What is up?
And welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
I’m your host, Britt Seva, and our annual Leadership One Week Bootcamp is back with fresh topics and exercises.
So all my salon owners listening to this one, this is for you.
We are calling this our Salon Owners Rapid Growth Roadmap Bootcamp.
And in just seven days, I’m covering how to make uncapped commissions, a salon owner’s best path to long-term growth, finding the profit margin even in booth rental salons, creating a strategy to market yourself as the number one place to work in your community, structuring the salon in a way that fits your lifestyle as a leader, and so much more.
That was like a 10-second summary.
We are covering so much in seven days.
You’re going to absolutely love it.
Plus, this will be the first preview of our updated Thriving Leadership System with our new Iceberg Leadership Method.
Nobody has seen this before.
And it’s the turnkey salon leadership solution we’ve all been waiting for.
I just cannot even wait to get this out into the world.
So if you want to learn more about this one week digital training, head to www.thrivingstylist.com/rapidgrowthbootcamp.
Thrivers Society members, you will register for free directly through your learning portal.
But if you are not a Thriver yet, you can check out boot camp details and save your seat at thrivingstylist.com/rapidgrowthbootcamp.
Boot camp kicks off on August the 18th.
I cannot wait to see you there.
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 weren’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.
What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
I’m your host Britt Seva, and we probably do one of these episodes every single year.
We have five Instagram updates for Stylists and salon owners.
What I’ve noticed in recent years is Instagram has massively increased the amount of annual updates it makes.
I think largely in part because it’s trying to compete with TikTok, which TikTok is the only app that has threatened Instagram from a social media standpoint as far as I’m concerned.
When you look at apps like Pinterest, the usership is a fraction of what you see on an Instagram or a Facebook or a TikTok.
I think the only other search engine other than TikTok that is really giving Instagram a run for its money is Google itself.
When you look at Google Business Profile, which is formerly Google my Business, that is the primary search engine that people are turning to find local small business today.
There was a time when Instagram was how particularly service-based businesses were found.
You can look at the data.
We sat in May of 2025.
I was in our Xclub Retreat.
Our Thrivers Society members are highest performers.
This room had $26 million worth of business in it.
This is a room filled with high-performance independent stylist and salon leaders.
I asked them to the room.
I said, how many of you primarily get your clients from Instagram?
Those of you in the room know there was maybe less than five, three to five hands that went up.
And then I said, interesting, how many of you get your clients from Google?
And it was, I mean, the masses.
You couldn’t even compare.
And then we talked about Nextdoor.
We talked about TikTok a little bit, but it was nothing.
I mean, it was just so predominantly Google.
That being said, I kind of cracked the room open.
And we had this big debate about visual content and what clients are looking for.
And unanimously, we agreed Instagram is still critical for stylist and salon owners, but the role that it plays has changed for a long time.
You can call it six years.
If you could be king or queen on Instagram in your community, you were the fastest growing stylist or salon.
That game has changed.
Now, there are a few shifts in Instagram that I think are relevant.
I think that they extend the life of Instagram.
And I think that these are all things important to note if you’re a stylist, salon owner, beauty professional of any kind.
That being said, I’m going to give you five of 40 of the updates that have come out in the last year.
These are the ones I think you need to concern yourself with.
If you want to look up others or play with others, that’s great.
These are the only ones I think are of relevance today.
These are in a particular order.
I’m going in order of importance, starting with the updates that I think you should know, but I don’t care that much about.
Going down to the fourth and fifth, I think are the most critical for us today.
So let’s start at the top with update number one.
You can now speed up Instagram reels.
So this came out a few weeks back.
I’m recording this July of 2025.
This came out a few weeks back, and it made a little bit of buzz.
I don’t think it’s any huge deal.
Where I see it becoming potentially beneficial is A, if your followers or users who are actually using this feature, usership data doesn’t show that it’s being used a whole lot.
So it’s an option.
I wouldn’t bank on your clients and followers doing it, but it is a thing.
I think some people use it.
It’s whatever.
This is why this is kind of update number one and the least important.
So we all know that viewership attention is low, and expecting someone to watch a 90-second reel is asking a lot.
If you get somebody to watch 15 seconds of a reel, that’s a win.
So what you can do or what users can do is when they’re watching reels, which if you don’t know, reels are basically short form video on Instagram.
If you’re not following what I’m talking about, any short form video on Instagram that hits the feed is going to be a reel.
A user can tap and hold on either the left or right side of the reel that they’re watching and the video will play at 2x.
So it will go twice as fast.
I think for highly visual data that is longer than 15 or 20 seconds, potentially there could be some impact.
I would say that the average Instagram user doesn’t even know this update happened.
I think some small business owners are excited about it.
I don’t think the average consumer is using it a ton, but it’s there.
It’s a thing and you’ll see some chatter about it.
Good to know.
This I found interesting for a couple of reasons.
So meta-verified Instagram users now can have clickable links in their reels.
So we’ve always been able to have a clickable link in bio.
Actually, not always, but for a really long time, you’ve been able to have a link in bio and then they expanded and you can have multiple links in your bio.
And then we were able to have clickable links in our Instagram stories.
Those things have been here for a while.
Now, you can have a clickable link in your reel.
So remembering that a reel is the video that hits the feed, which is what we’re watching when we scroll.
Now, this is only for those who are meta verified, meaning those who pay for a blue check mark on their Instagram and or Facebook account.
This, I think, is interesting.
So I never paid for meta or Instagram verification, didn’t have the blue check.
For a gajillion reasons, one, I didn’t see it having any positive impact business wise.
So for me to increase my business overhead, even if it’s by a couple hundred bucks a year, with no guaranteed positive outcome, I just don’t do things like that personally.
I don’t think that now that you can buy a blue check, the weight of importance it once carried is down to basically zero.
And if you talk to people who had been pre-meta verified before this purchasing thing came out, they’re like, it sucks because it used to actually mean something.
You used to have to show an ID and go through this vetting process.
And you used to have PR written about you.
And there’s all of these requirements.
It was really difficult.
Now anybody can just pay to have it.
And the big promise at the beginning was you did not get increased reach.
They said that from the start, like those who pay for the meta verified will not get increased reach.
And they haven’t.
There’s no you could talk to people who are meta verified.
There’s plenty of them who are still having dismal reach.
So I do believe that that’s true.
What they said was you would get increased customer support.
That’s been one of the bigger complaints from those who paid for the verification, is they were like, I paid for the increased support, and I don’t really feel like I’m getting it.
And what was interesting is they announced meta verified, this paid opportunity with this increased support, like literally at the same time that they were, that meta was laying off a huge portion of its workforce.
I happened to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and know friends who were laid off from meta, and they were like, it’s so hysterical because the support team is a huge part of who was let go.
So how they were going to pull off more support when laying off their support team was, there was always some irony there.
And so when you hear that that was one of the biggest complaints, it should be no surprise.
So I think meta and Instagram have been looking for ways to make verified a stronger offer because they need to make money.
The efficiency of ads or the efficacy of ads has dwindled over the years.
And this is a pay to play platform.
They need people spending money.
And so they’re trying to juice up what you get if you pay for verification.
Okay, so that’s, I think, the context of it.
Okay, so this whole clickable link thing is not just for everybody verified.
Meta verified, which is the same as Instagram blue check, is on a tiered payment plan.
So $14.99 is the baseline offer.
If you’re somebody who paid for the blue check and you’re paying $14.99, you don’t get any clickable links.
It’s not an opportunity there.
You have to pay for a higher tier.
So the next level is $44.99 a month, which allows for up to two clickable links per reel.
A further upgrade to $1.19.99 a month, up to four links per reel.
And at the highest tier, $3.49.99 a month, six clickable links per reel.
So you’d be paying, what, $500 bucks a year or something like that to have clickable links in your reels.
I can see some value there.
Is it worth $500 a year?
I don’t know.
I think it would depend on your social content strategy and how well it’s working overall and what you’re linking to.
I do think it has some potential if you have some marketing investment that you want to spend and you want to test out these clickable links.
If you do a really great educational post on Instagram, video-wise, and you want to include a link in there that says, click here, learn more about the service, I think it’s interesting.
Have I done it?
Not at the time of this recording.
Will I play with it?
I’m not sure yet, but I think it has some potential.
Next feature, you can now schedule your Instagram DMs.
I think this is really interesting.
This is another thing that came up at the X Club Retreat, is we were talking to an owner and she shared openly, if a stylist is applying to work for me and DMs me at like 11:30 at night, it’s a bit of a red flag because I don’t want to have a team that’s texting me all night long, DMing me all night long, thinks that they can intrude my personal time.
As all of us, I think, are trying to find more work-life balance.
It was an interesting take and it was again, something we debated as a group.
Even I asked questions about it.
I was like, that’s so interesting that the time in which somebody DMs you is an indicator to you of their relationship with boundaries.
I just thought that was such an interesting take.
So now you can schedule your DM messages so that you don’t hit somebody’s inbox at 1:30 in the morning.
If that’s when you have to be DMing and nobody has to be like, oh my gosh, what would they do scrolling in the middle of the night, right?
You can now schedule these things.
So what you’ll do is you’ll start your message, you’ll go to DM somebody on Instagram, you’ll go to their profile, you click to message, and then you’ll tap and hold the send button.
When you do that, a little menu pops up that allows you to choose a date and time for the message to be sent and then it can be scheduled.
I think that’s a pretty cool feature.
Next, this is a feature that people were excited about.
I’m not personally overly excited about it, but I think it’s worth discussing.
And this is the ability to edit your grid.
I think at the point we’re editing our grid, we’ve kind of like lost the plot on what social media is all about.
So social media was intended to be a way to connect human to human in real time on the reality of what’s going on in our life and in our business.
And if we are like at this point where we are curating what we previously created as our grid to create a new grid, but now the posts are out of order because the date is still going to show.
So if I pull up a post from, I don’t know, 2021, and I decide I want it to fit between a post I made today and a post I made yesterday, and I just drag it up and now it lives between the two of those.
Well, the date on that post is still going to show back from 2021.
So somebody who’s scrolling my feed might be like, wait, what?
So I think the point in doing it is to create a more cohesive aesthetic and or it’s to give second life to a post that was made in the past.
The part I can’t get is A, I think we’re moving away from this overly aesthetic grid.
It still has to look cohesive.
It still has to look professional.
But there was a time, it was 2017, where it was patterns and themes.
And we’ve kind of moved away from that overall.
So I almost think this feature is like landing several years too late.
The other thing too is we do this.
A lot of the other influencers I respect give their old post second life by posting it as new.
Do you know what I mean?
Like if I posted some kind of educational post in 2022 and it did really, really well, I will post it again tomorrow if it’s relevant, but not moving it up on my grid.
I’ll post it again as fresh content.
Like some of you weren’t following me in 2022 or don’t remember what I posted four years ago or whatever.
And you see a lot of content recycling.
Like when you look at very established content creators, content recycling has always been a thing.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed it or not, but it’s always been a thing.
And so this idea of like rearranging our grid, I’m not sold on it.
It’s almost like I’m a big fan of pinned posts, right?
Pinned posts are something that I’ve always had.
I suggest that Stylist and Salons have it.
It’s the three top posts on your grid.
We’ve been able to have pinned posts for years.
And I think curating those makes sense.
I think at the point where we’re like overly editing our grid and dragging up old posts and changing the layout, and this should have gone before this thing, I just think we’ve kind of lost the magic of what social media was supposed to be about.
That being said, if you want to play with editing your Instagram grid and you do want to change your aesthetic, because maybe you’ve learned more about the grid and the feed and the platform and how it works, you can totally play with this.
So what you’ll do is long press on any posts in your grid.
So if you find a photo that you want to move in your grid, you click and hold on it.
Edit grid will come up as an option.
In that edit mode, you’re just going to drag that post to wherever you want it to live, and the changes will immediately be made by Instagram.
You can also undo them from there as well.
So if you want to play with editing your grid, if you think that having a more cohesive aesthetic, even if you just re-edit the last year or something, if that makes you feel more organized psychologically, go for it.
Do I think it’s going to have any major impact on your business?
I don’t, but I think that if it makes you feel better, there’s some value to that for sure.
Okay, next update, which I’m realizing I said there was five, there’s actually six.
So bonus, if you’ve made it this far, you actually have two more updates to share.
Both, I think, are critical and important, and you should strongly consider if you’re continuing to use Instagram as a stylist or salon owner.
So you likely heard this one made big, big buzz.
As of July 10th, 2025, Google officially indexes public Instagram posts, reels, carousels, captions, alt text, and geotags from business and creator accounts.
So when this was first announced, it was like big news.
It was like, whoa, Instagram posts are going to be indexed on Google, searchability is going to increase radically.
So the reason I delayed announcing this and talking about it is I wanted to see what actually happened.
Like in context, in theory, it sounds amazing.
In practicality, it’s a little bit more of like a drop in the bucket.
It’s not this huge, whoa, transformational change.
It’s also a little bit different than Instagram announced.
So in the research I’m finding, yes, when I do Google searches, Instagram reels and posts do come up.
So do TikToks.
So do YouTube shorts.
And so what I’m finding is it’s not Instagram specific.
It’s short form content and social media content is now being indexed on Google as a whole.
That’s at least what I’m experiencing as a user.
I also kind of dialed in what search terms are actually bringing up social content versus not.
So I want to talk about those things.
If you want to have your Instagram posts or your TikToks or your YouTube shorts or whatever, show up in Google search, knowing that video and the highly visual content is always going to perform well in Google search.
I think that’s why they’re leaning into this.
If you want to show up, you have to be leaning into strong captions, intentional content, educational content.
If you’ve been in Thrivers Society, it’s all the stuff we’ve been talking about the whole time.
If you’ve been in Thrivers, your strategy does not change.
You just need to lean into what I’ve been teaching in the modules because that is how your content is going to be pulled and potentially show up in Google search.
So I’ve been playing with this.
I’ve been playing with this for weeks at this point and trying to understand what kind of content is coming up.
What I’m not finding, at least at this crossroads, is that local small business search is not what’s coming up.
So when I look for Best Barber in San Mateo, California, which is kind of like my neck of the woods, I’m still getting Yelp, Google Business Profile, Reddit, Nextdoor.
I’m getting local small business search, and then I’m getting full Instagram profiles.
That’s how it’s still showing up for me.
When I look up Best Bakery in San Francisco, California, it’s the same thing.
It’s the same traditional local small business search results we’ve been seeing for at least the last 18 months.
Very similar indexing.
Google Business Profile, Yelp, Reddit, things like that.
Things started to get interesting, and I started to see more social media content when I searched for Best Garlic Chicken Recipe.
Now I’m starting to get TikToks and Instagram reels and YouTube shorts.
That’s when that sort of stuff came up.
So I was like, okay, okay, now I’m on the right track.
It has to be more of the highly visual stuff.
So I thought, okay, in our industry, what would be highly visual?
And I looked up Best Haircut for Fine Hair.
Now I started getting Instagram reels, YouTube Shorts from stylists.
So again, going back to the idea of, is your content educational or are you just posting before and afters?
If you’re just posting before and afters, it’s never going to happen.
This is not going to do a whole lot for you, at least at this stage and phase, versus if you are doing more educational style of content, now we’re starting to show up in that search.
So what I’m not finding is a social media optimized local small business search.
I’m finding like that highly visual content, think, you know, recipes, how to DIY questions.
Like I kind of just share like best haircuts for thin hair, maybe best extensions for coarse hair.
I don’t know, things like that.
Think about search terms in that way and how you can address those common questions and how you can create like truly great content that address those issues.
If you want to lean into this additional Google indexing that’s coming up on all of these social media platforms, that seems to be the way to get out in front of those search results.
Lastly, this is something that’s buzzing more recently, the opportunity to use trial reels.
So I think this is really cool.
I’m big on shaking up content.
Like sometimes we’ll post content and it will totally bomb.
That’s great.
Some of our most popular content is stuff that we posted where we were like, wow, we had no idea that was going to take off like it did.
And you don’t get those really great viral moments without testing lots of content.
So Instagram has come up with a really cool way to test new stuff.
So if you want to post, this is reels specific.
So remember reels are short form video on Instagram.
If you want to post kind of a new video, like maybe you want to try something educational and you’ve never really done that before, and you’re worried that like your current followers are going to think you’re ridiculous or that it’s not going to land well.
What you can do is post a reel.
And when you’re going to post it, you’ll now see a new option to post as a trial reel.
So what happens when you click this is that Instagram is going to show your video to random Instagram users.
It does not show up on your feed and it doesn’t show up on your reels tab.
So in theory, the majority, I’m going to give a caveat to this, the majority of your current followers are not going to see it.
And if somebody goes to your feed or your grid or they looked to index all of your reels, it’s not going to show up there.
It’s almost like ghost content.
So it’s floating around the platform, but it’s not specifically living on your feed or on your grid anywhere.
Now what Instagram said is it does not mean that your current followers will not see it because maybe they’re showing it to somebody else in your community and that person in your community shares it with their friend.
And their friend happens to be a client of yours.
Like there are still ways that your clients or your followers or people who know you could see the content.
So it’s not like, oh my gosh, I can post this and it’s totally top secret and nobody who knows me will ever find it.
It’s not like that, but it’s a way to test content without having it affect your grid.
So if you are worried about your aesthetic or you’re worried about trying something that’s maybe too radical or too weird or too different, and you’re worried it’s not going to land well, this is a really cool way to do that.
Then what you can do is look at the engagement, see how it did, and if it does really well and you like it, then you can retroactively choose to have it publish on your profile.
And now it’s a part of your grid long term.
I think that’s a really cool feature, especially for those of you who are a little bit nervous about new content or new concepts.
It’s a really great opportunity.
So bonus, six new changes to Instagram that I thought all Stylists and salon owners should know about.
I hope this has been a fun and inspiring one for you, and I can’t wait to see what you try and test.
So much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
