Navigating Instagram in 2024

Confession time—I’m not big on making predictions or following trends. As the new year unfolds, my social media feed gets flooded with forecasts for 2024: “My Top 5 Predictions for Social Media!” and “What Changes Are Coming to Instagram?” fill the digital landscape. While I respect the insights of my peers, the trendsetting spectacle doesn’t quite resonate with me.

Why, you ask? Because social media is in a constant state of flux, and staying abreast of these changes is a year-round commitment for me. It evolves uniquely for different communities, and my focus is consistently on what’s trending, what’s working, and what’s shifting for each of my client accounts.

As we step into 2024, here are a few things I’m keeping a close eye on:

1. Trending Audio

This fluctuates quickly, and I like to stay informed. Recently, my niece began texting me trending videos from another platform. This has been fun as Instagram trends often follow there a few weeks later.

Tip: Incorporate trending audio into your reels for added visibility. While it might attract a too broad of an audience, it’s always good for extra exposure. Look for songs used in fewer than 5000 reels, with top reels boasting 1M or more views.

2. Content Preferences

Understanding what resonates on each client’s account is crucial. I ask key questions such as:

• Highly produced or more casual?
• Longer or shorter content?
• B-roll or talking head?
• Fast-paced and energetic or aesthetic and chill?
• Effective style hooks?
• Preferred CTAs?
• Captions that strike a chord?

3. Embracing New Features

Instagram continually introduces fresh features, and I’m all in for them. Unfortunately, they often debut on iPhones first, and frequently don’t ever make it to android. I’m still holding on to my android, but sometimes I’m tempted to switch just for this reason! 

I’m excited about Instagram’s expanded search features, no longer relying just on hashtags for categorization alone. Just this week they added “popular” to search results, marking what is being searched a lot. This helps identify keywords that people are actually looking for!

4. Building Community

In this time of generative AI, my hope is that we keep finding ways to build community and be human together. Fostering genuine connections is even more important than before. Whether through innovative features, smaller communities, improved chat functionalities, or increased engagement, I’m optimistic about the evolving landscape of building community and embracing our human side.

This also makes it extra important to embrace those qualities of ourselves that can’t be reproduced by AI, and leaning into them more strongly. It’s time to embrace our opinions, unique style, and genuine connections?with one another.

It promises to be an exciting 2024 as we find all the ways we shift on Instagram. You can trust that I’ll be keeping close tabs as the year progresses.