Each Friday, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri invites questions on his own Instagram account @mosseri – here’s a transcript of the questions and answers posted on Stories during March 2025.
29/3/2025 – Does tagging someone with more followers help my reach? Tagging someone with more followers will not get you more reach, but if you do Collab posts with someone with more followers than you, particularly if they start the collab, that will help with your reach, but tagging people does not.
29/3/2025 – Why do some of my stories reach more people than others? There’s lots of reasons this could happen. It could be that this is more competition on a given day and more people are posting, it could be that your followers or less active on a given day. One thing that we have learned recently is that if you post a lot of stories, you can get less reach. That’s not on purpose. That’s not by design, but we do see that happens and we’re trying to figure out if we can address that. Different things can happen.
29/3/2025 – Are Stories only meant for followers? Stories are not meant only for followers, but they’re predominantly only seen by followers. This is because we don’t recommend stories from accounts you do not follow anywhere in the app. But as someone who doesn’t follow, does go to your profile or sees one of your post, they can actually tap on that little story ring and see your story, so it does happen a lot.
29/3/2025 – Why should I get Edits if I already edit using IG? There are a number of creative tools that are going to be only in the Edits app, but one of the things I’m most excited about is that there’s going to be a place. maybe not at initial launch, maybe not at initial launch, we’re still working on it, to keep track of and iterate on all of your ideas even before you start editing. There’s also going to be a number of other kind of fun little bells and whistles that are just in the Edits app, but more to come soon.
29/3/2025 – Will posting a certain number of Reels help me grow faster? There’s no perfect number, unfortunately, for some people, they can only post once every week or once in a month because that’s all that they have to post and that’s okay. Generally speaking, though, the more you post, the more chances you have to have your content reach more people and therefore have your account grow, but I don’t want to be pushing that on everybody because it’s not for everybody. So, you know, it just depends. Figure out what is right for you.
29/3/2025 – Does using a scheduler hurt posting reach? No, if you use something like scheduled posts, it will not affect your reach one way or the other.
29/3/2025 – Is there a way to tell if someone has paid to Boost a Reel? If anyone is paid to boost a Reel or to boost anything, for that matter, on Instagram, it’ll be marked as an ad or it will say ‘sponsored’.
29/3/2025 – Can we add people to an existing saved collection? It’s not possible yet unfortunately, if you want to create a collaborative collection, you’ve got to create a new one, but we should be able to fix that, so I will take that to the team and try to figure out if we can take that on.
22/3/2025 – Should I turn on 2 factor authentication for Instagram? Please turn on two-factor authentication and protect your account using an authenticator app, do not use SMS.
22/3/2025 – What metric should I be most focused on for my Reels? The most important three metrics for Reels are sends per reach, so how many people sent your Reel to a friend over the number of people who saw your Reel, The, likes per each, and then just generally watch time, sort of how many seconds the average person watched your Reel for. Those three matter most.
22/3/2025 – Will Edits app tools also exist on Instagram or will I need to get the new app for all the features? Generally speaking because it’s our own app, it might be easier for us to start with some new features there, and then I think that if they work well, we will bring them to the main app. so overall, I think the vast majority of the features will be on both apps, but it’s definitely likely that some features will start on Edits first.
22/3/2025 – Do people follow the same creators on Instagram and Threads? More and more we are seeing that people actually create different graphs between Threads and Instagram and the more you use Threads, the more likely you are to have picked people to follow you on Threads.
22/3/2025 – Will there ever be a search feature? I’d love to be able to search a Creator’s library. So we are working on improving search this year, and to be able to search not just for accounts but for content on Instagram, but we do not yet have a search feature on profiles which I think this is asking for, but it’s a good thing to consider.
22/3/2025 – Do inactive followers reduce my post reach? No they don’t. But they don’t help your reach either. So they are just sort of noise. So I would focus on trying to engage with people who are active. You are welcome to remove followers who seem to be suspicious or problematic, but it’s not going to affect your reach.
22/3/2025 – When will IG offer PIP (picture in picture) like TikTok and YouTube? We really should build this. This is a good call out. I’ll speak to the team and see if we can figure something out.
22/3/2025 – Do you downrank content (esp bix accounts) for saying ‘link in bio’? No, totally fine. Will not affect your reach one way or the other.
22/3/2025 – If someone reposts your Reel and gets a huge chunk of views, it should just add up to original content views, no? Ideally, yeah. Now, if we’re gonna recommend a post, something someone from an account they do not follow, we look for if there’s the original post from somebody else and if we find it, we swap it out at the last minute. So it’ll just be the original post that actually gets the views. But we don’t always know what the original post is because sometimes when you repost you make it your own in some way and you change it, or sometimes the original post was not even posted on Instagram and the first place. So we’re looking for more ways to make sure as many of the views go back to the original creator as possible, but we don’t always know what the original post is, or even that it exists.
22/3/205 – How much should we upload per day? Depends on what you’re posting, and you know what your followers are interested in. I post stories every day, you don’t have to. I’ve tried to post things to feed, including reels, at least a couple of times a week, you don’t have to. I know people who post once a month and it does well. for them, and I know people who post five reels a day and it does well for them. So you can’t have to figure out what you people are interested in and then also what is reasonable and practical, and sustainable for you.
15/3/2025 – What should I post on Notes? Are there new notes features coming? Notes are a way to communicate with your friends. People who not only you follow but who follow you as well. So, people you probably know in real life. So it’s a little bit less about trying to reach a lot of people or increase your reach overall as a creator and a little bit more about how you might use Instagram to connect with people that you care about. So I use them to let people know where I’m at, what I’m thinking about, what I’m up to, sort of a lightweight status.
15/3/2025 – How do you use AI for work? I don’t know what to use it for. Predominantly, I use services like Meta AI to proof read and give me feedback on my writing. I use it to do research about topics that I’m trying to understand and technology that I’m trying to understand better. Those are probably the dominant use cases. So, you know, as a creative tool and as a research tool.
15/3/2025 – Is it normal for my reach to fluctuate a lot? It is normal. Now, I wish reach could be more stable, but in general, it is relatively volatile. I see regularly, I don’t know, in the order of four or five times the reach of my best post in a month for my worst post in a month. And that is pretty normal. If you’ve seen a lot more than that, that is not as normal, maybe you had a really amazing post that just went viral. But if you’re seeing something like 10, 20 or 30 X regularly between your best and your worse than a week or in a month, that is not what we expect, so please let us know about it.
15/3/2025 – What messaging app do you use? My primary messaging app s definitely WhatsApp. I got family in Israel and in Germany. I lived in the UK for a year, so my life in terms of messaging is primarily anchored on WhatsApp. I use Instagram a lot to talk about things, about my interests with my friends, sending them soccer videos, funny videos, things about architecture and design. But WhatsApp is my primary.
15/3/2025 – I wish there was a way to copy text in comments? Will that ever happen? This is good feedback. I thought you could long-press and copy, but it looks like you cannot, so I will talk to the team.
15/3/2025 – Does posting frequency affect algorithmic ranking? Your posting frequency can affect your reach, but it isn’t the most important thing. If you post too much, it could be that your followers are just giving frustrated, you know, if you post like nine things in a day and feed. If you want to do that, you want to avoid affecting your reach or bothering any of your followers, try using trials to just post to non- followers. But if you post not at all, or if you don’t post for a couple months, that can also hurt you reach because this isn’t on purpose, but our ranking system doesn’t have any recent data to train on, and so it knows less about who’s interested in your content. I try to post at least a couple of things a week when it comes to permanent content and I try to post stories every day. But there is no perfect rule, every follower base a difference. I would experiment and see what works for you.
15/3/2025 – Can anyone use Trial Reels? Or just Creators? Trials are designed for Creators predominantly and businesses on but they are eligible to all public accounts as long as you have a thousand followers. It is, though a tool, but we aren’t actually trying to encourage people to use to post about friend content with. It’s more if you’re trying to make a name for yourself and grow your reach on the platform, and you have a public account, trying to figure out how you might be able to experiment without worrying about what shows up in your profile or about bothering your followers.
15/3/2025 – The Guides section will never be back on Instagram? No plans to bring back the Guide’s tab on the profile. Sorry, I personally did love Guides, but they were used very little, and in general we tried to identify features that are used very little and define complexity for everybody else, and then remove them from time to time, so for those of you who loved Guides, I feel for you, I hear you, I loved them too. but we do need to try and do more actually to keep Instagram simple and easy to use.
15/3/2025 – What is the best kind of content to post? Talking head, text on screen, or vlog? The honest answer is it’s different for every creator, right? I’m not a creator who you’re gonna wanna see, dance or sing or do things like that. So I’m not doing music Reels or dancing Reels or singing Reels. I’m what we would call a talking head. For other Creaters, that doesn’t make any sense at all. So, I would try to think about what story you want to tell what you want to get out of Instagram, what content you might be able to produce that you think is gonna be engaging for an audience on there, and experiment with formats that line up at that, whether it is a talking head or a dancing video or a duet or whatever other format might, you know, pick your fancy.
7/3/2025 – If someone’s shadow-banned, how do they go about getting back in good graces? So, if you think the reach of your account is limited, you can go to settings and then account status and you can see if there are any issues with your account. If there are any pieces of content that were taken down, you can appeal if you disagree, and if you are no longer recommendable, meaning we don’t show your content to people who do not follow you proactively anymore, you can see why and you can either appeal or make adjustments right there in land. So go to account status and check it out.
7/3/2025 – Any ‘new’ features you are excited about coming soon? There are actually a lot that I’m excited about right now. I’m really excited about edits, which we’ve talked about, which is hopefully coming out soon. We’re still working on it. I’m really excited about a feature we’re starting to test called blend, where you can actually have a feed of reels for you and a friend or a group of friends. You could get to it through your DM thread with them. It’s a fun way to opt in to showing your interests with someone and getting to know them a little bit better. And then I’m also excited about a bunch of things I can’t talk about yet.
7/3/2025 – Why should I cross post to FB? You certainly don’t have to cross post from Instagram to Facebook, but if you do, you will reach more people. So if you’re trying to reach as many people as possible and you think there’s people on Facebook who might be interested in your content, there’s no reason really not to. But if that’s not your interest, no worries. That’s the hope.
7/3/2025 – Will Edits be easy enough for anyone to use? Edits is not designed to replace professionals who used desktop software to edit their videos like final cut or premiere. It’s for people who love making videos and love doing so on their phones. So it the idea is that it’s super easy to do and that it’s gonna eventually be not only really easy to edit videos, but to keep track of your ideas and develop them before you’re even ready to shoot or edit.
7/3/2025 – Why should I use close friends? Close friends is really useful if there’s a small group of people that you want to share more with than you’re willing to share with all of your followers. So, I have a lot of followers who are focused on understanding how Instagram works, most of them don’t really care about my kids’ photos. So, I use close friends to share my kids’ daily lives with a small group of people about 50 or 60 that are closest to me without bothering the rest of you. That’s the kind of thing that close friends is useful for.
7/3/2025 – If a Reel is taking off, will posting again slow it down? Should we wait? If you posted a real and it’s taking off, it don’t it should not affect that reach to post another thing, particularly if it’s not right immediately afterwards. Sometimes people can be worried about posting too frequently because you might bother your followers, but honestly, a ton of reach comes from people who don’t follow you yet at this point, we call that unconnected reach, and there should be no concerns. I think in general, people are too precious about how often they share. If you are worried about it, though, you can always post another reel as a trial which just goes to people who don’t follow you and not too profile to start and then upgrad it later.
7/3/2025 – Can starting a new account from scratch help with engagement? Usually starting a new account from a scratch is harder than working on an existing account. So, you have to build up your followership from scratch, we have to start to learn. Are people interested in your account for nothing, that cold start can be tough and it is almost always tougher than just iterating on your existing account. But sometimes it’s the right thing to do. Sometimes you just wanna clean break, sometimes you have a new idea, I don’t know. presentation or a different interest, maybe you wanna get into posting about one of your hobbies, and your main account was posting about your work or something like that.
7/3/2025 – How come some 4:5 posts don’t get recognised as carousels? You can actually post the carousel and have it four by five, when you post a carousel, it will, like allow you to hit this little button in the bottom; at the bottom right of the image or the video, and you can change the ratio. Also, if you start with something vertical like a video, and then you hit carousel, it’s gonna automatically go to four by five as opposed to one by one.
7/3/2025 – Is it true that the highlights stories will eventually disappear? We are experimenting with moving highlights into the grid, but they would still be highlights, and you still have control over them. I don’t know that we’ll end up launching that, but we’re trying to find ways to make it Instagram simple by preserving people’s ability to curate their profile and something that they’re excited about. But we’ll see. We’ll see if it works.
7/3/2025 – Is carousel enough to reach new audience and grow my Instagram without Reels? You can grow your account without posting Reels and just posting photos and carousels. One way, though, that I would recommend if you are doing that to increase the likelihood that you’re growing your reach and growing your followers, is to use music, because if you want your carousel to be eligible to show up in recommendation services, that means to show up for people who do not yet follow you, which is one way you can grow your account, you do need to add audio because it’s gonna show up in places like theel’s viewer, where audio is expected, that will help grow your reach.
1/3/25 – How do I make sure I’m not missing my friends content? best way to make sure you’re not missing friends content, and by the way, we don’t want you to miss friends content We try to rank it highly is to add them to your favorites list, and if you do we will do our best who should at the top of feed any time you open up Instagram and they have actually posted something recently. You can also, if you want to go to your notifications and be notified every time they post as well, be it a feed post or a story or otherwise.
1/3/25 – What’s the right mix of personal and professional content to share? No, perfect mix. I think you got to figure out what’s better to resonate with your audience. Some people find that sharing a lot of personal content can really make them more relatable or approachable and that works really well. Other people find that they’re audiences are dis interested in what they professionally produce and everyone’s audience is different, so I encourage you to experiment and see what works.
1/3/25 – How do you decide when to remove a feature? Removing features this tough, but honestly, I think we don’t do it quite enough. Generally speaking Instagram is too complicated, so we need to find opportunities to remove features when they’re not used by that many people, or that larger percentage of people, or when they’re adding a lot of complexity, but not creating a lot of value for the overall Instagram community. So we try to identify these opportunities and then turn those features off from time to time.
1/3/25 – Sharing collab posts to Stories? I didn’t realize that you can’t seem to connect or sorry, share your collab posts to stories, so I will talk to the team and try to figure out how to fix that.
1/3/25 – Will you guys add some kind of history tab so we can see Reels that accidentally clicked away? This is a good idea. And to be able to go see the history of things that you’ve watched in case you want to go back to something because you collected away or you, you know, got on with your day. I like this idea. So also, I’ll talk to the team about this one as well.
1/3/25 – What makes a story go well? Is it watch time? If a story is particularly well, it’s probably not because of watch time that’s not an important signal in stories ranking. It’s about to people tap on your story and do they like your story and do they reply to your story? Those are the top three signals we look at.
1/3/25 – How are you coping with loss of moderators on the platform? What have been the downsides? We actually haven’t reduced the amount of moderators we used for the platform at least in any way that I know about. I think you might be referring to the third party fact checking program. That program was actually one that I worked on personally and helped to build and it just didn’t scale very well. We backchecked roughly 100 things total in the entire country of the US per day. And so what I’m hoping for with community notes to move to a program that scales to a much larger number of people and focuses more on misinformation and scams and the type of content that we want to make sure that we reduce the prevalence of on our platform.
1/3/25 – Why do my followers keep growing more in other country’s than mine? It’s because no matter what country you live in, there are more people who live in countries outside of your country than in your country. And that’s true on Instagram, right? There are more users who could potentially follow you outside of your country than in your country. It’s a great thing. I think it shows that you are creating content that is compelling or speaking to a broader audience, and that’s one of our core value propositions as a global platform is to allow you to reach a really broad audience.
1/3/25 – Does having an older Instagram account give any advantage Vs starting a new account? So if you’re asking if you start a new account, does having an older account help in any way, no, it’s just starting new and fresh. If you’re asking whether or not you should start a new account or continue to work with an old account, it just depends starting a new just means you do your followers from scratch and starting with your old account allows you to start from a bit of a bigger base. It’s totally possible to reinvent, redirect, or evolve your account forward, so it encourages you to try that first before, sorry from scratch, but some people find from scratch is a nice clean, easy break and a way to get started on a new direction.
21/2/25 – If you auto share with Facebook does reach split between the two? If you cross post to Facebook when you post to Instagram, it’s not gonna split your reach, you will increase your reach because you’re gonna reach people on Facebook in addition to on Instagram.
21/2/25 – Hidden words, but for things to not show up on your Explore page? I like this idea to build it, we’d have to have really good content understanding and no matter what word you put in, we’d have to be able to figure out if a piece of media, photo or a video had that thing in it. And I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but that is the kind of longer term deal algorithm type idea that we’d really like to do one day.
21/2/25 – How does the new translate feature work on DMs? If you get a DM in a language you don’t understand, you’re going to be able to actually translate it, which is useful for lots of people around the world, actually over 85% of our users are outside of the US and so there’s a wide variety of languages people use, and sometimes it can help to write something in your native language and allow someone to translate it on the other side.
21/2/25 – Will Edits have a premium subscription? Is it free? Edits, which is going to come out in a matter of weeks, is going to be free, and we might have some paid features over time, but right now we’re focused on just having the most compelling, free set of creative tools possible, not just for video editing, but for collecting your ideas, for sharing them with friends and for seeing how the Reels you do post on Instagram do – so hopefully it’ll be a full sweet for the entire creative experience and to start all of the features are free.
21/2/25 – Is there a sweet spot for how long Reels should be? There is no sweet spot. Now I want to be clear we focus on shorter form Reels on Instagram, shorter form being three minutes and less, but everyone’s audience is different. Some people do explainer videos, which are gonna take a bit longer, Other people do jokes which might take less time. Experiment and figure out what works for your audience.
21/2/25 – When will it be possible to schedule Stories with stickers? No plans to build the ability to schedule stories right now. The whole point of stories is that they’re kind of a behind the scenes, authentic sharing format. And if you’re scheduling ahead of time that’s sort of in the odds with the purpose of stories. So right now at the plan is just to have those schedule features be limited to things like feed posts and reels and on threads for threads.
21/2/25 – How does ranking work for Stories? We try and rank stories based on how interested we think the viewer is in them and the things that we predict as a proxy for thinking you might be interested are you going to tap the story if you see it? Are you going to like the story if you open it and are you going to reply to the story if you open it? But those are those are kind of the major ones. That’s the vast majority of all the ranking system works for stories. And the thing on sources is way more stories than there is time to consume them. And so it’s much more for people’s friends, for cyprocal follows, people who you follow who follow you back. It’s less of a meaningful distribution tool or channel for creators, though it’s a meaningful.
21/2/25 – IG content strategy, what to focus on? We’re focused on creators. We think power is going to continue to shift from institutions to individuals across industries, you know, athletes are more relevant than teams, now journalists to build in their own brands outside of the publicationss that they work for, you know, whether it’s entertainment or news or music more and more people are interested in individuals. And so we’re building for creators. all around the world. We focus on craters that are the most relevant with young people because young people are early adopters. They tend to give us a sense for where the world is going to go over time. And we focus worldwide. Those are our priorities.