Instagram CEO shares 19 Proven Growth Hacks for 2025: What Works and What Doesn’t
Instagram continues to be one of the leading social media platforms in 2025 - it’s a place where creativity meets strategy. With over 2.6 billion active users worldwide, standing out requires more than just posting regularly. It demands a nuanced understanding of the platform’s evolving algorithms and user behaviors. Instagram’s algorithm is constantly learning and evolving, with its main goal to keep users on their platform and having social interactions. Drawing from the latest data, insights from Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, and successful practices from other Arizona businesses, here are 19 growth hacks to elevate your Instagram presence this year.
1. Sends: The Most Important Trigger in the Algorithm
Sends (aka “Shares”), especially through Direct Messages (DMs), is currently the most important trigger on Instagram’s algorithm. Adam Mosseri emphasizes that content shared via DMs signals strong interest, prompting the algorithm to boost its reach.
“If you save something, that’s great, but it’s usually something you do on your own. If you see a comedy bit that makes you laugh out loud, and then you send it to a friend…that’s a different type of connection….That is a social experience, not just a solo experience, and we are very focused on bringing people together.”
— Adam Mosseri, Instagram CEO
2. Embrace Instagram Stories for Rapid Growth
Instagram Reels and Carousels are currently the best ways to improve your reach, but that’s not the only metric that matters. Instagram Stories is the secret to engaging with your most passionate existing audience. These are people who already follow you, and creators who post on Stories often generally see less “unfollows” than those who don’t. It’s all about growing your reach and retaining it.
3. Use Carousels to Enhance Engagement
Carousels, or multi-image posts, have shown higher engagement rates and greater reach compared to single-image posts. It’s a no-brainer: multiple pieces of media means more opportunities for interactions.
When a user scrolls past your initial Carousel post, even after they’ve seen it, Instagram will sometimes run the same post on your audience’s feed again, this time with the second image shown. This means you have TWICE the opportunity for your content to be seen and engaged with.
💡 Practical Tip: Try adding text to your first slide in a Carousel post to establish context, then follow with a visually engaging image on the second slide.
4. Make the 2nd Slide Count
The 2nd slide in an Instagram Carousel post is absolutely crucial. If the first image doesn’t capture attention, and the viewer does not initially scroll to the second or third slides in the Carousel, Instagram may show the viewer the same post again, this time with the next slide showing.
Your 2nd slide should be visually engaging, and give your viewers a reason to continue swiping through.
💡 Practical Tip: Continue adding context and enriching the depth of your content with each slide within the Carousel post, so that your viewers are encouraged to keep swiping through for the full experience. An example might be a first slide that talks about how you want to show your viewers how you created this makeup look. Your second slide could show how the look starts to come together, and by the time your viewers hit your last slide, they get to see the final look.
5. Capture Attention in the First 3 Seconds of a Video
As users scroll through their feed, you only get a very brief moment to capture their attention, which determine whether viewers will continue watching. This is also called a “hook.” Some of the most effective hooks also include text, and sets the stage for what the rest of the Instagram Reel will be about, or what your viewers can expect as a “pay off” for watching all the way through the end.
💡 Practical Tip: Because many users are scrolling with their sound off (at least initially), include text that hook your viewers attention, and lets them know what the Reel will be about.
6. Optimize Reel Length Between 30-90 Seconds
Coming from the source itself, Instagram recommends posting Reels that are 90 seconds or less, with a sweet spot for engagement with Reels between 30-90 seconds long.
You can go shorter or longer, but the data says there is an optimal length for best performance.
7. Respond to Comments Promptly
By now, you should know that the name of the game is “Engagement.” By replying to your audience’s comments within a couple days, you are helping to keep the dialogue going, increasing engagement through user interactions, ultimately growing the reach of your content.
💡 Practical Tip: If you tend to get a lot of heat in your comments 🔥 wait an hour before diving in to respond. This will give more users a chance to comment on your post, and it gives Instagram a chance to sort out spam or bot comments, along with negative comments to push those towards the bottom.
8. Be the First to Cover Trending Topics
When something happens in the real world, social media is where all the conversations happen. It allows us to discuss the event with the entire world, something that wasn’t as accessible before social media was created. Instagram values users sharing their views and having social interactions in the moment. This means it likes to prioritize initial posts about a trending topic or event. It’s one of the easiest ways to almost guarantee your reach and growth. It doesn’t have to look the best, it doesn’t have to be heavily produced - but you do want to be amongst the first people talking about it.
9. Engage Through Direct Messages
According to Instagram’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, the platform is doubling down on their mission to drive real social interactions and encourage genuine connections. DMs continue to be one of the primary ways that users on Instagram are sharing posts, and they’re a powerful tool for improving your engagement and reach. Personalized messages can lead to a higher engagement and conversion rate, fostering greater loyalty amongst your followers.
10. Highly Produced Content Can Actually Hurt Your Reach
People don’t like to be sold to, and they don’t like it when brands try too hard to be “perfect.” If there’s anything to be learned from the social media age, it’s that people love authentic, genuine interactions.
If you are a luxury brand? Yes, polished content could make sense. But if you are a local restaurant, an artist, or in the people-business, overly produced content can feel impersonal.
The question you want to answer is, “Can my audience relate to my content?” Often times, posts that show behind-the-scenes glimpses or user-generated content resonate so much more with your viewers, and it encourages them to share their thoughts as a comment or to share the post with a friend. This drives your engagement and will go a long way with the growth of your account.
11. Watermarks Can Decrease Your Reach
Posting content with your own watermark is fine. Posting content on Instagram that features CapCut, or TikTok? Not as good. In fact, the algorithm detects these watermarks, and your post is more likely to not be recommended. That means it hurts your potential reach, and diminishes the effort you’ve put into creating that piece of content for your audiences.
12. Ensure Video Quality Meets Instagram Standards
There’s a difference between a highly-produced video vs. a user generated style piece of content. While audiences prefer more authentic, rough-around-the-edges type of content, the quality of your actual video upload does matter.
When exporting or saving your video, make sure that it is at least a minimum of 720p resolution, and 30 frames per second (fps). This ensures your videos meet Instagram’s own quality standards, preventing your videos from being compressed by the platform, which will degrade its visual clarity.
13. How Often Should I Post?
Growing an Instagram account requires discipline and consistency in your posting and engagement activities. That said, you should never sacrifice quality for quantity. Posting something for the sake of posting is less valuable to your audiences than sharing something that they can actually engage with and talk about. The short answer: Post as often as you can manage, but aim for consistency and quality.
💡 Practical Tip: Use Instagram’s built-in analytics and insights, or other management platforms to get an understanding of the best times to post, and what types of content your audience engages with most.
14. Post Soon After a Successful Post to Keep Momentum
You’ve just made a post on Instagram that got way more likes or engagement than your typical posts. Maybe it even went viral! Congratulations! It’s time to keep capitalizing on that increased visibility. Follow up in the next day or so with additional content to sustain your audience’s interest and engagement. This will give your next post its best chance of being seen (and maybe going viral as well!).
15. Consume More Content in Your Niche
Write this one down, because it’s an important one. This is something most people forget about, including other social media account managers: You have to use the account as a real person and engage with other people’s posts. Not only is there value to seeing what types of content is performing the best in your industry, but it also plays a huge role in teaching Instagram’s algorithm what types of content and topics your account is most relevant to, and therefore which other audiences are also likely to share the same interests.
This means viewing, scrolling through Carousels, liking, sharing, saving, commenting on, and reposting content that are relevant to your account and the kind of content that you post.
16. Hashtags Do Not Improve Visibility. Captions Do.
Hashtags used to be one of the most valuable tools for organic reach and discovery on Instagram. But you may have realized that some hashtags have literally millions of uses. What’s the likelihood that your post will be seen when tagged amongst the millions of other posts, all under the same hashtag? Almost zero.
Instagram now prioritizes the actual content written in your caption. When it picks up on specific keywords that tell the algorithm what your post is about, it knows to show your post to other people who may be searching for or enjoy the same content.
17. Use Captions for Silent Viewers
Unless you’re new to cell phones (or over a certain age 🤭 most people are scrolling through their feed with their sound off. Users might be inclined to turn up their volume if they find the post interesting and want to listen to it, but most keep their volume down.
Using captions overlaid onto your video helps your viewers understand what is being said, keeps them watching your video, and increasing your total watch time and helping your reach.
In this example from Instagram’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, you can see that he includes captions generated by Instagram’s native tools for Reels. It enables viewers to consume the content, no matter how they consume it.
💡 Practical Tip: You can use Instagram or other third-party apps like CapCut to automatically generate captions for your Reels or Stories. Just make sure you take the time to double-check for quality and accuracy!
18. Use Trending Audio to Enhance Engagement
Using trending audio directly from Instagram (and not from other sources) is quite the secret weapon. It improves your reach by capitalizing on a piece of content that’s already popular, but it gives you a second avenue through which audiences can discovery your content. When you use an audio (music or otherwise) that is trending on Instagram, your post has a chance of showing up on audio pages as well, which is where a lot of people go to find inspiration for their own content.
19. Likes Over Saves.
At the end of the day, engagement is engagement. Whether someone likes, shares, or saves your Instagram post, it all contributes to your overall ranking on the platform. However, Instagram’s algorithm can only work with the data they get, and based on how people are using the platform, posts gets way more likes than they get saves or shares. Based on this data, the amount of “likes” that you get on a post plays a bigger factor into your ranking than other engagement activities.
💡 Practical Tip: When coming up with ideas for your next piece of content, think about the kind of content that you would like to see for this topic. What’s something that would engage you personally, either because it was entertaining, valuable, or something you’d like to share with a friend? When you create content that you would find interesting, odds are, others will too.
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