What Clickable Reels Links and Hashtag Limits Mean for Your 2026 Instagram Strategy

If you're getting thousands of views on your reels right now, how valuable would it be to have a clickable link right on the screen and you don't have to pay for an ad to get it? Also, we've had the ability with these trial reels to only release them to non followers. Now we're seeing this test where you can release reels only to your followers. And Instagram's gone from having a 30 hashtag limit now down to only allowing five. How should this impact your strategy and reach going forward? If your content is gonna be hidden or is gonna be early access, or you're getting people to push a button to follow you, it better be good. Chelsea, how long is the maximum length of a reel? Now? Some people have 10 minutes, 20 minutes. I have never gotten that long. AI generated content ideas, you know, do, do they help us think strategically or do they encourage sameness? That Algorithm's pretty accurate. Uh, so I'm, I'm interested to see. I think it's possible, but as far as you know, sameness, yeah, I mean, trends are trends that is sameness with a twist. Gemini, Claude, and Check GPT are going to crush whatever Instagram is capable of doing. If you're looking for ideas, I would start on those platforms. We're very excited to join, be joined by Chelsea Peitz. Uh, Chelsea teaches sales professionals how to leverage social media and technology to build a powerful personal brand and develop content that generates real leads. She's host of the Chelsea Peitz podcast and her most recent book is called What to Post. Today, Chelsea, Mike and I are gonna explore what these latest updates from Instagram and meta mean for small business marketers and owners like you. Chelsea, welcome back to the show. Excited to be here. As always. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, so we have another type of reel because there can just never be too many types of reels, and they're testing it, they call it an early access feature where reels can be viewable only by your followers for the first 24 hours before becoming public. And so the way this looks is if you went to somebody's profile and they had one of these reels and you were not following them, there'll be a clock on it and a star icon, and it'll be blurred and it'd say early access until the timer expired. Now the nice thing is then somebody could decide to follow you and actually get it during that first 24 hours. So it's very FOMO driven, which we know from a psychological marketing standpoint, it's very effective. Uh, and of course, it's sort of the opposite of trial reels, which prioritize non followers. So first, Chelsea, I know, like, do you think this follower only early access, you know, feature is gonna increase followers for most brands? Or does this feel like a novelty that will disappear in six months? I feel like there's so many tests that Instagram has run over the last even quarter. Um, I don't know if it's going to stick. You know, what's interesting is I finally saw my first one lie in the feed and I saw it in the feed. It was somebody that I followed and it said early access. So I was one of the people who was already following that person who was able to then see something and it noted, hey, this is early access. So I think it could be really interesting. You and I've talked about this before with the trial reels going out to non followers, and could this be something where you could, could have the, the followers see that first as for like your first series, or if you're announcing something new and it's a new, uh, product that's coming out. I think the series is gonna be really where these creators are gonna double down because so many people are doing signature series right now. You know, one of the things that I am concerned about with this feature is what if it doesn't perform well to your audience? Is that gonna ding you when it goes out into the public feed? Because it could be just kind of a way that they're trying to get people to, uh, I don't know. I mean, I, because you know how these work, right? Like they test these to a sub audience and they expand it to the entire audience. Do you think this could potentially backfire? I mean, it's always possible. I think they've done a lot of tests and just have seen people not adopt it. And I think they probably thought, oh, people will love this, and then they just didn't do anything with it. Um, I personally haven't heard of anyone who actually has access to it. My wonder is in regards to subscriptions, because I know that subscriptions, while it's a paid model, um, would that sort of be similar and or compete? Like how would the people that are getting paid subscriptions, how would they feel about this free early access, which feels to me like a little bit of that sneak peek. Uh, so it feels a little confused for me. I know that the goal here is fomo to get more followers because so many creators have said, help, please, my community is not seeing me. Help me grow, help me get the reach. And, um, I'm not really sure if it will, if it will work out or not. I don't have it yet. Now, now you're making me feel like the strategy is even more overwhelming because it's like, okay, do I put this out for a regular reel, an early access reel, a non follower trial reel, or the subscription reels? Now you mentioned the series, and so with that, are you picturing where obviously it would be a, you know, a series of reels, but where the first one might be public and then the subsequent ones might be early access to encourage non followers to want to jump on board? I could see that, that's a really good point. I think that one thing is that if your content is gonna be hidden or is gonna be early access

or you're getting people to push a button to follow you, it better be good. You know what I'm saying? So it better be something good content that I wanna actually see. And I'm excited to, but I think, you know, besides product launches and sort of the time sensitive collaborations and announcements, you know, series are very popular on any platform, playlists, series themed type of content. And let's be honest, it's been a little bit hard to find that content and Instagram. And so we don't have playlists yet. Uh, we are gonna be talking about links later on in the show, but this could be something where you don't miss out on those future installments and be the first person to see it if you are a super fan of that content. Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, just a couple clarifying questions because I, I'm just as confused as probably everyone else is listening with all these options, trial reels and all this stuff. So is it po isn't it true that reels are generally meant not to be seen by your following? Am I wrong on that or, or what's the deal on that? 'cause I've, I've always heard a lot of these Instagram experts say, reels are designed to draw on a new audience to you, and stories and posts are designed to nurture your existing audience. Is that fundamentally shifting here? And is it possible that eventually we'll be able to only have our reels be seen by our followers? Do you think that's where this is going? So in the early days of reels, I feel like it changed over the first three years from, you know, year zero to, to the three years in, because there was so much adoption when I first started doing reels, yes, it primarily went to non followers. It was very much like the other app that goes to non followers. And now personally, my content generally goes to majority of my followers. I'm very happy with that. And also it depends on when you're looking at the insights, because they're testing it internally first with people that follow you, and then from there they're going to place that out with other people. So you might look at it at hour three and it could look like it's going to all your followers. You could look at it at hour 32 and it could look like it's changed. So, um, I think that the trial reels is good for testing. I think the, the goal there was to test things and it's creators to test content with a newer audience. And then the early access, I believe probably was for, hey, reward your loyal followers. So we're trying to figure out the nurture versus, you know, new growth. And yes, originally reels had kind of been designed to say, Hey, this is how you're gonna grow. We're gonna help you find all new people. And I think that's changed for some of us and probably will continue to change. It's interesting 'cause Chelsea and I have had this conversation multiple times over the last couple of years where I, you know, I remember early on when most people were still seeing most of their reels views from non followers. I mean, I, you know, even taught and coached on this, and early on Chelsea was like, oh, really? Most of mine are going to my followers. And I was like, okay. I think you're the exception. But that's interesting, Mike. 'cause it does seem like maybe it's moving in that direction where we are gonna see more of that. The people that I think about are the marketers that have to, you know, basically report to somebody else. So if you're running an agency and you have to report to your clients, or you're the marketing director and you have to report to your boss, I think a lot of them have pushed toward reels simply because they theoretically get the most reach. And it removes, you know, some of that pressure because it, when you think about our, you know, our ROE that return on effort, it doesn't feel worth it sometimes for some of these other platforms. So I don't know if, I mean, Chelsea, how much content are you doing on reels versus some of the other, you know, formats, carousels? And I know you avid with stories. Yeah, right now carousels are performing so well, and I feel like so many people are talking about the two big trends that I see right now, carousels, which are performing much better for me than my reels. Um, and also the unedited talk to the camera Instagram story like reel, which is a big shift from what we've seen. And I'm loving it. I'm here for that. Of course, it's gonna shift back to highly edited and produced at some point. Um, but I think that, um, you know, for me, carousels are performing really well. I'm still doing the talking head reels, and I always will do them. So I like to mix it up. I probably do one-to-one at this point, so whenever I post a reel, my next post is usually a carousel. Sometimes I get wild and I do two reels back to back, but I really try to do some of those carousel posts too. Okay. This is a crazy question that I've pondered because I'm seeing a lot of people doing reels on Facebook as well. Um, do you recommend, and, and again, I'm confessing, I'm an Instagram noob here. Okay. But I'm, I know other people might be thinking what I'm about to ask. Do you recommend cross publishing your Instagram reels also to Facebook? Because I, I don't even know. I mean, in the, in the olden days, I know it was one click, it was very easy. Um, what's your thoughts on that, Chelsea? I mean, are you doing the same thing on Facebook that you're doing on Instagram? I think it's highly efficient. And here's the thing about Facebook and Instagram. You either love Facebook and hang out there, or you love Instagram and you hang out there.

So a lot of people come to me and say, well, I'm nervous because I feel like I have some overlap in my community. Will they get annoyed? And I said, they're probably not hanging out on both. And so you are going to have an easier way to scale that reach in content. Um, I don't know if it's still operating like this as it once was, but it was my understanding that Facebook was really pushing reels because the adoption was much lower than over on Instagram. And so it's possible that you could have something that doesn't perform that well on Instagram, and it really takes off on Facebook and vice versa. So why not? Why not share the post? And it is fairly easy. You can just toggle a switch on and it will, as you're posting your Instagram reel, and it will ask you, would you also like to post this to Facebook? Well, and from a consumer standpoint, I've never seen a reel from one company on Instagram and then seen it later that day on Facebook and thought, oh my gosh, I can't believe they're posting the same content everywhere. Like, I think we've moved past that. I think that was a fear of marketers back in the day. Um, but I also know that people open different apps for different things. You know, when I open Facebook, I'm looking for something different. When I open Instagram looking for something different, when I open LinkedIn, if I watch videos, I'm looking for something different. So I can't remember the last time that I did, unless it was a close friend that I see on every platform that I saw the same piece of content on multiple places from a different brand or from the same brand. So, so going forward, Chelsea, with this, if you were to publish a reel tomorrow and you had access to these early, again, to recap, we have early access reels, which go out only to your followers for the first 24 hours. Then we have trial reels that go out to your non followers before going out to your actual followers. And then we just have regular reels that theoretically go out to everybody. So what would you think about as you were creating a reel? Or do you give it much thought, um, as you were going to put it out there? If I knew specifically that I'm going to create a reel and I'm gonna make this a trial reel, and I'm gonna create a reel and I'm gonna make this an early access reel, I, I personally would have two schools of thought. Um, I know that for the trial reels, I think the current max is 20 a day, which I think is a lot. And I know a lot of people are using, and it's different content now. So here's the thing, they have the AI that can tell this is the exact same video that you've done. So it's not, Hey, let me do a bunch of B roll videos from my camera roll and put some different text on it and then shoot out 12 different trial reels because they will now notice, nope, sorry, this is the same thing. So could you have 20 different little B rolls and try 20 different hooks? Sure. So for people who really wanna ab test, um, those trial reels are gonna be really helpful and see what's working and then double down on that one for the early access. Um, I think that's more interesting to me because I'm very community focused and I wanna grow deep with my community. I'm not as concerned with the reach, which is why I was so excited that my reels actually go to my community. And a lot of people were saying they weren't. So I personally love that to create that, that really close community connection where people are really excited to see what is coming next. If you have a really big announcement and you kind of have been talking about it in stories and you're like, okay, this is gonna be the launch date or whatever it is that you're promoting or coming out with, that could be really interesting too. So I personally would look at it in two different ways. I think one is more for testing, one is more for, for rewarding your loyal fans, but I am very interested more so in the early access in the trial. Personally, One thing that's not gonna escape my head is that idea that once somebody decides to follow you to unlock a specific piece of content, their expectation is higher. So as you said, it better be good, right? Mm-hmm. Right. Like you're gonna ask them to take that step. So, well, we, we obviously have seen reels grown, and now as Mike you just brought up, you know, is Instagram expecting reels to be more for your followers rather than non followers and middle of funnel? So one of the things we are seeing is more and more insights, uh, which is of course, what medic has called analytics, including in the actual edits app, where there's a new tab now where you can sort reels by views, likes, comments, reposts shares, saves new followers, lowest skip rate. Um, you can also filter performance data across multiple time ranges. So the past week, two weeks, 30 days, one year, they're adding all of these different like elements in there. And I know Chelsea, you've kind of gone back and forth between the native Instagram app and the Edits app, but does it feel like the regular Instagram app is going to become more for consuming and potentially obsolete for marketing teams if they can do everything in edits? I think the big component though that Instagram, the original Instagram has over edits is the communication, the dms. And so I, I can't imagine that going away because that social media managers know that that's so critical to respond to that community. I think that these new insights are a social media manager's dream, because here it is finally where we can see all of these things. You can compare them, you can go back up to, to a year. It's not just like 30 days. Um, and it can really give you some good insights and they will allow you to print out a really cool little looking PDF so

that if you need to deliver it to someone, it looks nice and has all of the charts on it. So, um, I don't think that Instagram itself because of stories, remember edits doesn't have stories. I suppose they could put all of that stuff in it, but as a user of Instagram and edits, and I use edits every time I make a reel, I would be really annoyed if I had to get half the stuff over on edits and Instagram. And some of the, it's kind of happening now because now they're like, here's your ideas, get your inspiration, get your templates. And so now I'm going back over there, but I just really want everything in one place. I'm not even sure why they made the separate app. Well, I wanna clarify this because like for people that may not realize maybe they're using cap cuts still or whatever, you know, like what is the advantage that at it springs to the table? The main advantage I think in many people's minds right now is a very specific reel that came out with Adam Oeri, the CEO of Instagram who said, Hey, friends, this new edits app, we're gonna give you a little bit more love if you actually use it. And so I think kind of in the mindset still, I, I personally haven't seen any difference. Uh, that's, it's stayed steady whether I used Cap cut or edits or not, but I use edits because in my mind I'm thinking, well, if it's made by Instagram, why wouldn't you wanna use it? Why wouldn't they want users to use it? So I don't know that they're going to publicly say they'll penalize anything or promote anything, but they did say for a specific amount of time, who knows when the time was when it started or when it ended, or if it's still going, you'll get a little bit more of a boost if you're using the Edits app and you're editing in there. So I used to use Cap Cut all the time, and now I exclusively use edits and it has gotten much better, much more like cap cut. Uh, I think it's pretty similar to it. It probably doesn't have as many bells and whistles, but honestly, with this new rollout of the tools and the editing features, I think we're pretty darn close. So Jerry, just so we're clear, are you saying that there's statistics that are only available in the Edits app that don't even have any Instagram app? Is that what I'm trying to Say? That this stuff is all rolling out, but yeah, that's the way that they're presenting it. And it almost feels like, you know, Chelsea brought up that, you know, that potential widening gap between what you get in the Instagram app and edits app. And you know, over on the YouTube side, which is my main platform, we've had that for years with the YouTube studio app and the regular YouTube app. And so I, you know, completely see where that's going. But at the same time, if we think of a, a company or you know, an agency where they're creating a lot of this higher end media, you know, years ago when I worked at an agency, we were just mostly doing text posts and, uh, image posts, right? And an occasional video. But now for most companies, I gotta think that at least half of your content is gonna be video. And so I love the idea of having the analytics, right, where you're creating the videos potentially, um, just to be able to see things in that way. And as we think about AI integrating with all of this, you know, like the, the tool that I use for editing videos has AI built into it. And now as those models get better, they can see frame by frame what's in the video and, and do all kinds of things. So I like where this is going, um, in that way. Now, Chelsea, you did bring up this, uh, you know, the, the insights and how helpful they're in that way. And one of them is that they're allowing you to do a side-by-side analysis of real performance, so you can kind of compare them. And this is where I could see, you know, you mentioned being able to release, I think you said up to 20, um, trial reels a day. Is that what that was? Okay, That last number I heard it, it has been different numbers, but the last one I heard is around 20. Okay. And so do, would you see marketers then, you know, having this, doing more of this ab testing with trial reels where there were two reels that only have one variable between them, like a different piece of B roll or a different hook on the opening screen? Or do you think, is this what you were talking about where you, you sort of implied that, uh, Instagram's gonna, we know that's the same content, we're not gonna let you do that? Yeah, I don't, I haven't talked to anybody who's actually gotten caught for, Hey, this is the same content. I do know somebody who got put in timeout because they were posting too many trial reels a day, uh, said they were like, no, no, sorry, you can't do that. I don't know how long she got put in timeout for, but, uh, I think the side by side comparison, again, social media managers, especially teens, when we have like a large content team, I think this could be really useful to see what worked. And you're looking for that little edge. Like for me, I'm a personal brand. I'm not looking for the edge. I'm not going to be spending hours comparing B you know, a real B real, that kind of thing. But I think for the teams who are creating volume content and are looking to potentially really try to optimize that reach, maybe even, possibly go viral, it's very important to look at those small little nuances about the first three seconds. And what was the watch time retention? Um, I think you mentioned one thing about lowest skip rate. That's really important to be able to see that and then look at those visuals and figure out as a team, well here's

what happened in this one, here's one. And we're looking at it side by side. This is the one that performs. So that's the one we're gonna go with to really give you those insights to then take it forward and create future content with it. And then one other metric they're talking about is AI that will basically, you know, browse your comments and give you sentiment summaries about, you know, exactly what's happening there. Um, which I like the idea of when I worked in radio as a morning radio host, if one complaining call came in, I was just done for the day, you know, it was like, sorry, 500 or 499,999 listeners, I'm gonna go try and deal with this one person. And so I think other people go through that. But, um, do you see that as being valuable as well, or do you think it's still important to go through comment by comment and make sure that you're embracing everybody? Well, of course, you know, Instagram says respond to as many comments as you possibly can. Hopefully all of them. And of course, we're dealing with super large accounts. Some people have millions of followers, hundreds of thousands corporations and brands. And so I think the idea here was twofold. One, to help people with time to get through and say, okay, here's what people are saying. But also I think their original intent was to also get ideas from all those comments. If you're getting hundreds of comments, like, what are, what are the, the thoughts that people are talking about, that might be a great idea to make some future content. Um, so I also think your ideas very interesting as a fellow sensitive person where I'm, you know, focusing on, oh gosh, this is maybe a not super positive comment. Uh, that it definitely could weed those out. So I think for the, you know, the personal brands, they probably don't have 500 comments to go through on every reel or every post. But I think for those larger brands with lots of content, super helpful for that. You know, this is so intriguing because for those that have been around for a little while, you've got Facebook, you've got Instagram, you've got Threads, you've got WhatsApp, and you probably have a bunch of things I've forgotten about that exist within the meta ecosystem, and they seem to take these little features and try 'em out somewhere, and then they put 'em somewhere else. Like, one of the things I've noticed on Facebook, and I haven't seen it lately, is when I see someone else's thread with lots of comments, I'll have a little AI analysis of the sentiment at the top on someone else's post. Hmm. So I can see what the vibe is. Okay. So that's been on Facebook, I feel like, for months. And this concept I don't think is new. The real question is who sees it? Do you see it? Or does everyone see it? Because that's where it could get really interesting. Do we know Jerry? 'cause everyone sees it on Facebook. Okay. I see it on other people's posts where there's a lot of comments and it gives me the vibes so I don't have to read all the comments. But the real question is like, is this gonna come just for the creator or do you feel like this is gonna be available for the entire community? Yeah, well, I mean, the, the update is they're adding this to the insights for the person who's creating the content. So you can see it on the backend. Um, but I have also seen those summaries on Facebook. Have you seen them on Instagram, Chelsea? Where it summarizes other people's comments? I think I might've seen it once. I know somebody shared a screenshot and I personally get to see summaries on my content, but not other people's content. And nobody else seems to have that, and it's very interesting. Okay. Yeah, it's probably coming. It's interesting because, you know, it seems like these features are just kind of like they start out on one app and then they, they're very smart in the way they release all this stuff to just kind of keep the conversation going. So look, let's be honest, meta has spent a lot of money on ai. They've been using AI for a long time. Remember back when they would say, Hey, do you wanna tag your friend in this photo, in this photograph? I mean, like, it's been going on for a long time. But I do think that this is very valuable and I do think it's gonna help a lot of people because like, it'd be really cool if it highlighted important comments, right? Imagine if this person is influential. Like sometimes you'll see on Facebook, it'll say, this person has more than 10,000 followers. You know, and I see that as the creator, and that might, oh, maybe this person has influence. Maybe I should respond to that person's comment over the other people. I don't know. Well, Mike, he said YouTube That too. Use Something. Don't tell you how many subscribers somebody has. Oh, you YouTube, yes, go ahead, Chelsea, On Instagram. I know it's possible because, um, on my inbox for my direct messages, and I think also in my, my comment sorting, I just recently saw for the first time, you can actually sort now by, uh, verified, uh, and like certain number of, of followers. So I don't think that's far off. They already are offering that for different aspects of Instagram, but perhaps not directly on the actual post. But yeah, that's, that's in play. Well, speaking of meta, um, recently on the show we had Mari Smith and we were talking about how Facebook is testing something now where you can add links to reels if you pay for meta verified, but meanwhile over on Instagram, there's a new update where you can actually link to other things on your reels. And it doesn't have to be part of a paid strategy, either meta verified or an ad strategy.

Now there is an asterisk with it, but now you're gonna be able to add clickable links to an Instagram account or on a public reel, which basically appears right on top of it. It's a, it's a clickable overlay. And again, this is when you are exporting directly from edits. So another, you know, another, uh, thumbs up in the column for using edits. And the way that this is working is you're able to then link to, for example, other profiles or other public reels. So how meaningful are these clickable video links for businesses? Or do you see people actually clicking on these? Chelsea, I mean I obviously everything's worth testing, but what's your initial reaction to this? I think of it very similar to YouTube. I think you probably immediately thought of that too. When I watch a video and I'm interested and somebody says, if you want more information, click here to go to this video. Or if it's, again, a series which are very popular right now, uh, I would be likely to click on someone's profile or click on the next video. And I love that it's not just a link for the actual reel, it's the overlay, like you said. So I think that's really smart because it's one thing to see a little link, it's another to be able to see like the overlay of the actual reel, the visual. So I love that. And I also think it's interesting, um, to be able to direct people to profiles and say, just click this link and go right to the profile. So even if you have maybe multiple profiles too, you know, as you're operating with a, a brand. So I think it's really interesting. I think it's been a long time coming. I think it's a good thing. Again, these links don't go out to other websites. They only stay with inside the Instagram ecosystem. So again, Instagram's like, Hey, we're gonna keep you on the platform. But more tools, I think, for creators to get people into that quote unquote video funnel. Like, let's go down the rabbit hole of, of consuming as much content as possible. Yeah. Can you, uh, just describe visually what you mean by the difference between an overlay link versus another link? The Way that I've seen it only in pictures, I haven't seen it live yet. So there's going to be, let's say a link like, so Jerry, let's say you're doing a reel and it will have like, almost like a little long bubble, and it will have your profile photo and your, your username. And so it'll appear almost like a sticker on the reel and people can click on it and then it will take them directly to your profile or somebody else's profile. And when you are using the overlay, it will show up like as a video, like a picture and picture or a video and video, um, so that people can actually point to it and say, and if you wanna check this video out that's next in the series, just go right here, which is really nice. Instead of just having a link that doesn't show you any kind of visual, so you can have somewhat of an image and element to it. And also even the link if you put your profile, still has your profile picture, which is really nice. I, one of the things that I love about this too, and this is something that I've done and I've seen other people do over the years, is I think at this point it might be worth maybe making some more profiles that have a specific external link, you know, on there. I did that for a podcast once so that I could very smart, yeah. Tag the podcast. I had no intention of growing this podcast Instagram account, but that podcast Instagram account had that clickable URL. So they are now, you know, we've at Social Media Marketing World the last few years, and I think in marketing in general, we always hear marketers ruin everything. So maybe this will be the way that marketers ruin these on onscreen, uh, links on top of the reels. But I think that's an incredible opportunity too. Jerry, Doesn't this sound a little bit like what YouTube does? I mean with, you know, how YouTube has the ability to put, I forget what they call 'em, cards up on the screen or something like that. It kind of feels a little bit like that, doesn't it? Yeah, there's the cards that you can put anytime in your video, and then there's the end screen videos that you can have at the end, the last 20 seconds of your video. And it does feel somewhat like that. But without having used this on Instagram, I'm curious, like, can it be up there the entire time? Now, one of the big things that has to happen for any new feature like this is consumer adoption, right? So I can tell you that, uh, when I have, you know, tried to use cards in my videos and I've talked to other people in the same way, they don't get a lot of clicks right now. Occasionally they might, and my hope when I use them is kind of like, if this isn't the video you were looking for, I have one that does this, you know, go click on it now instead of going to somebody else's video, like for example, if it's a tutorial about how to do something on desktop and they wanna know on mobile, but the end screen ones work really well, but it's all about consumer adoption. End screens wouldn't work if somebody was stubborn or if we were all stubborn and we're like, you don't tell me what to watch, you know, I'm, I'm gonna go watch my own thing. So, well, yeah, I think it's similar. Chelsea, How long is the maximum length of a reel? No, Some people have 10 minutes, 20 minutes. I have never gone that long, but some people, it's all different. So I think 10 minutes is probably the average for most users, but I do have a friend that has 20. Okay. So like, it would make total sense if you did a 10 minute video and you wanted to reference another video

that everybody could go watch, is that effectively what this functionality would achieve on a longer form video? Is that what we're talking about here? Mm-hmm. Because that could be a really big deal if, if like, like if you created like a, a little mini series for lack of better words, you know, and you had episodes you could just episodically kind of connect these things together, could you not? Absolutely. Yep. Absolutely. That's exactly what I would use it for. That's what I would suggest it for. Because as somebody who does a ton of educational content myself, I know Jerry, you do the same it you are talking about similar topics or going in depth on new topics. And so that is really helpful to then direct them to the next step. Or if you're doing a how to or a process and you're on step number three, and they're like, well, where is step number two or step number four? I think that could be really helpful as well. Yeah. And you could link to some of your other 20 reels a day that you're, you know, uploading to your, your trial reels and your test reels and everything else. And then another update they added for the edits app is a feed of 10 personalized content ideas each week based on your past reels. And so once a week they'll generate this list of 10 personalized content ideas and you can save them, uh, edit them or skip them. And so I, my on one hand I'm like, Hey, the more ideas the better. But on the other hand, you know, AI generated content ideas, you know, do, do they help us think strategically or do they encourage sameness? What are your thoughts around that? Chelsea, I'm very interested to see this. I am, what really got me entrusted was that it said your content, because when I go to edits now, what edits offers is you can go to the inspiration section, but I will tell you as somebody who makes primarily talking head reels that are long form, you know, over a minute and not b roll content, uh, that's all I see. That's all I get served is short B-roll, trendy kind of content. And I'm like, but you don't know what I'm making because I don't usually make that kind of content. So I'm very, very interested to see how accurate I guess it is. Um, I know we're gonna talk about the, um, creating your own algorithm, that algorithm's pretty accurate. Uh, so I'm, I'm interested to see. I think it's possible. Uh, but as far as you know, sameness, yeah, I mean trends are trends that is sameness with a twist. Uh, but I think hopefully if they are able to do it customized to your last whatever, you know, how many videos they're looking at, that could be interesting. But it's not gonna be helpful if you wanna change your content. Yeah. Mike, I'd love to know your take on this. Just, you know, living around AI so much. I mean, can we get good original ideas from ai? Oh, a hundred percent, but I'm not sure we can get it from an Instagram or an edits app. I'm not gonna lie. And let me explain why. Um, you know, over on my other show, AI explored, we talk about all sorts of fascinating things related to ai. I feel like you'd be much better off using Chate or Claude, which is my personal preference. And, uh, given it a lot of insights about who you are, what you're creating, you could create, like I've created a YouTube hook specialist and you could create a Instagram or TikTok content expert and you could tell who's, here's my target audience, here's the kind of things that I talk about. And you could actually, you could give it data, screenshots from your insights and you can say, help me understand, uh, what are my most successful pieces of data? You can actually download the video and upload it and have it watch it frame, frame by frame. And then you could say, okay, uh, help, help me come up with a, um, series of relevant topics that I've not yet covered. You know, you probably have scripts somewhere, right? Most people have scripts. You could put all that inside of, uh, a document or a PDF and attach it up there and say, what have I not covered that this target audience is interested in that I could cover? These are my most popular ones. Like, it's going to give you ideas that you hadn't even fat fathom, and you probably smack yourself in the head and say, well, why didn't I think of that? You didn't think of that. You're too close to it. You know? So honestly, I think you can't get any better. Chelsea or Jerry, have you guys tried any of these tools to, to ideate on topics? I, I'll tell you Have, I don't have, Yeah, YouTube password. I meant AI in general. Oh, in general. I love Claude. When you said Claude, I was like, oh, I use Claude and Chad t every single day. I use them with each other and against each other. I am a big fan and use it every single day for a variety of things. And uh, you know, ideation, talking through things and I'll say, no, I don't like that. No, I wanna go against it. Gimme the opposite. I wanna poke the holes in it. And so I, I use that. I can't imagine that being inside of Instagram. I'm with you. I'm with you, Mike. I can't, that's why I just don't think that their models are as capable

as like, like Gemini, which is multimodal also. And it can view stuff. Gemini, Claude and chat PT are going to crush whatever Instagram is capable of doing. If you're looking for ideas, I would start on those platforms and because most people have scripts, you can just feed all that stuff in there. Jerry, have you tried this at all on some of your YouTube stuff? Yeah, well, YouTube has its own built-in ai, which obviously runs on Gemini called Ask Studio. And you can go in, which is what sounds like Instagram is doing. You can say, Hey, what, you know, based on what my done in the past, what videos should I make? And obviously, even if you could access all the data, you could never get through it all, like you said, Mike. And so it'll come back and it'll say, Hey, you can make a video about this and video about this. And the thing I like about it, and this is what I encourage others to do, is if something is, if something's just wrong, you just know it's wrong, right? Like, I don't talk about that. But if something's like, oh, that's interesting, but I'm not sure, I will push back and I'll say, tell me why you think that. And I think this is where AI is amazing and also dangerous. If we just take what it says blindly, then we end up doing things that don't fit. But it'll come back and it'll explain it and it'll say, because of this and because this video attracted this audience, or whatever it might be, then my brain goes, yeah, you're right. All right, let's do this. So I definitely think that's the future of ideas. Well, and I have a really hot tip for everybody. Uh, if you have a phone smartphone, which pretty much everybody does, you can record your screen and load up Instagram and go through the insights and go through it slowly and just record the whole darn thing. Okay? Then you can download that or send it over to your computer and load up Gemini. And the reason I'm saying Gemini is because it's got the best vision model and everybody who has a paid Gmail account gets access to Gemini for free. You can go to Gemini, um, uh, dot google. com, I believe it is. Jerry, maybe you can cross check that. Yeah. And literally upload the video into it and you can just give it this command. Hey, analyze everything you see inside this video and tell me important insights that might have overlooked. It will literally go frame by frame through that entire darn video. I dunno if anybody's tried this, but I'm telling you, this is the big unlock for a lot of people is literally just having a, having a video from your mobile phone. 'cause you know how hard it is to look at insights on like a mobile phone. It's, it's a nightmare, but you can just upload that video and then it'll, it'll literally analyze the entire thing for you. That's really cool. I haven't tried it with Gemini, but that's a hot tip because I didn't know it had the best vision model. But I have uploaded videos of mine into Claude and chat GPT to ask questions. And Both of them will do the same thing. Claude will just retake the frames out of it. And then, but you can do this with Claude as well. But Gemini is exceptionally good with video because it, it was built from the ground up as a multimodal model. So yeah, I mean this is the kind of stuff when people start thinking outside the box a little bit about taking data from one place and sticking it in another place, all of a sudden you can unlock some pretty cool ideas. That's brilliant. I never thought about just, yeah, putting a video in there. 'cause then you can give it everything. You're like, all right, which, which columns do you need from this sa speed? Eventually it's just gonna be on your phone and literally it's just gonna take over. You know what I mean? Yes. But now, Yes. Well, I honestly thought hashtags would be dead by now on Instagram. They're not. But we started with 30 hashtags, uh, on Instagram as the limit. And now they've reduced the hashtag limit and captions for posts and reels to five hashtags. The whole idea is to help marketers create more targeted, more specific content. And of course, they're continuing to discourage us from using spammy hashtags like hashtag reels or hashtag explore, which they said will or potentially negatively impact your reach. So Chelsea, you know, you're on Instagram more than either of us. Do you see lots of people still using hashtags? And are you still using hashtags as part of your strategy? You know, I actually can't even use five hashtags. I was trying to put in high hashtags the other day and it said, I'm sorry, you've been limited to only three. So I only have three hashtags. Um, and so I personally, behind the scenes do I think that they've been doing this probably for a long time. I think we humans have a really hard time with change. And for many, many, many years we used 27, 28 all the way up to 30 hashtags because that's how the system was able to understand what your content was about and sort and serve it up to people who were interested. Um, and now AI is just so smart, right? You, you don't even need hashtags, quite frankly, the words in and of themselves. Um, I thought that I had read somewhere that they, they might even be trying, and maybe it was on threads trying to hide those hashtags just so you didn't have to even look at 'em. So I think it's really interesting. I mean, I think this is probably going on behind the scenes for much longer than we have known. Um, but we have a big hard time with h Yeah, well, you're a power user, so they're taking away features from you first. So yeah, maybe three. You know, first, You know what, I don't even use hashtags sometimes now, and it totally works. I get the little AI summary that tells me

what they think it is and it goes out. So it's, it's doing its thing. So I think you just answered this question for the marketer or business that's listening right now, and they're going, oh gosh, should I, should I finally be using hashtag should I get back to using hashtags? What do you say to them? I still use hashtags, but I also think of them just as keywords that have, you know, I'm aging myself, the pound symbols in front of it, uh, because that's just how it works. But I think when you're looking at hashtags or keywords in general, it's just very simply, what is it that your ideal clients would be looking for? And what is the topic that you are talking about? Because again, the AI is smart. If you're talking about one thing and you're trying to use something else, it, it's going to know that it's likely not going to categorize it if you're trying to hack your way through that. Well, if we think about the history of hashtags, they started on Twitter, okay. And back in the day, they were a way for Twitter to categorize things. Okay. So it was like a, uh, it, it was a way to structure content so that Twitter could intelligently serve up relevant content. And eventually, like you said, Jerry marketers kind of got crazy and went nuts with it, and everybody implemented hashtags. But now we're in an era where we've got incredibly intelligent AI algorithms that understand the essence of what it is you're saying. Yeah. So the hashtag, if it's being hidden, it serves no function. Let's be intellectually honest. And why do we need hashtags when we have really intelligent models that listen to what we say when they're videos, read what we write, there's no reason a hashtag is going to make their job any better. If anything, they're going to probably doubt that the hack, you might even get punished if your hashtag isn't relevant to your content because they're gonna know you're trying to game the system. I mean, I don't, I Oh, for sure. I don't even think, like, honestly, I would not be surprised if they disappear tomorrow because why do, what, what do they, what do they actually do? Like, I, I don't know. I'm just throwing that out there. I mean, like, what do they really do? And maybe they're there because they, as Chelsea said, people don't like change and they're just trying to appease people a little bit longer. You know, they go from five, it'll go to three and it'll go to one, and then, you know, you'll, you'll have nothing. I, I always like to tell people, and this is across platforms, basically in the last couple of years, the algorithms have all learned synonyms. So you don't have to put in every possible usage of a word, you can just put in what your content's gonna be and it's gonna figure it out. So I mean, if we think about what Meta's doing on the ad side, you don't even need to address an audience anymore. Okay. So like that's, I've, I've actually a few experts and they say, just let it do its thing. You don't even have the same targeting that you used to have. So if, if that's available to paid advertisers, what's available on the actual feed, it's the same ultimate technology behind the scenes. So this is just kind of like, I think it's like a, patterns are hard to break kind of thing. And my guess is it's probably worth an experiment to just do none and see if they actually do better because, 'cause if there's one less thing we have to do as creators and marketers and then, then isn't that gonna make our life a lot easier, Chelsea? Yes. And you know what? I look back and think, you know, years ago I used to have the spreadsheets. I had so many tabs on every single spreadsheet. I would research those hashtags. I had big hashtags, midsize hashtags, smaller hashtags, niche hashtags. Wow, what a waste. Because we don't need any of that. And every time I make a piece of content, it's interesting because sometimes even the words that I'm saying and typing, it's not even picking that up. It's picking up something I'm holding. Like if I'm talking about a book, yeah, I'm holding the book and maybe I'm not even saying the exact book name, I will see it in the summary and I'm like, wow, this it, it's really already knows everything that we're talking about and showing in our content. Yeah. And Chelsea, I want to ask you, because you mentioned this earlier where Instagram is letting users now choose their topics and sort of customize their own algorithm. So anyone can go in and do this if you don't like what you're seeing. And so how do you think these user controlled algorithms are gonna impact brands that are trying to reach new audiences at scale? Is this a bad thing? Is this a good thing? How do you see this playing out? Yes, this is a very interesting one. As soon as this came out, I immediately went to my reels. This is just right now, we should make the disclaimer, it's just on the reels feed. Okay. But Adam said we are planning to bring it everywhere. So they're starting it on reels. So we can anticipate this just basically being the norm at some point on Instagram. But when they said go and check it out, I immediately went, I clicked on the icon. And I think even if you love what you see and you don't care about your algorithm, go see what they think you like. Because it has 20 words that it said that I thought I liked. And I would say 90% spot on 10% were wild and random. I'm like, I'm not, didn't have content at all. Um, so I took those out and changed it and immediately, like as soon as I clicked done, my content was different. Now what I will say is it was very cool because I got to see content from people I'd never seen

before in the content I'm interested in. But also I stopped seeing other stuff too. So it was kind of like a little bit of a stop for me on discovery of, of more content. Now I think that a brand or a company, yeah, you should be thinking about that. Be thoughtful because people like me who are using that, I may not see your content. So you might have to think of a different way. You might be losing some views, but if you look at it on the other side, your views are going to the right people now. So what's a view if it's not going to the right person, I don't care if I get 30,000 views and I don't get any clients from it. I'd rather have three clients and very low views and then going to the right clients than a bunch of numbers that amount to nothing. So I think it, you could argue both sides of it. As a consumer, I like the ability to go in and change it and then look at it. 'cause it, it continues to think. And so I went back a few months later, it had added more things that it thought I was interested in. I did not add them. And so I do find that I go in there to remove things, but you can say, see less so you don't totally delete it. Or you can say, do not show this to me. I am not interested. And you can change it at any time, but I think you should go in and just see what Instagram thinks you're interested in. And so from what I'm hearing you say then, should brands consider making sure that their content does fit into a topic that could be listed? Like that sounds like the important part To me, if, if you don't fit one of these categories, then you're potentially, and, and I'm sure there's way more than any of a CNR list, but you're, if they can't categorize you, they can't put you in front of new people, is what I'm hearing. I don't know on the backend if that's how it's working. I tried to put in some pretty niche things and actually quite a few of those niche things were allowed, and then I got really specific and it didn't allow me that. Uh, so I, I was surprised at like, so, you know, you don't just have just marketing. Um, but listen, like even if they're more niche and or broad, if I'm not interested in sports, I'm not seeing sports. So if you're a sports company, good luck. You will never end up in my feed. So, you know, I've got dogs in my feed and you know what I see a lot of, of dogs. So yeah, I, I think the, you know, brands kind of got like nervous, like, oh my gosh, I don't know that it's the categorization because I think the AI is still smart enough to, to really categorize all the niche stuff. But I, I don't think they have to worry about fitting into a specific like keyword or a tag. I think they got nervous thinking, oh, my views are gonna go down because if content is going to people that are just interested in that content, then my views are going to go down. So I, but I think that's positive because hopefully then your content's going to the people that are interested in sports. Yeah. And so I, I think they should be thoughtful about it. But if you're not making content that is directly speaking to your audience who's interested, I think that's more of the foundational problem than, uh, you know, whether or not people can cont control their algorithm because ultimately it is making content speaking to your ideal human. All right, Chelsea, this has been a fascinating conversation and also the tip from Mike about how to use AI to analyze your Instagram insights. If you missed that, make sure to go back and grab it. Thank you so much for joining us today. Chelsea, if people wanna explore working with you, where do you wanna send them in? If they want to connect with you on the socials, uh, where's the best place to do that? No surprise, you're gonna find me on Instagram. It's my name, it's Chelsea dot Peitz, P-E-I-T-Z. Chelsea and Jerry, thank you so much for being on the show today. And hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer. com slash 7 0 8. And if you're new to the show, be sure to follow us on whatever podcasting app you're listening to us on. And if you've been a listener for a while, we would love a review. And do check out my other show, the AI explored podcast. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzer, and I was joined today by Jerry Potter, my co-host. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day. And mate you are marketing, keep evolving.