In the decade+ that I’ve been working with brands, I’ve noticed one consistent theme across every team, regardless of their size: No one feels like they have content figured out. We are all convinced that everyone else has the answers, and we’re on our own struggling to keep up.

Ironically, that fact alone should be comforting. The fact that some of our favourite brands are in the same boat lets us know that we’re all in this together.

So, when YouTube and Instagram both released guides about what’s actually working on their platforms in the same week, I knew everyone would get something from their insights.

Instagram

Let’s start with the elephant in the room. Instagram is the platform that brands typically spend the most time thinking about, and this week their leader, Adam Mosseri, joined podcaster Brock Johnson to answer the question: How are people growing Instagram accounts in 2025.

In addition to tried and true advice, Mosseri shared some new insights that we found particularly interesting:

1. People aren’t posting to the feed; most feed content is from brands & creators

“(The Feed) is the most important place for creators to post. Stories are awesome but your average creator reaches way more people in feed… (The) feed is for average folk to share photos or videos that they’re really proud of, but it’s a very small percentage of average folk who actually post to feed on a given day, whereas for creators, it’s much higher, so it’s becoming much more of a public domain, whereas stories and DMs are much more about where your friends are.”

2. Accounts grow through recommended content

“Recommendations was a way to maintain and grow feed as an important part of Instagram, and we try to do so in a way where it would help people discover creators and other accounts that they would love, but might not even know existed. So you’ve seen that play out, and I’ve pushed really hard to make sure people could see the difference between their “connected” and “unconnected” reach.”

3. Recommendations prioritize shorter videos

“We’re not trying to optimize for time. This is a common misconception… that is not quite the case for us I think if you look at Netflix from what I can tell they optimize for time YouTube time TikTok, time plus some other things around originality and and and breaking content.

We are a place to be to to be entertained to entertain yourself to find stuff that to explore your interests but we’re also a place to connect with your friends and if we just optimize for time what would happen is you would you could just you would just show longer and longer and more and more videos but then for every five minute video you watch that’s maybe 50 things you didn’t see from other other people including your friends so we’re much more in the like short video focus.

It doesn’t mean there’s a perfect length for video but one of the reasons why the the primary flows only allow for up to three minutes it’s like we are you know a place where we want you to easily explore a bunch of interests send a couple things to a friend maybe talk to your friends about them.”

5. Hashtags are not useful for growth

“Hashtags are no longer a primary way to increase your reach on Instagram. They don’t significantly increase your reach on Instagram, contrary to popular belief.”

6. The #1 metric to get recommended is shares to DMs

“It’s true that like if you send a message to one person there’s less views than if you send it to your stories and maybe thousands of people are going to see your story but they might have seen your other stories that day anyway… but also because if you just think about it from a from the perspective of the of the person receiving it like it’s kind of

more meaningful if you send me something you’re like I think you’d be really interested in this that is a lot more meaningful than I thought everyone might want to know this thing in addition to all the other things I thought they all should know today”

Go Further

It seems that Instagram is on a mission to help more people grow their accounts, which makes sense because they’re trying to keep us there rather than moving over to TikTok or YouTube. They’re offering additional advice on a live webinar called “From Essentials to Excellence” this Thursday at 6am PST/ 9am EST. Sign up for the webinar here.

YouTube Shorts

The advice we got from YouTube was much more direct. Shorts is one of the most under-utilized channels by marketers, and the best part is, in many cases, we can re-use the stuff we post to Reels or other video platforms.

The following info came directly from the team at YouTube with the goal of helping more brands and creators see better results. If you’ve been thinking about using Shorts, this is a great place to start