Instagram’s Algorithm CHANGED! (Update 2026)

Key Takeaways

instagram recently updated their algorithm and if you don't pivot and adjust your marketing strategy you're going to take a massive hit both to the amount of people that your content is going to get in front of as well as the number of new followers you're going to be able to attract in fact one of the biggest reasons that people complain about seeing their reach and engagement and followers on instagram declining and going down is simply because they don't understand the few simple things that i'm going to be sharing with you here in this video and failing to make these changes makes it nearly impossible to grow or have any kind of success on instagram at all so let me show you how it's done starting by first covering the only two kinds of content you should be posting on instagram right now reels and carousels here's the deal instagram has one goal and one goal only i mean sure their official mission statement is to capture and share the world's moments but the real goal is far more practical and capitalistic that is to make money no surprise there i hope after all that's the goal of every business and the way that instagram makes money is through advertising which means they need two things to succeed first they need advertisers people willing to pay money to put their ads in front of people and next they need people to show those ads too and that's the key to this whole thing the better a job that instagram can do to keep more people on the platform for longer the more ads they can show and the more money they can make and this is why reels and carousels are the only two kinds of content you should be creating right now because reels and carousels have the highest engagement time which gives instagram more time to serve more people more ads on the flip side the reason that single image posts on your feed are so difficult to succeed with right now is because they simply don't take that long for a viewer to consume there's one exception to this that just got announced so if you still want to post single images this may be your golden opportunity but i'll talk more about that at the end for now just know that instagram has updated their algorithm and is giving more weight to reels and to carousels so by creating this kind of content you're helping them and in return they'll help you by showing it to even more people and if i had to pick a winner between reels and carousels i'd have to pick reels every single time not only because they're going to keep people more engaged but also because they're video and instagram has said repeatedly now that they're no longer a photo sharing app the future for instagram is video but today i actually want to talk a bit more about video and i want to start by saying we're no longer a photo sharing app or a square photo sharing app so now that we've got that settled let me show you a few ways to optimize your new reels content for this updated algorithm and it all starts by first understanding an important metric that instagram is looking for in your reels and how you can perfectly engineer your content to go viral the first thing that instagram wants to see in your reels is watch time and specifically 100 watch time and that makes sense i mean after all what platform wouldn't want a viewer to watch 100 of the content put in front of them but what's interesting is how much weight they appear to be giving this metric especially when compared to other often equally important video metrics so let me break that down you see when it comes to analyzing a piece of video content the algorithms typically look at a few different metrics among them are views watch time and average view duration or avd now they all kind of sound the same but they're actually pretty different and they're important to understand not only today to help you have greater success on the platform but also when things change in the future because they definitely will so you can be positioned in the best possible way to capitalize on whatever new metric they're optimizing for so here's the basics real quick views are simple they really are just how many views a video gets sometimes these autoplay like in the case of reels when you swipe through them and sometimes they require clicking to play like most youtube videos on the home page next is watch time this is the total amount of time someone spends watching a video measured in minutes and seconds so a 10 second reel can never have more than a 10 second watch time then you have average view duration also known as avd this is the total watch time of your video divided by the total number of video plays including replays essentially it's trying to see how much of your video someone watched before scrolling onto the next one 100 means they watched the whole thing and 10 means they skipped off pretty quick which isn't a good sign now this could change in the future but at least for now it appears that instagram is favoring shorter videos with 100 average view duration over longer videos with only 20 or 30 average view duration in other words this is more of a hack than a long-term strategy because things could and probably will change in the future but at least for now it's worth testing reels that are shorter in length around say five to 10 seconds and the goal with these shorter reels is to get them to loop or in other words to have people watch them again and again and again so here's how to do that the most important part of any video or post or piece of content is the hook the big idea the thing that captures their attention and triggers their curiosity for your reels you obviously want to make sure that the video itself is hooky enough meaning it's interesting entertaining educational or relevant to the people that you're trying to get in front of but you also want to put your hook in the first line of your caption because one of the biggest goals of your caption is to get them to spend enough time reading it so your video can play and loop automatically in the background it's kind of sneaky but it works and honestly it's not really that sneaky after all as long as you're providing good value and actually helping someone well the more time they spend with you the better in turn instagram will see that people are looping your video and watching it again and again and again which is a powerful viral signal that'll indicate that they need to share it out and show it to even more people but there's another trick you can do as well if you want to push the limits a little bit and try out longer reels of 20 seconds 30 seconds maybe even 60 seconds and that's to ramp up a little known something called the rate of revelation one of the best ways to hook people fast and keep them engaged throughout your content whether it's a blog post a podcast or a video is by increasing the pacing of it and the overall speed that you're delivering insights the fancy term for this is called rate of revelation which is how fast you're delivering new insights content with a slow rate of revelation takes forever to get into it seems to drag on for hours and hours without presenting anything new and it makes you feel like you're stuck in one of those awkward conversations with one of those people that just doesn't seem to be getting the hint a fast rate of revelation on the other hand means non-stop value a constant and steady stream of new and exciting information all delivered at a rate that's almost too fast to keep up with and that requires them to watch it over and over again just to make sure they didn't miss anything and on that note remember earlier when i said there's one exception to this that just got announced so if you still want to post single images this may be your golden opportunity but i'll talk more about that at the end well my friend that time has come so here's what's going on instagram has just announced that they're about to test out a different way of displaying images on their platform specifically that they're going to be testing tall images so 9x16 or vertical like a real but image form not video where both photos and videos take up more of your screen now these are early days so this may stick around or it may not but the big takeaway is that any time a platform like instagram launches or rolls out a new feature well they give that new feature a little extra push or big extra push and they do this to encourage enough new people to actually try it out and to make sure that enough people see it so they can get some relevant and valid feedback this means there may be an opportunity here to do a bit of a land grab and to take away some market share from slower people who are yet to figure this out or to adopt it into their strategy of course the best way to make sure that you're taking advantage of this opportunity as well as all of the other ones that instagram has to offer is to make sure that you've got a solid instagram marketing strategy in place and this is why the next thing you're going to want to do is check out the video i've got linked up right here on my best instagram marketing strategy so make sure to check it out now and i'll see in the next video now the way to develop a brand plan for instagram is to follow the three c's of consistency clarity and congruence so let me explain those now consistency simply means that you're consistent with your content as well as with your engagement on the platform so are you regularly posting content and are you