Instagram Changed in 2025: What You Need to Know
Social media has changed drastically in the past year, so I want to talk about how it's changed and why it's actually a good thing for us as creatives who are using social media to market our work and to build a community.
Prefer to watch or listen rather than read this article?
You might remember the days a long time ago when your posts would be seen for about 24 hours or so as people scrolled through their chronological feed in order, and after about 24-48 hours, your post probably wasn't going to be seen anymore, and it died off. Marketers used to say social media was for short-term visibility and not to spend a lot of time on your posts because they weren't going to be seen for long anyway.
Well, that has changed drastically, and we now have posts months and years later being seen—which is a good thing, because if we're putting our time into social media marketing, it's really nice to know that our efforts are actually going to outlast what we might think.
Social media has just changed
The algorithms have changed to be more personalized, so now when we scroll, we don't need to follow as many people because we're getting tailored content to us from people we might not even be following. I know that irritates a lot of people, but as creatives using social media to market, this is helpful for us because we have the opportunity to get in front of new people constantly.
And I feel you if you're also thinking, “Okay, but I'd also like to reach my followers.” I understand. But I want to share with you some of my recent analytics and some data from recent studies showcasing how things are different and why it's going to be okay.
Data
A recent study done by Buffer, which is a social media management tool, saw Instagram engagement plummet in the past year. From January 2024 to January 2025, the public engagement rate dropped drastically. So if you've seen a dip in likes and comments, you are not alone. I've seen it too. And here's why I'm not caring at all about the number of likes that I get on a post.
What has increased is saves, shares, and DMs—people having conversations privately. Sharing posts with friends has increased, and Instagram is supporting this. They're putting more emphasis on how much saves and shares matter to the algorithm for our posts to get more visibility.
When a person shares your post with a friend, you're now increasing your visibility by one extra person. If they share it with 10 friends, and so on and so forth, your reach grows. So while they may not hit like or they may not tag a friend in the comments, people are turning to more private forms of engagement and sharing it privately with a friend while you still reap the benefit of getting that extra person's eyes on your content.
Focus on other metrics instead
It's good to look at trends, observing why did one post get so many more likes than a different post. That's actually helpful. However, the things that are actually creating conversions are very unlikely to be likes. We're kind of tired as a society of liking posts. We've all been doing it for over a decade now with social media.
People are resorting to other types of engagement. They might also be silently lurking and not really engaging with posts at all, but are still there in the background, looking at your posts, building trust with you, getting to be a part of your community silently, and then becoming a customer. So don't rule out those silent people. If it feels like social media has been dead for you, there are likely people watching who aren't actively engaging, but enjoy seeing your content anyway.
So keep posting and showing up for those people to bring them through the journey of becoming aware of you, trusting you, and then buying from you.
Search engine
The other thing that's changed with social media is it becoming more of a search engine. People are searching on social media, asking their questions, searching for answers, and just using it like Google more than ever before.
That’s why inserting keywords that people are searching for into your posts will help your content outlast the 24-48 hours that it used to. This means that whenever I log onto my Instagram or TikTok notifications, I’m seeing people like, comment, and share posts from months ago—if not years ago.
If you want to see or listen to my recent Instagram and TikTok notifications and insights, check out the corresponding YouTube video or podcast linked in the buttons below the image at the top of this post!
The power of not caring about unfollows
Caring too much about this used to hold me back so much, and I think it actually stunted my growth. In the past month, I gained 1,250 Instagram followers and lost 1,721 followers. So my net was a loss, right?
I've had this account for 10 years. I've gone through many viral waves of growth, meaning that I'm attracting a ton of followers at once, many of whom might not actually be my target audience. Sometimes when things go viral, they can get in front of the wrong people. There's not a lot you can do to stop it unless you want to delete the post, but I'd rather lose followers than prevent people from finding my account who would be a good fit.
And then there's also the fact that Instagram is frequently (and now more than ever) deleting bot accounts, spam accounts, hacked accounts, and accounts that have been deactivated for a long time. So they're flushing out accounts from the past 10 years that have potentially followed me, and if I go to my list of followers, it shows around 3,000 people that have deactivated their accounts. They're not even active anyway, so losing that chunk of people doesn't bother me because I was able to reach over 1,000 people this month who wanted to follow along, who are new and fresh to me, giving more opportunities to make a sale. I don't care about all those unfollows.
I wanted to share that because you might be seeing that too. If you have a newer account, probably not, but if you've been on Instagram or any other platform for a while, you might see this happen.
Maybe over time, the unfollows would decrease as those numbers of accounts that are no longer active get removed, and I'll see the follower number grow again. But that's why I'm not concerned. Being able to bring in that number of people for free on a regular basis into my community and show them why my books are amazing and why they should purchase them and join my email list and become customers over time? It's really impactful.
Traction can take time
Sometimes posts don't start gaining traction until months later. That's why I just never want anyone reading this to delete a post just because they think it didn't get enough likes. People are genuinely just “liking” things less.
I’ve had posts that get a huge dip in the amount of likes I often see, but if they create conversation, they get comments, someone shares it with a friend, or they DM me from seeing this post, that's a huge win in my book. I recently got a notification from a post I made 115 weeks ago! So you can see that people are seeing content from me from a long time ago. And that's really impactful for us, because if you're just starting out, you can know with confidence that the stuff you're sharing now could gain traction months or years later.
If you've been posting for a while, take a look at your own analytics. If you're not seeing some recent posts continue to gain traction, continue to get engagement a few weeks or months down the line, let's focus on incorporating context into our posts. You can use Instagram as a tool to see what people are searching for, and then incorporate those keywords into your posts.
You can also focus on making posts shareable and savable. People want entertainment. They want to be heard and seen and feel related to. They want funny things to share with their friends. How can you incorporate that into your strategy? I see the same thing on TikTok as well.
Our posts have the opportunity to reach more people than ever because they're lasting longer. Social media is such a great resource! Even if it feels like engagement is dipping and people aren't listening, they are.
Thanks for reading along—it’s a topic I’m really passionate about. This was one marketing shift that's happening right now, but I talked about four other marketing shifts in my recent free live class. I will leave it for you here if you'd like to check it out, because I give you the four different shifts and the fixes for each of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5ariWhoDPw
And if you would like my marketing support, and I would love to see you inside the Creative’s Content Club, my marketing community with training support, shortcuts, templates, and more. I am in there hands-on, answering questions about your marketing strategy, and giving you feedback on your content. Check it out here: https://www.marketingbyshelby.com/club
And I'd love to see you in there to help support you and get the results you're looking for. Enrollment closes on June 24, 2025 and won’t be open again until later this year!
I'll see you in the next one. Bye!