My Instagram Strategy for 2025 EXPOSED

If you watch to the end of this video, I'm gonna reveal my exact content calendar for January of 2025. So you can see how I'm putting my 2025 Instagram strategy into practice. But in the meantime, I wanna talk you through the three essential parts to any successful Instagram strategy in 2025.

Plus a few popular strategies that honestly you should leave behind in 2024 because they just don't really work anymore. Welcome back to my annual update video where I expose my Instagram strategy for you. So you can see the reasoning behind how and what I post on Instagram in order to grow my audience and make a living as a full-time content creator.

If you've been around for a while, then you'll know that 2023 was a huge year on Instagram for me. I started that year with around 35,000 followers and ended it with just over 100,000. 2024 was also a good year on Instagram for me, but for kind of different reasons.

I did continue to grow my audience going from about 100,000 followers to 173,000. But the bigger transformation was my income. Prior to 2024, I had done a handful of brand deals on Instagram here and there, but this past year was the first year where I really made a substantial income from it.

In total in 2024, I generated just about $42,150 from short form content brand deals, primarily on Instagram. This was huge for me because it meant that I was able to diversify my income outside of just the brand deals that I do here on YouTube by doing paid partnerships across Instagram and then like syndicating them to TikTok and YouTube shorts as well. In general, it is very important for content creators to have a diverse array of income streams because that way of one in particular, like say your YouTube channel gets less views all of a sudden and then you're not like totally out of ways to make money.

So whether your motivation for watching the strategy video is because you want to continue to build your audience and grow your community or because you're ready to start monetizing your content on Instagram, you're in the right place because we're gonna cover it all. So grab your coffee, grab a notebook and let's chat. While we're here for our yearly Instagram strategy talk, we have to cover the annual state of the gram address.

Let's discuss the most important features, updates, changes to the algorithm that happened in the past year and how they're gonna continue to affect our posting strategy in 2025. Number one, 20 slide carousels. This is a big upgrade that slowly rolled out over the course of 2023.

Obviously it gives you more opportunity to share more images in one carousel post, but to me, it's also an indication that Instagram is continuing to prioritize carousels as a format. So moving into 2025, don't fall into the trap of only ever creating reels because carousels are important for growth too. Number two, we got trial reels.

This was kind of an 11th hour edition at the very end of 2024, but now creators have the opportunity to post a reel directly to not their followers. Normally how it works is you post a reel, your followers are gonna be the first initial audience that see that content and their reaction to it, their engagement or lack thereof is gonna tell the algorithm whether to recommend your content to more people. Trial reels features kind of the inverse of that where you get the opportunity to test out your reel with a new audience, people that don't follow you already and Instagram will decide whether or not to recommend your reel further based on their reaction.

Kind of a neat way to test out content outside of your regular niche or format and see how other people react before sharing it to your followers. Okay, notes, this was another edition. Basically inside of your DM inbox, you can leave a little note and that's like across the kind of bubbles of profile pictures at the top there.

It's just a very short piece of text that is shared with people who you follow that also follow you back. There were a lot of other DM feature updates too, like setting chat themes, pinning chats to the top of your inbox, but in my opinion, these are kind of less relevant to content creators and more to just like regular everyday users. But the reason why I mention it here is because I think again, it's an indication of Instagram's priorities.

Again and again, we see Adam Asary talking about how the DM inbox is where most users are spending most of their time. This makes sense to me. As somebody who is right on the cusp of Gen Z and millennial, I'm still in the camp of people that primarily use Facebook messenger to contact people whose phone number I don't have.

But for Gen Z, they're like definitely using Instagram DMs to do that. The biggest lesson we can take from this as content creators is to continue to prioritize content that is shareable because a lot of users are accessing Instagram content through stuff that's been shared to them from their friends in their DM inbox. Okay, the inspiration tab.

This is another major upgrade that we got as creators. This is a section of the professional dashboard portion of the Instagram app where you can see inspiration for content you might wanna make. This includes accounts, actual like wheels that you can look at.

And what's really helpful in my opinion is the audio tab. You can see the current trending audios and also specifically the audios that are popular with your followers. Once I discovered this, I use it all the time for choosing what music to use with my reel.

It's way faster than just fishing through the reel speed, looking for that little like up arrow to find trending music. Overall, I think these major changes are kind of pointing us in the direction of continuing to make shareable content that people can DM to their friends. Making sure to include a balance of carousels and reels because carousels are also important for growing.

And of course remembering to use all the tools at our disposal from Instagram, like that inspiration tab in order to make optimized content. Okay, with the state of the grammar dress out of the way, I wanted to quickly rapid fire some ins and outs, stuff that was really popular in 2024 and beforehand that I think is just like gone when it comes to our Instagram strategies for 2025. And of course, what to replace it with.

Starting with stories, what is absolutely out is posting lots of story frames every day. In particular, talking to the camera style story frames, like where you're just filming yourself talking, especially if you don't include captions. But honestly, I think these long chatty stories with captions also not gonna perform the best in 2025.

Instead, what is in for 2025, if you have a lot of stuff you wanna share to your stories, try out making like a 30 second or so montage video that you'll post as a single frame. In general, I feel like stories are really leaning into quality over quantity right now. We're gonna talk more about that specifically later, but that's what you're gonna wanna lean into this year.

Okay, when it comes to reels, what is absolutely out are these like one and a half or two second long reels that just loop forever and ever and have a CTA that says read the caption. Great algorithm hack for a while, but I honestly think people are starting to get sick of this. People are watching reels because they want to consume video content, not because they wanna read your caption while they listen to like two seconds of audio loop forever.

Instead, what is in for reels in 2025 is creating your own original content, particular and original series that gets people invested and makes them want to keep following you to see the next episode. Again, we'll talk more about that in a minute. Okay, finally for carousels, what is out is, and I hate to inform you of this, but posting personal photo dumps with like no apparent purpose or reason.

Yeah, I know celebrities and like really big influencers do that. And that's kind of fine when it comes to sharing updates with your community, but like, it's not gonna help you grow. What is really in in 2025 for carousels is like structured purposeful collections of images that have some kind of story or format or like overall theme to them.

I'm not talking about like infographics or like text walls. I'm just talking about a curation of images that is like has some kind of reason behind it. And we're gonna talk more about options for that in a minute.

Hopefully this gives you a sense of some of the strategies that are really not that effective anymore. And a little bit of a teaser of the 2025 strategy that we're gonna dive into in more detail now. Okay, so we've skimmed the surface a bit on some Instagram updates and the various features, but now I wanna deep dive into the three essential components of any successful Instagram strategy in 2025 and really build out in detail what your strategy and your content calendar is gonna look like so that you can grow.

In my mind, there continue to be two major categories of reels that you could make, trendy and original reels. Though I feel like they've really shifted over the past year or so into slightly different styles and formats that are successful at least. If you've heard me talk about this before, then you'll know that the trendy reels are really visual based reels that rely on a trending audio.

So it's usually aesthetic B roll with some text on screen. These can still be really effective, but I think it's important that you use them in opportunities where you have a message that can be communicated pretty succinctly. I think if it gets too text heavy, then people are just gonna scroll past, especially because there's so much high quality original content on reels these days.

We'll talk about that in a second. Generally though, I think that if you come across a trending audio or some kind of trending format that really suits your particular brand and audience, it can be a great opportunity to really extend your reach and potentially even go viral. But in my opinion, trending content like this is always gonna be just that initial handshake where people start to get to know you on reels.

The place where you really convert viewers into audience members, into fans, is with the original content. Original content on reels has really evolved over the past six to 12 months really, and we're seeing more creators use this strategy and in more creative ways. In the past, I've talked about original reels as kind of like the YouTube-ification of reels, and it really is just that.

Like, original reels are just like a mini YouTube video. It can be a vlog, it could be a tutorial, it could be like a talking head strategy video like this, but I think the 2025 update to this strategy is really leaning into the format of a series. This is my challenge for you.

This year, I want you to create an original reels series that you can really become known for. It's like representative of your brand and what you offer your audience. There's a few creators that I think have done this really well in the past year.

My Lean's Mind is a great example. This might not be strictly defined as a series, but Sarah Snow's videos, it's very consistent cinematography, overall style, scripting, music, and she is like known for these videos, right? Phil McCollan also does a great version of this.

Some examples that you might try for yourself would be like 25 days of vegan recipes, 30 Things I Learned Before Turning 30, 12 Days of Mid-sized Outfit Ideas. Your first series doesn't have to last forever. In fact, I think it's better to start with something limited like that that has a countdown aspect.

And if it works well for you, you can always start a second one. The reason why this is so key as a content strategy is because for one, it gives you a structure to create within. It's so difficult to start from a blank slate.

This will give you a point of inspiration. It'll help you be more consistent. But it's also perfect as an Instagram growth strategy because it implicitly communicates to your audience that there's more to come from you.

Without having to say the obvious call to action of follow me for more content about blah, blah, blah. If you just say, this is day two of 25 days of vegan recipes, immediately people know if I follow this person, I will see more vegan recipe content and it will probably be pretty soon. This is why original series are like a growth machine because you're telling your audience, this is what I make and I'm gonna make more of it.

So, you know, follow me if you want that. These type of videos usually include talking to the camera or at the very least a voiceover. And that's also just much more of a real honest emotional connection with your viewer than just furo with text over top of it.

Trendy Reels and Original Reels both have their place in your strategy in 2024. What it comes down to is this, trendy reels are really meant for breadth. They help you reach a wide audience, but just kind of at a surface level.

Whereas original reels are designed for depth. The people that you connect with really connect with you because they hear your voice, they see you talking, they get some kind of value from you, whether that's education or just inspiration or vibes. Trendy Reels cast that net wide, they help you reach a lot of people, but original reels help you reel them in and make them fans.

Okay, so in terms of the frequency as we build out your content calendar, personally in the long term, I am gonna aim for posting two reels per week this year, one trendy and one original, but I think generally aiming for three to four per week, probably about the maximum that you're honestly gonna wanna do so that you don't burn yourself out. There's a bit more nuance to the posting frequency, but I'm gonna get into that later when I show you my full content calendar and a couple of options for how often you wanna post. So we're gonna dive into that in a little bit, but in the meantime, next, we need to talk about carousels.

Carousels are the second main component of any successful content strategy in 2025. And yes, I really still believe they are relevant and they're kind of helping creators grow, honestly more than they ever have before. For example, this was my top performing carousel of 2024, and it's actually up there in terms of views with some of my better reaching reels.

So yes, carousels have the potential to help you reach new people and convert them into followers. I also think this carousel is a great example of the type of carousel that works well in 2025. Like I was saying before, you don't wanna just do kind of a generic life update kind of photo dump.

Like, yes, we've all done those, but I feel like the results speak for themselves. Now, if you truly are a photographer, like if that is your main purpose with your account, I don't think there's anything wrong with just sharing your beautiful artistic photos. Like you don't have to put text over them, that kind of thing.

But if that is the case, then I think it can be helpful to have sort of a theme or some kind of story behind that collection of images. Helene Mu is a creator that I've been following for a while. You've probably seen her with these beautiful cotton candy skies in Norway and her like cute sweaters.

She does a great job of like just curating really beautiful images into carousels that get really good engagement. But there's usually some kind of theme behind it that makes it cohesive. So for example, my favorite places I stayed in 2024.

So if you really want your carousels to be solely imagery, think about doing some kind of theme like that. But if you're more of like an everyday average creator that's not like primarily a photographer, think about some kind of message, story, information that you could share and how you would do that in like a slideshow format. Years ago on Instagram, we used to see people doing primarily graphics, like literally just plain color background text on top.

And I feel like that, that's not the way to go now. Creating a carousel that is primarily imagery with just a little bit of text sprinkled in, I think is the perfect balance for engagement and converting people into followers. In terms of frequency, as we build out your content calendar, personally, I feel like one carousel per week would be like amazing.

I would love to hit that frequency, but for whatever reason, I find carousels like really difficult and time consuming to make. I way prefer creating reels. So realistically, I will probably post these like every other week or, you know, maybe once or twice a month.

But if you can do like one per week in the style of this carousel or something adjacent, like that will really show results for you. Now let's talk about the third component of your successful Instagram strategy, story. The biggest thing that I want to report to you about Instagram story strategy in 2025 is this.

Right now, by far, the most effective Instagram story strategy for getting high reach is waiting for your stories to fully expire and then posting a single frame. Don't post any more for the remaining 24 hours. Just let that single image do its thing.

If you are used to posting several frames in your story over the course of 24 hours, if you implement the single frame strategy, you'll probably see your views like quadruple. Okay, let me show you what I mean because I find this kind of crazy actually. A few months back when I was in Japan, I was posting probably like three to five story frames per day and you can see we were kind of averaging like 2,500 up to like, you know, maybe 4,000 views on a story.

Well, when I got home, I kind of started hearing people talk about the single frame story strategy thing. So I tried it out. And you can see these stories are hitting like 20,000 views.

For the record, if you're curious, I was doing some research on this and apparently the average Instagram story view rate is right around 7%. Though honestly, this is pretty hard to find data on. And the study that I found this from was actually from social media today and it was posted in 2018.

So clearly that is probably quite out of date right now. So for the sake of research, if you want to share about how many story views you get and how many followers you have, or just that represented as a percentage in the comments, I would love to know. Maybe we can get a more accurate sense of where things are at in 2025.

But the point is if we're going off the 7% rule with my current follower size, that would be about like 12,000 people as the expected number. So in that case, you can see how the multi-story post really underperforms quite a bit. Whereas the single frame like really outperforms that expected percentage anyway.

I did a post on threads talking about why I think this is happening. So I'll link that in the description if you want to like read my theories about that. But the point is it's like very obviously like observable.

With that being said, I don't think that just because we know that posting a single frame is gonna really help you boost your reach, that it's necessarily the most effective strategy and that you want to use it all the time. Because yes, posting just one single image may get me like 20,000 views. But that's 20,000 people who just spent like two seconds looking at that picture.

Whereas if I post three to five frames and maybe only reach 4,000 people, that's 4,000 people who gave me maybe like one or two minutes out of their day actually tapping through and like consuming all of that content. So again, it's kind of a question of quantity and quality. I really feel like the single frame story versus the multi frame story is similar to trendy reels versus original reels.

Single frame stories like trendy reels are great for read. They help you reach a wide audience, but you don't get as deep of a connection because people spend less time with you and feel less connected to you as compared to a multi frame Instagram story or an original reel. Yeah, you may reach less people, but you'll be doing it for a longer period of time and in a way that is more like real and authentic.

But that's where again, I recommend that you balance this. It can be tempting to just post single frame stories all the times that you can see those high view count numbers, but it actually might be most effective to do say, two stories per week, just a single frame, and then maybe like one day per week, you post a multi frame story. That way you're balancing the breadth of reaching a really wide audience and the depth of connecting more intimately with your community.

All right, it's time to reveal my content calendar for January so you can see exactly what this strategy looks like in practice. But here's the deal. My specific content calendar for January is actually gonna look quite different from many other months throughout 2025.

And that's because my Instagram strategy has kind of three different modes. We've got the comeback mode, the maintenance mode, and resting. This is my theory about Instagram growth for content creators.

You can't be in viral growth mode just constantly. You need periods of one, nurturing your existing audience, not just always trying to get new people. And two, you need time off.

That's just the way it is. Like it's very hard to post consistently forever and ever. Like we need to take breaks.

In the past, I would avoid taking breaks because I was really afraid of how it would impact my views. But the truth is every time I have taken a break, when I've come back, yes, there's been a slow period where my views aren't as high as what I would like them to be. But eventually I'll post a banger reel that'll go viral and it'll kind of like revive my account again and I'll bring things back to normal.

And while yes, I imagine my views would be better if I would have just kept posting that entire time, it's just not always feasible to do that. I think it's better to build breaks into your strategy and then understanding that, knowing that there's gonna be some time periods where you're making a comeback and you maybe need to post a little bit more often than you would just regularly. So throughout the year, we'll cycle through maintenance mode, which is basically posting on a regular schedule.

I'll show you what that content calendar looks like, followed by periods of rest where you take a break, maybe you don't post at all or maybe you just kind of post when you feel inspired to. Following the rest, we move into comeback mode, where you're posting at a higher frequency and focusing more on trending content for higher reach. Following about a month of comeback mode, then you shift back into maintenance mode and continue that for as long as you need until you wanna take a break.

So January happens to be a comeback mode month for me. I took some time off in December, obviously for the holidays and things were just busy. So that's why January is gonna be a bit more of a full content calendar than what I would advise you to do for your maintenance mode.

So with that in mind, this is my Instagram content calendar for January of 2025. You can see that we're looking at like four to five reels per week. You can kind of see the spread of like trendy versus original content.

Like I'm definitely focusing heavier on trendy content, specifically trendy content that's kind of based on some of my banger reels from 2024. So I went back and I looked at like what my highest viewed videos were from all of 2024. And a lot of these are like replicas or like the updated version of them.

So I'm basing this off of content that I know has performed well in the past. Plus some original content because like, I don't want my feet to be just completely like B-roll. And I've got just a couple partnerships scheduled as well.

This isn't reflected on my content calendar, but I'm planning to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Those will be the days where I post mostly single frame Instagram stories. I'm going to shift back into some days being like multi-frame stories as we get towards the end of the month, but just really focusing on being consistent with my like high reaching stories as part of my comeback strategy.

Now February is going to look a little bit different because I plan to shift back into my maintenance mode strategy, which is going to include, like I mentioned before, two reels per week. One of them, a trendy format reel, and one of them original. I'm kind of working on two different original series for reels.

One of them is a continuation of my editing 101 series, where I teach basic editing principles to help you make better videos. And the second one is a new series that I've been thinking about that I think I'm going to call like the honest influencer, where I tackle topics that a lot of professional content creators kind of avoid talking about. So I'll probably alternate those one week to the next, and then each week do a trendy video as well.

I like to do one carousel per week. That would be like my ideal scenario, but realistically it'll probably be a carousel every other week. And finally, like I said before, my story strategy is going to be Monday and Friday, posting a single frame story.

And then on Wednesday, I'll post like two to three frames. Understanding that the Wednesday story is more geared towards my kind of more tight knit, like sort of close audience. And Monday and Friday is being more focused on wider reach.

The important thing to know about Instagram in 2025 is that it's not just a platform to go viral and get lots of views on your reels. If you plan your strategy correctly, it can be a platform where yes, you go viral, but you also grow a community that deeply cares about you and the content that you share. Constantly chasing virality is only going to get you a fickle audience that stops caring once your videos become less flashy, and you'll probably burn out in the pursuit of it.

Okay, so after watching this video, I want you to create a maintenance mode strategy that works for you and your goals. You can copy the one that I came up with, or at least start with that. And then modifying that, you can create your comeback strategy so that you're ready to alternate between the two and rest periods as you need throughout the year.

Just going to the year, honestly, I recommend planning at least two different rest breaks of maybe somewhere between two weeks up to a month, however long you need, because it is just way too intimidating to start up a content calendar, like even your maintenance mode one, and tell yourself, well, I'm just gonna do this forever and ever and never stop. It's okay to take breaks. You can even plan them now.

Personally, I'm planning on doing my comeback strategy in January, maintenance mode for February, March, maybe even April, and then maybe a bit of a rest in like May or June. And then I'll cycle through it at about that pace moving forward. It's okay to see fluctuation in your metrics.

That's naturally gonna happen. Try not to feel discouraged. There's a season for all of these different strategies, and part of growing as a content creator is getting to know what works for you, how often you need to rest, and what kind of maintenance mode works for you in your life.

The balance of all of these things is essential to longevity as a content creator. So that's my Instagram strategy for 2025 exposed. Make sure you give me a follow over on Instagram so you can see all of the content that showed up in my little calendar preview there once it gets posted.

And let me know in the comments if there's any other Instagram strategy topics or advice that you'd like to see from me this year. If you're thinking of starting a YouTube channel in 2025, I already got just the video for you, so make sure you watch that next. And as always, I hope that you're having adventures and following your dreams, and I'll catch you in the next video.

Bye.