Coffees & Content: Instagram Now Rewards Shares (And Two Other Updates You Need This Week)

This week something quietly shifted in the algorithm - and it might already be affecting your reach without you knowing.

I'm covering three updates this week that every business owner needs to understand right now, across Instagram, LinkedIn, and the broader digital landscape.

What's covered:
- Instagram's new primary success metric (it's not likes or comments anymore)
- LinkedIn's 360 Brew AI system and why engagement bait is finally getting penalised
- Why Meta is projected to overtake Google in global ad spend in 2026 - and what that means for your strategy

Hit play and bring your coffee.

Links:

• Join the IHEE WhatsApp community
• Follow on Instagram: @inhererampireerapod
• Find Loren on LinkedIn: Loren Tomlinson
• Visit us at: inherempireera.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning and welcome back to another week of your Monday morning coffees and content podcast episodes brought to you on In Her Empire Era, presented by The Social Collective. Grab your coffee this morning because this episode is going to be a big one. This week we've had three things that have really shifted in the digital marketing landscape across Instagram, LinkedIn, and also the broader digital marketing landscape that I truly believe every business owner needs to know right now. And one of them could actually be quietly killing your reach without you even realizing. So I'm gonna cut the fluff. We are gonna get straight into it this morning for our regular bite-sized episode of copies and content. Update number one Instagram's algorithm is now rewarding shares over literally everything else. And I don't know about you, but I could not be more excited about this. So here's the lowdown on what's happened. Over the last couple of weeks, the head of Instagram, Mr. Adam Mosseri, as we know, has confirmed that the platform has now started to actually shift its primary success metrics away from likes and comments. So what this basically means is the new signal that now matters the most, throwback to the days when it used to be a like or a comment, it's actually shares. So a wee while back, I feel like it was probably about six or so months ago, maybe a little longer, basically what we talked about is how saves were such a big thing. If you could create saveable content that people wanted to refer back to, that was the main metric that everybody was focusing on, more so than likes and comments. Now what we're seeing is that shares are the most important. So basically what that means is when someone sends your post to a friend or to a colleague or to somebody they would like to share it with, that is the strongest possible signal that your content is actually worth pushing further. So when I look at this and when I hear these updates, I feel like Instagram has finally clicked onto the fact that people are meant to be social on social media. Social media, I feel like for a hot second there, it started to kind of lose the social aspect. And then TikTok sort of came around, and TikTok really, I mean, apart from the fact that it sort of smushed everybody's attention spans, TikTok also really showed us what it means to be social on social media. Not so much social in person, but really social on social media. Essentially what this means for you now is if you've been optimizing your content for comments, or I really hope you still haven't been optimizing your content for likes, but your benchmark is now a little bit outdated. So a post with something like 50 shares and only 20 comments will always outperform a post with a thousand likes on it. So when you create a piece of content this week, this is my challenge to you. Ask yourself, will people like this or will people be sending this to someone? I think the thing that I love the most about this update is yes, it does feel a little like, oh, we've got to create some really compelling content. But I think if you flip it on a positive lens and look at it like it's creating value, I am a massive value first person when it comes to social media. I wholeheartedly believe that at the core of everything you share, value should be the focus. So really looking at your content that you're creating, not just on Instagram, I also mean Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, whatever platforms you're on, your Substack as well. I really want you to think about is this valuable and will this be helpful for somebody else? Because if you can think about it through that lens, it's a no-brainer for people to be sharing it and supporting other people and passing it on because they think it's relevant rather than looking at it like, is this the most pick me piece of content or is this the most amazing piece of content that's gonna give me my flowers? I really want you to think about is this actually valuable for somebody else? So, like I said, start creating content that really prompts a forward. Start thinking about something that's useful or surprising or something that's relatable to your audience because their first instinct, if that's the case, is to either tag somebody or drop it in a DM. That is your new standard. That is where we are now setting the bar for Instagram moving forward. Moving on to update number two. This is another update that I'm so excited for, and it is about damn time. What's happened is this new AI system called 360 Brew has replaced the entire old algorithm, and I'm so here for it. As somebody who personally really, really loves a good LinkedIn post. I love this. The reason I do is because 360 Brew is actually smart enough to detect AI-generated content and engagement bait. So what that means is posts that are ending with something like comment blur if you agree, or like this, or message me with blah, blah, blah, and I'll send you the PDF. Those types of posts are now actively being penalized. And I just feel like hallelujah, it is about time. Yes, we hear those claps. I'm so here for it. Because the reach is starting to now drop for anyone that's using those tactics. And AI written posts that just don't have any personal voice are being throttled. I think it's really nice to start seeing platforms like LinkedIn that I personally really, really love, finally starting to crack down on all of this garbage that is getting you to comment the word clawed or comment the word AI, because it's just taking away from people actively actually engaging with content in a meaningful way. And instead, all it's doing is getting you to comment a simple word, which yes, people are seeing some major engagement from it, but it's not actually encouraging the social component of social media. So if that has been you up until now and your strategy has relied on engagement prompts, even this applies to Instagram as well, but predominantly for algorithm and strategy purposes, I'm gonna talk about LinkedIn. If your strategy when it comes to social media content up until recently has heavily relied on engagement prompts, or you've been really leaning into AI to write posts that basically sound exactly the same as everybody else, because, well, to me at least, it's really obvious these days which posts have been written by a real human versus which posts have been written by AI, I feel like you're probably starting to notice a change already. Now, I do say this, but I want to preface it as well by saying you can still use AI to write your content. I still very much do. However, my brain is the think tank before I use AI to execute. So I use Claude in a multitude of ways. And please DM me on Instagram, send us a message, add a comment to this episode if you would like to get a little bit more insight on how I'm using Claude to do my marketing. But one of the ways that I get it to give me some really great content is by basically trolling through all of my chats that I have with Claude and pulling out information that would be really valuable for my audience. So it's stuff that I'm already actively thinking about and I'm already doing and insights that I'm word vomiting into Claude on a daily basis, and then getting it to start pulling through what is actually valuable for my audience and how can I turn this into some content that sounds authentically like me. So rather than me writing it, I'm using AI to actually write my content, but it is my thoughts, it is my take, it is my opinion. I'm not going out there and getting it to replicate somebody else's post, but just writing it slightly differently. I'm actually thinking it and I'm getting Claude to write it in the most authentic way to me. So using my words, using essentially my tone, because it starts to pick that up with the amount of word vomiting I do. And when I say I talk to Claude, I use a tool called Whisper AI. Whisper is this amazing tool that you can install on your computer and speak directly into it. So it's just like dictation. And you pop everything into your computer and it transcribes it for you. So when I'm talking to it, rather than typing it out and thinking logically about how I would type it, I write it using my voice. And so when it then creates a post, it is very, very similar to my actual tone and my actual wording and the way that I phrase things and the way that I say things. Even like with this podcast, I will take this transcript and this will be what then informs my Substack articles, my show notes, my titles, because it's not coming from an AI summarized version. It's coming from the way in which I actually deliberately speak this information out there. So I think this is a really great update because it's not a glitch that's happening in the system. If you have noticed that your reach or your engagement has dropped a little bit, it's actually just the platform making a really deliberate shift towards rewarding the real expertise and genuine human perspective, which I'm all here for. So if you're wondering, okay, what on earth do I do at this point? Basically do as I do. Write your own LinkedIn post using your voice. If AI helps you to draft something up, that's so fine. But like I said, try and pull from your own voice in the way that you can, because your personality, your opinion, your expertise, that is going to beat out random AI-generated content every single time. So take that as you will. Really think about this new 360 brew AI system that's in the back end of LinkedIn when you create your content and continue to generate your own stuff. Even if it means whacking out a post that's like three sentences long and you just wrote it on the fly, that will always outperform some garbage piece of really AI-generated content that is so clearly not written by you. But for my content, I don't think anybody really notices. So if you're listening to this episode, you're one of the few people that do know now how I create my content. Update number three is around Meta and Google. This is one I'm really interested as an agency owner who has a paid ads division of the business. I'm very excited to see how this changes. Meta is about to overtake Google in their ad spend. So for the first time in digital history, Meta, so Instagram and Facebook, are actually projected to surpass Google in global advertising revenue in 2026, which I think is pretty crazy. So at the moment for the year, Meta is running at about 24.1% versus Google's 11.9%. And a lot of this shift is actually being driven by reels and AI-powered ad automation, which you've probably heard a lot about, and surprisingly, WhatsApp. A lot of this shift, I think we're seeing from reels because on Google, unless you're doing like a display campaign, you don't really have that visual component. And a lot of Google is words focused. It's very word-heavy. So you have to have the right keywords and the right key search. I spoke about this in last week's episode. And when I talked about using OpenAI for testing out some ads, which we are still doing, I'm not a huge fan of it at this stage, to be honest, but I'm not one to turn things off before I have given it a solid go. What we're starting to see is people are not interested in being served ads, but we are being served ads a lot more through our consumer behavior as opposed to the actual words in which we would search through a Google search. And I think this big shift here really kind of tells us that social media is where the attention and therefore those buying decisions are actually happening. So for my service-based business owners out there, obviously it's a common question that I get because e-com and product-based is obviously a lot easier to make it really clear how you run a campaign, which is predominantly working up towards having conversion campaigns running. But if you're a service-based business owner that hasn't taken meta ads seriously up until this point, the window to get in before it gets really, really expensive is starting to close. And take this as someone who, speaking about myself, I recently paused the social collectives ads on Meta because we needed to restrategize. And this shift has definitely given me the encouragement to get back on Meta so that I can start running ads at a very affordable price before things start to get really crazy. So if you are running ads, this is also your signal that the platform is only going to get more sophisticated. So stay on it, stay up to date, stay learning. And if you have any ads questions, of course, always reach out to us, send us a DM and let us know your questions. And I'd love to answer them on the pod. I should probably do a QA episode at some point soon, too. So when it comes to what to do about this particular update, at minimum, just understanding that organic, social, and paid social really do work together. Like I said, a lot of the shift is being driven by reels. So the more that you can really alter and improve your organic content, the better your paid ads will also be. Your organic content is ultimately what starts to feed your ad performance now. They're working together, they're not separate strategies anymore. So start treating them like one. One of the biggest things that I say to any of our clients, if they're coming to the social collective for advertising purposes, is are you doing anything organically? And funnily enough, we've actually had an amazing client who's just signed on to work with us recently who was going to be doing some advertising. And when we really got into the nitty-gritty of it and talked about their organic social content, we both mutually agreed that their organic content wasn't where it should be in order to really reap the benefits of paid advertising. And so we've pivoted slightly. And what we're doing is we're actually starting off with some organic social content with them first. We're gonna build that up. And then once we've got a really good cadence that's happening there, then we're adding in paid advertising. So if you're wondering what lever to pull and you want to pull the lever for ads, I would actually look at your organic content strategy first and then come back to the advertising. Because if you have a terrible organic strategy, just think about the fact that especially with Meta in particular, your audience and people that see your ads, if they don't buy straight away or go straight to your website, your social platform is the place they're gonna go to. So if your social platforms are not performing, that's probably a good sign that that's the lever you need to pull. So to wrap up this episode, basically what all three of these updates have in common is really one thing, and it's my favorite. It is that authenticity is coming out on top. Instagram wants people to connect and love connecting with other people. LinkedIn really wants real expertise, not that AI flavored noise. And Meta's dominance at the moment is really being built on those personal human-led content in reels and in stories. So the platforms are all kind of starting to really lean into that same message. And it's that the one thing that really plays to your advantage as a founder or as a senior leader or as anybody in business really is moving forward, sharing things that are worth saying. I don't believe that you need to go viral in every single post. We at the social collective don't chase virality. I believe in it. Obviously, it's a thing. I just don't really think that for our style of business, with building your future pipeline, with making sure that you've got really strong sales coming in the door, virality is going to give you a moment in time, but it's not going to give you a future. So we're leading with that thought leadership, leading with genuine content, putting yourself out there, especially as a founder, getting yourself on platforms like LinkedIn and showing up because I want to know that my face and my personal brand is going to last the test of time. And I think especially with AI coming in, we are seeing more and more that founders and humans want to connect. So make sure that your content is worth forwarding, make sure that it is valuable. Make sure that you are showing up with your own fresh ideas. Don't rely on AI to tell you what to share. Use your brain and think. One of the easiest ways to do it, I'll end this episode with a tip. My team and I have a thoughts channel in our Slack chat. Every Monday, we drop in one thing that happened last week that we think would be really great to take to the social space. And that is what we then generate our content using. So if you're struggling with what to post on social media this week, think about something that happened last week. Was it a really interesting thought? Was it a win that you had with a client? Was it maybe a fail that happened or something that didn't go so well that you've learned from that you could share? If these are the kinds of episodes that you want in your ears every single Monday, make sure that you hit subscribe and go follow us on Instagram at Inher Empire Era Pod. You can also check out all of the latest and greatest details. I'm so excited. We have the next events that are coming up for the In Her Empire Era community on inherempire.com. So go check everything out. But that is all. I will be back here next week with another brand new coffees and content episode. And I'll also be back on Wednesday with our regular stuff. So that is all for today. Have a wonderful Monday. I hope you enjoyed your morning cup of coffee, and I will see you in a week. Bye.