Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host Britt Seva, and we are going to talk about the latest Instagram algorithm updates.
Actually this is based on the blog and video that was released by Adam Mosseri on May 31st, 2023, titled “Instagram Ranking Explained.” If you want to look it up on the Instagram blog, you totally can. All of my information is coming directly from the source.
Adam Mosseri has done this a couple of times. He runs Instagram, if you don’t know, now you know, if you saw him, you’d probably recognize him. Every once in a while, a year or so, he does a post that explains how the algorithm works.
I’ll be fairly honest: every time he does, it does provide some clarity, but there’s also a pretty good amount of ambiguity.
It was funny because my process for getting the content for this podcast is I watched his video that he shared, which was maybe five minutes long or something. I took copious notes, I watched twice. Then I went to the blog post that was linked in his bio—you can just Google “Instagram Ranking Explained,” and the blog comes right up—and I read it. Even in watching his video and reading the blog, there’s some crossover conflicting information.
What I’m going to do is share this basically verbatim what was explained, and I’m going to try and make heads and tails of the way I’m digesting the information. Because, to be candid, there’s still a lot of gray area even in the explanation.
But I want to get into where Instagram is at, what the heck is going on, why this even matters, why we have to talk about it.
Let’s start right at the top. Instagram is still the number one social media platform when it comes to hair stylists.
It is not the number one business growth platform for every industry by a long shot. But our industry has always really gravitated towards Instagram and I think there’s a couple reasons why.
One, our industry is very visual. It’s visual and relationship driven. For Instagram, it’s like the perfect storm. Instagram is very visual. It’s about storytelling, it’s about relationships. I think as stylists, it feels like home. If there was going to be a social media app that was most comfortable for us, this pretty much checks all the boxes.
When you look at emerging apps that have come up that stylists have tried to hop on, things like TikTok, Lemon8, Pinterest even, it’s more challenging because it’s not what those platforms were designed for. Instagram really fit the mold for us in many ways.
Now, I’ll be totally candid, Facebook actually fit the mold better from the jump. Facebook was the social media platform created for local small business. I mean, Nextdoor app does that as well, Google Business Profile, Yelp, all of those things are to promote local small business.
Instagram technically is not. The reason why I wanted to speak to that is because Instagram and Meta, the parent company who owns Facebook and WhatsApp as well, is going through some challenges. I want to talk about those challenges for a second and then talk about why I think all of this matters. But I think it’s important that we understand the evolution of the platform and how we got here.
If you remember using Instagram back in, I don’t know, 2012, 2013, 2014, we all posted grainy, mediocre, super-filtered photos of our friends, our family, the dinner we had last night. It was almost like a blog with less words, like a visual blog, okay. Not a vlog but a photo blog is what Instagram started as.
Then a few people came up on it, like they really realized how to harness the platform and that’s where the influencer was born. Do you realize that there were not influencers? Truly, there was no such thing as influencers before social media. A couple people blew up on YouTube, but if you look at it, influencers blew up on YouTube and Instagram all at the same time. Influencers haven’t even been around for a decade yet, everybody. We are still in the infancy of that. And here’s the thing is we don’t know how long it’s going to last.
Being an influencer is massively on the decline, started to decline in 2020. A lot of brands started pulling spend back from influencer culture. But mostly what happened is we, the users of platforms like Instagram, got tired of seeing the BS. You likely relate.
Do you remember when being an influencer or building a brand on Instagram or social media was very much about when is the last time you did your fancy photo shoot? I’m going to post a picture of myself flying first class on the way to Fiji. Everything was very curated and perfection and over the top. We came to find out as the years went on, a lot of that was really artificial.
2020 was very much this year of transparency and a lot of these people who were living these artificial lives got very exposed. In that, there was this call to make Instagram authentic and it wasn’t the call from the influencers or from the businesses. It was the consumer.
It’s important for you to remember consumers drive the platform. Businesses are not in the driver’s seat. Businesses using Instagram make up the minority of Instagram users. You have to realize that. The reason I’m explaining that at the top is over and over and over in the explanation of Instagram ranking, Adam Mosseri made it very clear that all of their decisions are based on user experience, not creator experience. Not creator experience. I’m going to say it twice. When they stopped—there was a program for a long time where Instagram was paying creators for reels that was pulled back. They’re pulling away from their celebrating creators.
Why? Why would they do something like that?
Y’all, do you remember when Britt Seva said back in 2019 when reels were coming out, this smells funky to me. I don’t like it. I feel like the only reason reels is getting pushed is because Instagram wants to dominate TikTok, which P.S., Meta tried to buy TikTok. The deal was squashed. TikTok didn’t want to sell to them.
When you look at how they were paying creators and we love creators and we’re making reels and reels are doing so well in the algorithm, they didn’t do any of that for businesses or creators. They did that for themselves. It didn’t work.
2023 is set to be potentially the first year that TikTok will actually pick up more users than Instagram. Instagram, the platform growth has stagnated.
Historically, year over year, Instagram is picking up new users, new users, new users. They will not grow in average usership this year is the prediction. Stagnation is the first sign of decline.
It’s like when you’re going up to a rollercoaster and then you plateau at the top. They have reached the plateau. Younger generations aren’t joining. People who had once enjoyed the platform are not spending as much time on it anymore. It’s not businesses and it’s not influencers, it’s consumers.
What is happening is Instagram’s like, “Well, shoot, we need to figure out what we can do to keep user attention on here.” Because guess what? To you and to me, if your potential clients, your potential stylists who are looking to work for you, if people stop logging into the app, you can post on it 300 times a day. No one’s going to see your stuff.
Instagram relies on the average user—not the influencer, not the business owner, the average user having an incredible experience. The average user is not having a good experience right now and that is the problem.
Let’s go into how ranking has changed and what they’re doing now.
First of all, we have to talk about the change that started in 2019 and shifted into at least semi-permanency recently: the feature of hiding likes. That rolled out in 2019. It was a test feature. Not even everybody had the option to have it. Now everybody has the option to have it. You can turn it off or you can turn it on.
I want to read from you a quote from Instagram about hiding likes. I know that a lot of people do it. I’ve not to and I’ve chosen not to based on data. This is a direct quote. You can source this as well. This is from Instagram. It says, “What we heard from people and experts was that not seeing like counts was beneficial for some and annoying to others, particularly because people use like counts to get a sense for what’s trending or popular. So we’re giving you the choice.”
When Instagram started doing things like allowing users to hide likes, they started stripping away the accountability and the authenticity because now people can post mediocre content and you can’t see the kind of engagement it’s getting, so you don’t know. It feels really good to the creator because if they post something and they don’t get a lot of likes, they’re like, “Well, I’m doing this to be creative. I’m just doing this to show and I’m not doing it for the likes.”
I get it and I understand the sentiment. But if you’re not showing up on social media to build your business, then what are you showing up for? You’re doing it ’cause it’s fun or…? I’m a little confused.
If we’re using Instagram because the goal is to grow, let’s look at what needs to happen on the platform for you to grow.
In the article titled “Instagram Ranking Explained,” it starts with Instagram is created to help you connect to those you care about and that you’re interested in. We do that by looking at what they call proxies. This was a word that was used a lot in the explanation. Proxies indicate if you’d like to hear what a person has to say, what any sort of Instagram user poster creator has to say.
Okay, these are the first proxies that are mentioned. It’s going to start to get a little jumbly here and it’s not because I’m explaining it poorly, it’s because this is how it’s written. Go with me on it.
The initial proxies mentioned were opens, replies, likes, and comments, and then how long you spend looking at a photo or a video. They’re measuring how long you look at a photo, how long you watch a video for, right? The video is obvious. The photo, how long you look at a photo is really interesting to me.
Opens. I don’t know if that relates to DMs. I don’t know if it means clicking play on a video. Don’t know. They didn’t fully explain that. That was interesting that shares weren’t listed as a basic proxy.
So we have opens (whatever that means), replies, maybe opening DMs, replying to DMs. Again I’m speculating ’cause it wasn’t made super clear. Likes, some comments. I think that’s pretty obvious. And then how long a user spends looking at a photo or a video.
That helps for the algorithm to understand who you like to hear from. If you open somebody’s DM, reply to it, like their posts, comment on their stuff, or spend a lot of time looking at their photos or videos, you’re telling the algorithm I like hearing from this person.
Then it went on to talk about signals. So that’s proxies.
Then we have signals, another buzzword that we’re going to use here, I guess. The algorithm is not only based on proxies, it’s also based on signals.
Here are the signals. Signal number one is how popular a post is already. Again, gaining traction, this is where the irony kicks in. Instagram will allow you to hide the likes, but what they’re saying is the signal to the algorithm if a post is doing well is how popular it is. So you can hide the likes if it makes your ego feel better, I suppose, although you’re fighting away from the authenticity and accountability. But just know that that’s a choice you’re making.
But the likes still really count.
Signal number two is the interest in the author. Signal number three is the information that the author shares. And signal number four is a history of interacting with the author.
It’s based on your interests, the information from the author, your history of interacting with the author, and how popular any given post is.
So what do you usually like to see? What authors do you like to usually see stuff from and what is the top content posted of the day? Now there’s caveats to that, so listen to this. They went on to say that things that you’re most interested in should always be at the top of your feed as you scroll and should get less targeted the longer you scroll. That’s how our signals work.
The way I interpreted that is if we’re looking at these signals and or proxies, so I guess proxies determine the signals. Maybe that’s what’s happening. What what we’re doing is we interact on the platform—is if I look at a photo from a long time, if I always look at a photo for a long time from one particular Instagram creator and I like and comment on some of their stuff when they post something, that’s ranking well. It’s going to be the first thing that pops up when I open my Instagram feed at some point during the day.
Have you ever opened up your Instagram feed and the first post you see is from somebody you like but it’s from three days ago. I definitely have so I’ve seen this at work to a degree.
The question becomes how do you get your clients or potential stylists you want working in your salon, whatever your target market is, how do you get your target market seeing your stuff at the top? Well, what we used to do back in the olden days of 2017, 2018 is we would play the bump-up-my-engagement game. The bump-up-my-engagement game was to say, “Comment with the emoji below that most reminds you of what you had for lunch today,” and a post would get a gajillion comments of just emojis of cheeseburgers and apples and whatever. It would do well in the algorithm because it got a ton of engagement.
That kind of stuff doesn’t work anymore because it’s not what the average Instagram user wants. It started to become clickbait-ish and people didn’t like it.
Again, going back to Instagram wants to give the users what they want, not the businesses, not the creators. It needs to be true authentic engagement. Posting the stuff that makes people want to naturally comment naturally, like something naturally, DM you based on something is going to be the way it works.
Now there are two things that you can ask your clients to do to help show up higher in their feeds. There is a favorites list on Instagram and I think this could potentially be something that stylists and salon owners are underusing. Asking your clients to add you to their favorites list can be really powerful because Instagram did say it makes a priority to show your favorites. Whatever you note as a favorite to show up in the feed, guaranteed.
So asking your clients and your stylists who are interested in working for you, anybody that you want to make sure you’re getting out in front of, ask them to favorite your account. That may have a good impact.
Now there is an alternative way of viewing the account. It’s the following view and what it does is it allows any user to see their account in chronological order. I know the way I explain that sounds complicated. To be honest, it doesn’t hardly matter. Less than 10% of users are opting into that alternative feed that shows chronologically.
When Instagram announced that they were bringing back the chronological feed as an alternative option last year, people were so excited about it. Over 90% of Instagram users still use the default feed. To me, if over 90% aren’t using it, it’s probably not going to stick around forever. I don’t want to spend a bunch of time on it.
Let’s talk about how the algorithm works in feed, in stories, and in reels.
Your feed, this is a quote from Instagram. “Your feed will always have a mix of content from the accounts you’ve chosen to follow, recommended content from accounts we think you’ll enjoy, and ads.” One third of the account is the people you follow. One third is from accounts that Instagram thinks you’ll like, and another third is ads.
Listen to this, this is where I think we can get strategic also. “You’ll also always see a mixture of videos, photos, and carousels.”
Now Instagram made a huge statement back in 2022 and said that they were stopping the artificial push of reels, which was hilarious because I said in 2019 I feel like reels are being artificially inflated. No statement was ever made about it until 2022. That was one of the predictions I got right. I could just see it, it smelled fishy, and it was.
There is no more artificial reach on reels. As they pulled the artificial reach back, reels engagement really dipped and declined because the average Instagram user wasn’t ever really enjoying it.
What they’re doing now is a mix of videos, photos, and carousels.
Here’s what is important for you to understand. Currently, 48.9% of content being uploaded to Instagram feed posts are photos, 31.8% are videos, and 19.3% are carousels. What does that data mean to me? That data means to me if Instagram is saying they want to have a good blend of photos, videos, and carousels, carousel is the easy shot because 80% of what’s being uploaded to Instagram is either video or photo. Only 20% is carousel. But Instagram wants more carousels.
If it were me, I’d be hacking the system and posting carousels as often as I can because, based on what’s being said about the algorithm, that is a type of content they want to have in equal representation on the platform. The need is high, the supply is low, that’s a gap that you can seize the day on. I would take advantage of that.
This was another interesting post or an interesting comment. This is a direct quote. “We try to avoid showing too many posts from the same person in a row or too many suggested posts back to back.” Do you remember in 2022 and 2021 when a lot of influencers were like, “The name of the game is posting six times a day”? Well, Instagram has openly come out and said no, we try to avoid showing you that.
There’s always this culture of trying to hack Instagram and Instagram is always like, no, you can’t. This was another way to block it.
The idea of if you post a ton of times a day, you’re going to cheat the system. Instagram is openly saying we have safe-proofed it to ensure that that does not happen. Quality over quantity is still winning.
Now let’s look at stories. The way that the algorithm chooses what stories get out in front of more people is three things. Viewing history, so if one of your clients likes to look at your stories, like every time you post a story, they seem to watch it, your story bubble is probably going to show up first and foremost on their account.
Then engagement history. It’s how often the viewer engages with your story, so hearting it sending you a DM from it. That factors in too.
Then I loved the word for this: closeness. The relationship with the author and the user. Y’all, how many times have I said to nurture clients on social media? I have said it hundreds of times. The closeness is now admittedly a part of the algorithm. Don’t do the post and go actually engage.
Then we have the Explore feature on Instagram if you’re interested in making it onto Explore, which is a decent way for organic growth.
I’ll be honest, I don’t go to the Explorer feature very often, but some people do so that’s fine. Information about the post, so how popular a post seems to be. Again, this is based on the signals, so likes, comments, shares, saves, interaction with the author, your activity in Explorer.
If you do use Explorer—like if you look at my Explorer, I’m going to be honest, it’s all celebrity gossip. The whole thing is celebrity gossip. There’s nothing else to it. What’s funny about that is I like celebrity gossip and I like reality shows. I wouldn’t say that’s my—that’s definitely not what I follow on social media at all. You can look at who I follow on Instagram. It’s not a ton of celebrity gossip accounts, so that’s interesting. When I go to Instagram to get inspired again, it’s not for that. It’s interesting how it all has all come together, but it is based on how you interact in Explore. So I must have at some point looked at something in Explore that was related to celebrity gossip and now that’s how my feed is being accumulated. Probably happened when the Vanderpump Rules scandal came out. I’ll be totally honest. And so now that’s how my feed is being populated. I can see that happen in real time.
The history of interacting with a person who is posted. That’s why sometimes in Explorer, you’ll see somebody you’re familiar with, but a lot of times you don’t, and then information about the person who posted, and their again signals.
Then let’s get into reels and how reels are used in the algorithm. This was interesting to me. It said “Reels are designed to help you discover new things.” They’re openly saying reels are not for you to keep in touch with people you already choose to follow. Not at all. “Reels are used to help you discover new things with an emphasis on entertainment.” Why? Because Instagram reels are trying to be TikTok.
If you’re a TikTok user, you’ll know this. When you go on TikTok and you choose to follow somebody or you like a video or whatever, you definitely see more random content in those genres. People will say, “What side of TikTok are you on?” “I’m on CleanTok,” “I’m on GardeningTok,” or whatever. But it’s odd because you choose to follow whoever you choose to follow. I rarely see the content of the people I choose to follow unless I actually go to look at their account, right? Instagram is leaning that direction with reels as well. Reels is for discovering new accounts, so exposure to new eyeballs versus entertaining your existing clients, that kind of thing. Not for entertaining existing followers, for reaching new.
Here’s the rub. This is very circular. The way that it works is if you’re posting stuff that your own audience isn’t into, you can’t be like, “Well, forget my own audience. I’m going to just post a bunch of reels to get out in front of a new audience.” No, no, no, no, no.
Go back to the signals, remember? The signals are people liking the content you post? What is your relationship with the people who follow you? If you’re not nurturing the platform, posting reels whenever you do is never going to get you anywhere because you’re not doing the other things that the platform expects you to do, right? So your reach on reels is based on your activity, so what things you’ve liked, saved, re-shared, commented on, and engaged with recently. These signals help us to decide what to share and also what to show. That one goes both ways.
“You’ll see the reels of other users based on your history of interacting with those people. Information about the reel also determines the reach of it and information about the person who posted.” Again, consistency. Is the quality of your content. Good quality over quantity, right? Don’t just post to post, don’t post to look cool. Don’t post to be an influencer. Post the right stuff. That’s going to be the only way to make it work.
The other thing that they talked about quite a bit is shadow banning. That term came up I want to say in like 2016 or 2017. It was a very real thing. When it happened initially, it was overuse of hashtags, I believe is where it started. They openly said that shadow banning is not happening in the way that people assume that it is. I actually tend to believe that that’s true. I don’t think they would make a statement that can be proven false.
What I’ve noticed is Instagram has a pattern of more omitting things, like not saying anything at all versus outright lying, so I think that if it was happening, they just wouldn’t talk about it. But they openly said we’re not shadow banning in the way that people say that we are. Content is just not being produced properly and I tend to agree with that.
I think that our industry and a lot of industries are very slow to adapt right now and I can’t quite figure out why. It’s like we’re yearning for the olden days, but 2019, 2018, 2017 is not coming back. You can yearn for the olden days forever. They’re never coming. All you can do is look to the future and it’s time to adapt.
You’re not being shadow banned, you’re not being punished, the algorithm doesn’t hate you, you are just not posting the right stuff. Period. That’s the end of the story.
Instagram’s statement was “When you are not getting as much reach as you think you deserve, it’s generally based on quality of your content. We do not suppress reach in order to get you to pay for ads,” which I do believe is true. I have had posts go viral for sure and lots of posts that have not gone viral, lots of swings and misses, more swings and misses than posts that have gone viral. But that’s the social media game, right?
I’ve gone back and forth in seasons of life of paying for ads, not paying for ads. For the last year and a half, I’ve barely paid for ads at all. Very minimal ad spend. I’ve not had a negative reach because of it. As somebody who has played the ads game and then not played the ads game, my personal experience is paying for ads has not not made my growth or my engagement any higher for me, personally.
The reason why I paid for ads in the past is I got a good result on specific objectives. But as far as brand growth and growth of my services, no, for me, that’s been a no. So I tend to believe that the statement is also true.
Then Instagram said, “The more we can connect users with accounts they actually enjoy, the happier they’ll be. The more we’re going to use Instagram, the better our business health will be overall.” That to me was a very vulnerable statement of Instagram saying why would we shadow ban you? We’re not out to get you, but our platform is trying to survive and we have no choice but to push out the best content because if Instagram becomes filled with just content nobody wants to see, no one’s going to show up. That only makes sense.
What I think has happened is that people are sick of being sold to on Instagram. Instead of using Instagram as a brag book, we have to use it as a different kind of resource.
Then they said “There will be times when we do restrict accounts when they violate community standards.” There’s all these different rules to Instagram, right? If you violate those things, they will limit your reach, but I feel like that’s something everybody knows about. It’s different than shadow banning. They’ve always been very public about that. That shouldn’t be new.
Then Adam Mosseri shared this. “I want to close this video by sharing how to grow your reach in audience on Instagram.” The very first thing he said is, “There’s no silver bullets.” I do tend to agree with that. I think that we’re living in a time where everybody wants results and they want it right now, myself included. My patience—I’ve never been a very patient person. From the time I was little, as long as I can remember, patience has been hard for me.
My daughter is 19. I look at her generation, she’s Gen Z. I think they get labeled as lazy. I don’t think they’re lazy. I think they’re impatient. I shared on a podcast a few months back, they are a product of the parents who raised them. We like to blame the children. You can blame the millennials and the Gen Xs for creating children who are that way. You can’t blame the children themselves.
Just like I happen to be a millennial. I am 1000% a product of my childhood and the way I was raised. Most of you can probably say the same thing. You have to look at the way that—like I raised a Gen Z kid. I look at the way she was raised, I can a hundred percent see why she’s become impatient. She is the last thing from lazy. I could get emotional talking about it. She will work her ass off for anybody who hires her and I think that’s why I get so fired up about the idea that Gen Z is lazy. They’re not lazy. Her and her friends too and even some of the people that she’s not really friends with, but I’ve gotten the chance to hang out with, not lazy. Not any lazier than any other generation, but their tolerance for BS and for wasting time is very small. I think that’s where the confusion comes from.
We are living in a time of Amazon Prime. I can make quick money on TikTok tomorrow. Everything is just a pressure cooker.
What Adam reminded us of is play the slow game on social. Don’t post 10 things over a period of a month and be like, “Yeah, see, this is why Instagram sucks.” It might take you three months, four months, six months to figure it out. Be patient.
What he said was, “Experiment with your audience. Figure out what your audience likes, check your insights, but don’t get too focused on one good piece. Look at trends overall and repeating patterns. Collaborate with other creators when you can. Do an account status check if you’re worried that you have violated community standard policies.”
This was the piece that people had a lot of questions about. He said, “Original and highly engaging content will always be prioritized.” What they said was they are scanning for aggregators versus those who make original content.
Let’s talk about the Voldemort accounts. Those who should not be named. You know, the accounts that don’t actually produce their own content. They’re just doing reshares, reshares, reshares, reshares. Look at this amazing photo that at Debbie Jones posted on her account. We love it. Look at this amazing picture of the stylist who works for me.
Reposted content is not getting as much reach. What Instagram is looking for is for every account to post original content, not aggregate content from other places and bring it in.
This is where it gets interesting is they’re suggesting collaboration but don’t have every post be collaborative. Original content still wins. Keep that in mind.
Then they made a statement, “We are doing our best to focus this platform on those who make original content.” I think that’s really interesting and important to understand.
This was a lot of information. This is a much longer podcast episode for me. It’s about 10 minutes longer than my average, but I wanted to pack in as much as I could from this Instagram algorithm update I picked up on.
Instagram is in a funny place in space. When we look at what’s happened to Facebook, they lost several billion dollars in the last year. They’ve laid off over a hundred thousand employees. There’s no doubt the platforms are struggling.
I do think the platform will be around for another 18 months to three years. Use it while you can. Do not write it off. Don’t get lazy with it. Don’t get complacent with it ‘cause I’ll tell you one thing: in 2027, God willing, I’ll still be here coaching stylists and salon owners and I’ll say, “Do y’all remember when we had Instagram?” and people are going to say, “Yes, damn, I wish I had used it when I had it.” I’ll wait for it ’cause it’ll happen.
What I want you to do is make the most of this tool you have while you still got it. Everything is fleeting, everything is evolving. It is time to adapt, my friends.
If you love this podcast, I’d love it if you left me a rating or review on iTunes, share it on Instagram, hit me up in the DMs, ask me any questions you have.
And I say, always like to say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
