What the heck is going on with Instagram?

In the past weeks, you may have noticed your Instagram feed looking different. Perhaps more of the posts you see are Reels or videos from AI recommended accounts you don’t follow. Maybe you are seeing less photo content all together. For some, these changes are making it harder to keep up with content from accounts you have chosen to follow, like content from your friends, brands, or celebrities.

People are not happy about these changes, in fact, hundreds of thousands of people have signed this petition on Change.org to “Make Instagram Instagram Again.” Many high-profile influencers and public figures have added to the conversation asking the company to reverse the changes and restore the app to what drew people to it in the first place.

Widely accepted speculation suggests that Instagram is adjusting its experience to compete with TikTok and remain relevant as user habits adjust and change. After all, short form video is the fastest-growing content format on IG and across the web. Facebook and Youtube have also recently added shorts as part of their feed pages as apps try to predict trends and user expectations.

Instagram’s chief executive, Adam Mosseri, posted a reply to the outcry reminding users that the full screen feed is still in test mode, assuring viewers that photos remain the primary focus of the app despite an increase in video content, and insisting that the AI recommendations in your feed are part of their commitment to showing people more of the content they tend to be interested in.

It appears that despite the apparent dissatisfaction with these recent changes, Instagram will move forward as planned. For us as marketers, this means embracing video content to ensure we are still being seen. We’ve known that video content performs better that static content for some time and these changes are the result of that.