I was wondering if Instagram was working on anything like that nothing major that I can think of okay um another new feature I've you've mentioned this a few times um Blends I'm psyched about blend I knew you were gonna be psyched

about this question so tell me more about Blends and kind of how it's going to operate supposedly so the way it works is you can start a blend with a friend in uh a thread so if you and I message uh there'll be a little blend icon at the top and we can start a blend and it's just a feed of reals that you or I or both of us might be interested in okay and as you as you scroll through it it'll show you who it's for oh so you can be like ah you

know you know this one this one was like for Adam you have to opt into it so because it's it's it's personal right you see my very intimate oh yeah yeah yeah you get a you get a look into the wild weird weird world of your friends interests yeah um and then you can you know and the the default action if you if you sort of reply is to send the message so you're talking about it um and so it's pretty fun actually uh I don't know if it's for everyone uh um you can also

do it in group chats too not just oneon-one chats um but look I want us to be a place where you connect you know over your interests we're not the best place to sit and just watch TV or video and if I'm running late I'm not going to DM you on Instagram I'm probably going to Whatsapp you or hit you up on iMessage or something uh but I think we can be the best place to connect with the people you care about about the things you care about to me this sits right at the heart

of that in a really kind of cool way yeah it um you know I know that the the adoption of people using the friends feed and the the following feed might not have been as wild at least from what I hear people still are unaware that that even exists yeah um so is the hope that because this is in DMS a place where people are spending more of their time already that it will be a more heavily adopted features at the hope at least to some degree yeah but it's really not about I'll be pretty

excited about it if it's not something that drives a lot of incremental engagement for the whole platform but if it's a if it's like a really meaningful thing for a minority of people who just really love it gotcha because I feel like not everything is about growing the pie growing the pie is good you know if there's more people spending more time on Instagram you know that that is helpful for us as a business that is helpful for creators because there's more reach to go around um but if you only grow by just doing things

that you can get anywhere else you get the same movie clips and like old sports highlights and all this commoditized content that you can get anywhere else then it's yeah you might grow engagement but you are you're less it's easier to leave Instagram in the future whereas if there's content that you can only find on Instagram or experiences you can only have an Instagram that might not make us more money that might not mean that any average crator reach goes up but it might just like deepen someone's appreciation for the experience I think that's pretty

rat so um this one I'm actually there's multiple ways this could work out that I'd be pretty happy with good um speaking of growing the pie and increasing average reach um I was reading a study that um at least according to this one study average reach for reals carousels feed images and stories were all significantly down last year compared to the year prior is I'm curious why is that why and I know this is the number one question I receive number one question I'm sure you receive is why am I not getting the views I

feel I deserve yeah I mean I wish I had a great answer that would satisfy people who aren't getting as much reach as they feel like they deserve in general reach is going up for some people and down for other people it's much more of a blend the thing that's hard is that though overall there's more reach to go around this year than last year um there's also more people on Instagram and so there's more competition and so like if if there're in the if there are 10% if there's 10% more content because either you

know because there's 10% more people and they're all posting the same amount a day as a year ago that doesn't mean there's 10% more things consumed yeah there's probably one or two% more things consumed okay so that means that there's more there can be more competition in practice there are people growing and there are people shrinking and there's people who are roughly flat there's also people who turn out right you don't get the reach you deserve for long enough you move on yeah uh and there's new people all the time who either have signed up

for a while but now just starting to post or they just sign up in the first place so there's also a decent amount of sort of churn uh for lack of a better word um so I want to get someone's content to every single person who's really interested in it because if we can do that the person who sees a video or photo will be happy the creator of the video be happy and then we'll be happy because both of those people will be happy and they'll be using Instagram more um are we perfect at

ranking absolutely not um but we're getting better all the time um so I it is the thing I try to really explain to people is it is in our interest to get someone's content to every person who's really interested interested in it and if we're failing to do so that's bad for our business yeah people think that we suppress reach to get people to buy ads it doesn't make any sense it's easy to get people other people to buy that wouldn't be a sustainable business model no no it would just be no one would be

there and it just wouldn't work like we have over 10 million advertisers around the world on on meta advertising and like we have we've got that's okay that's that's a different challenge there's weaknesses and strengths there but we are more than happy to grow engagement with one group of people and then sell ads to a different group of people against that same attention makes sense essentially boils down to supply demand so there's an oftentimes an increase in the supply of maybe the number of people posting the frequency of their posting but the demand hasn't necessarily

risen at the same pace is that what you would say yeah for a bunch of reasons right so for a while the amount of time people were spending on smartphones was growing every year that's roughly flat in a lot of countries like the US now I it's not like there for a while a lot of people like I mean think about how many people you know well maybe this is a little bit longer than five years ago but 10 years ago but you know 10 years ago not everybody had a smartphone now everybody has a

smartphone you know we're buying them less often or you know five years ago maybe not everyone had fast internet access and now most everyone has fast internet access and so the amount that's on the demand side right because the amount of people who are interested in watching stuff isn't growing as um as fast as the amount of people who are interested in reaching people makes sense um and look I would love it if it was yeah that would be great um so the thing that I'm more focused on is how can I make sure that

the right value is ACR to the right people like so I still think we're getting better but I still think aggregators as great as they are and they I'm not anti- agregator they get disproportionate amount of value relative to what they create if you compare them to original content creators yeah um that doesn't mean they they aren't valuable right if you go around and you Source awesome stuff and you bu able to reach about that that's cool but ideally the person who came up with the thing and made the thing gets more views than the

person who found your thing Y and so we're trying to do more and more to find the original content creator when we can and swap that person into that spot um so but there's still room to improve there last few questions if Tik Tok goes away what's your advice for Tik Tok creators migrating to Instagram I mean if Tik Tok goes away that' be a big deal I I would say look more and more creators are across multiple platforms I think that's just smart I try to lean into that like I I feel like it's

good to not have all your eggs in one basket it's my job to make sure Instagram is as compelling a platform as possible but it's a great basket yeah exactly or a great egg but you can have a couple other eggs that's cool um when you're joining Instagram I think that I mean there's some things that are the same and there's some things that are different for any platform Tik Tok Instagram YouTube Facebook the most important thing is to be really clear eyed about what you're trying to accomplish um and then make sure that the

work you do aligns with that sure reach is great but for what end are you trying to get brand deals are you trying to evangelize a cause are you trying to sell mugs like what are you doing and then okay you've got that goal in mind you then need to find the overlap between content that is going to help you achieve that goal and content that is g to be compelling because if it achieves that goal and it's not compelling no one's going to see it and if it's compelling and it doesn't achieve that goal

why are you doing it and then the third is that it's true to you so that's true of all the platforms for Instagram specifically if you're new to Instagram or you haven't been using it as much much I think it's important to understand that it's not just about um short form video that's a huge part of what we do it's a lot of the time it's maybe probably more than half the time spent on the platform at this point um but there's a lot of other things too that can kind of be really interesting um

you can do stories that show behind the scenes of how you make your reals you can create a channel and really create a deep relationship with your most passionate followers and message them directly you know there's and the coolest stuff happens when people connect the dots between these things you know they tease their video that's going to come out on Sunday and their stories on Friday or I met a Creator once that unfollowed everybody and then ref followed a bunch of people every month with a different Focus so you know one one month it was

about climate change one month it was about you know women's education and I was like okay that's really cool you should make a video on the first the month explaining why and then point them to that these are the kind of things where it gets really fun so I would I would don't feel like you have to do everything but it' be good to understand all the pieces so you can see if there's anything that aligns with your interests I often say that the diversity of ways you can approach Instagram is really its biggest strength

in that you have stories and reals and photos and carousels and all these different ways you can create and engage with the platform yeah and and you got to figure out the ones that are good for you because doing all of them might be too much yeah that's okay yeah um last question besides Blends what feature is coming in the pipeline that you're most excited about or that can make the biggest difference maybe for creators or I don't know if I can say I don't any I'm already like sharing with I'm probably gon to get

a little grief for how much I I H it rhymes with it Creator specifically rhymes with uh for creators specifically I don't know um I feel there like a new thing I can I can I can tease but I will say this I am very excited about the long-term potential around partner ads partner ads allow you to create content as a Creator and then have you know you can do this deal offline that's fine with a brand and then they can ask for um the permission to use your creative for their own ads and run

ads to our ad system um and you have to approve that as a Creator and you can make that deal however you want to make that deal the reason I really like it might be a little bit academic but I think it matters is that in general brained content there's no measurement right so you don't know as an Advertiser I I paid I paid you five grand to post this thing that I get anything from it our ad system has a lot of measurement which means that how much you are actually helping the advertiser is

going to be much better Quantified MH and that is I think going be really good for the small creators because when an Advertiser doesn't have measurement they don't really know M they go on their gut they go with the big name that they know or they like yeah um and so I think and sorry if you're a big crator out there I think the biggest creators are probably overpaid and the smallest and the small even not just the smallest and the and everybody else particularly the small crators are underpaid absolutely and so and this is

growing a lot on um on Instagram the partner hat system and so if we can grow that more I think we can help shift more dollars from the biggest craters to the little ones I think that's pretty cool because the whole promise of Instagram and really the internet is to help you discover your Niche interests allow anyone to be successful uh and then there's other things we can build on top of that around the Creator Marketplace and helping Brands find the creators that can help them and help creators vet the right Brands and make sure

they're reputable so there's a lot more work to do there uh some people know about it it's grown really fast but we don't you don't hear about it a lot so I think that would be the one that I would be the most excited about awesome Adam thank you so much thanks for having me this was a blast yeah I appreciate you cheers again I want to say thank you so much for listening today I would not be here and I would not have been able to make this interview happen if it wasn't for supporters

like you I want to ask you to subscribe to this podcast where we release episodes every sing week about the latest trends tips and strategies across the various social medias and I do want to let you know that next week I'm going to be posting a followup to today's interview where I'm going to break down my thoughts and my responses to his answers to the questions but if this is the last video of mine that you ever watch and the last time you ever hear my voice I want to say one last time thank you

so much for being here and as always happy networking