Today's episode is brought to you by Shopify, the number one e-commerce platform in the world for building your business and selling your products. More about them later. Also later, I'll tell you a little bit more about our newest sponsor, which has me super excited, which provides weekly, nutritious, wholesome meals that help you hit your goals in less time, energy, and effort. Plus, they taste great. Today's episode is also brought to you by Notion, which is so much more than just a task management platform. It truly manages my whole life,

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The Instagram train never slows down, and according to Adam Lozary himself, the algorithm is changing on a daily basis. And so in today's episode, I'm going to share with you all of the recent Instagram news, the platform updates, new studies that have come out, new features that have been announced, and even some things that are still in testing. And I'm sharing all of this with you so that you can get ahead of the curve and continue to grow your brand or small business on Instagram. Which, by the way, if we've never met before, hello. My name is Brock Johnson, and it is my full-time job to do exactly that. It's my job to help you get better results, whether that's more reviews, followers, or customers directly through Instagram by keeping you up to date with the latest strategies, tips, and breaking news. And so if you're trying to grow a brand business or a community, consider hitting that subscribe button because every single week on this podcast, I put out helpful tips and videos to help you do exactly that. And from the outset of today's episode, I want you to know that the new updates, new features, and studies that I'm going to be sharing with you today are the ones that are most relevant and going to make the biggest difference for you, at least in the near future on Instagram.

If I wanted to make a video covering every single new change and tweak that has come out recently, number one, that video would be three hours long. And number two, it would include a lot of information that is just not necessary or helpful for you to know, and it would ultimately just confuse or overwhelm you. And so in today's episode, I've tried to distill this information down to the eight biggest and most important updates. And as a precursor to these eight updates, I think it's important to understand the state of Instagram or kind of like, where are we at right now? And the stats that I'm about to share with you come from a study titled, the State of Social Media Engagement in 26, and it was a study that analyzed over 52 million posts. I will link up the

full study in the show notes below this episode, but here are some of the key takeaways. Number one,

engagement across the board on Instagram has decreased by 26% in the last two years. That's a pretty

massive drop. And not to get too lost in the

weeds, but I believe the primary reason for this is that there are a lot more people posting a lot

more content, and there's not necessarily a lot more people consuming or the amount of time that

people are consuming hasn't necessarily increased. Basically, if we're thinking about this in terms of

supply and demand, supply is way up,

and demand is relatively stagnant. The second thing that you need to know about the state of

Instagram right now is that it kind of performs like two different platforms at the same time.

And what I mean by that is that on the Instagram feed, reels and non-reels, also known as

carousels and photos, are treated almost completely differently, both by the

algorithm and by the audience. Reels, on average, get 36% more reach than carousels, but carousels

get 12% more engagement. And usually, those two things are a predictor of each other. The more

engagement you get, the more reach you will be rewarded with. The more reach you are rewarded with, the more people are likely to engage. However, this shows us quite clearly that Instagram is

favoring reels in terms of what is going to get the most views, but the average audience member,

your average follower, is more likely to engage with your carousels or your photos. Not only are

carousels getting more overall engagement,

they also have a significantly higher engagement rate. The median engagement rate for carousels

...