ICYMI: Repost, Maps... Which Instagram updates do you really need?!

A full list of Instagram's Summer 2025 updates

Greetings to you from San Francisco’s AEJMC 2025 Conference — whether you’re at home, in the office, at Creator Economy Live East in NYC and or headed to Chicago’s Creator Tech Week!

Last week I promised you an interview with the USTA about the US Open’s new tennis-themed reality series — there was a last-minute delay. But, fear not tenniscore-meets-marketing fans, it is coming. The US Open says it didn’t anticipate the press and audience attention and they decided to expand the scope of the project.

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⏰ 1-SECOND SUMMARY

• Special Report: A recap of Instagram’s Summer 2025 updates

  • Instagram launches “Repost” of public Reels and Feed posts

  • Instagram adds “like” insights for Reels and Carousels

  • Instagram adds demographic insights on individual posts

  • Instagram shows you which post is driving new followers

  • Instagram rolls out a problematic Maps feature

  • You get the idea, so many updates…

  • Plus reactions to the updates from an all-star crew of social pros: Nathan Jun Poekert, Sophie Miller, Zack Waldman, Katy Stankevitz, Heston Roberts, Lucas O’Keefe and Francesca Murray!

  • And 5 key takeaways to focus on in the back half of 2025

• YouTube tests a new collaboration feature

• Snapchat has seen a rise in content sharing

• Gen Z now makes up more than 50% of Pinterest’s audience

• CEO’s posting on LinkedIn has increased by 52% in the past 2 years

• Report: The top search motivation for Gen Z and Millennials is “to explore my personal interests”

• Report: Gen Alpha drives almost half of household spending

• Love stories are the theme of this summer’s creator-brand partnerships

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💻 ROADMAP

📲 Meta Updates

Instagram is on fire, rolling out what feels like non-stop updates. Blink and you might have missed an announcement.

To help you stay ahead, I’ve rounded up Instagram’s new features and insights from August, plus some summer releases you might’ve already forgotten.

I also tapped some of the smartest creators and marketers I know to get their POVs — and pulled together 5 key takeaways to focus on in the back half of 2025:

New August Features

Reposts

• You can now repost public reels and feed posts

• There will be a “reposts” tab on your profile (similar to Threads)

• Public accounts have the option to turn off reposts

Instagram Map

• You can now opt into sharing your last active location with friends

• Options to share are friends (followers you follow back), Close Friends, selected friends, or no one

• You can see content friends and creators are posting from tagged locations

*Creators, please treat this one with caution. Even if you don’t opt in to location sharing but you tag a business or location in your Stories or Feed posts, that content will get pulled into the map tagged to the location. IMO, this product could have been a fun roll-out but needs some fixes for everyone’s safety.

Friends Tab

• A new tab in Reels that lets you see public content your friends have engaged with

• Controls are coming for what’s shown in the tab, including controls for hiding your own likes and comments on Reels

• You can start conversations using the reply bar with your friends and mutuals

New August Insights

• Instagram is adding new insights for Reels and Carousels that show:

→ When people liked your Reel

→ When people liked your Carousel

• You’ll be able to see demographics on an individual post level (gender, country and age)

• You’ll see the content that’s most effective at driving new followers to your account

• And instead of Accounts Reached, you’ll see Viewers with the number of accounts that have viewed your content

Earlier this summer:

1. Instagram labeled the six surfaces for interacting with audiences and their value:

• Channels and Lives (for loyal fans)

• Stories, Photo Posts and Carousels (to engage followers)

• Reels and Carousels (reach new audiences)

2. Instagram let Google crawl and index your public posts, including Reels, Carousels, and captions, making them searchable on Google

3. “Recaps” launched as a new recurring, personalized digest in your Professional Dashboard that gives you added insights on your content and follower habits, including:

• Total views

• Views month over month

• Your most popular post

• When your followers are most active

• Other content that’s popular with your followers

4. “Celebrations” launched as an in-app notification received when you hit significant milestones.

5. Instagram limited its live streams to users who have a public account with 1,000 followers or more.

6. Instagram made Trial Reels available to everyone and then established new criteria for getting the Trial Reels feature: accounts must be set to Public and have at least 1,000 followers.

Creators and Marketers React

I asked some of the most plugged-in creators and social marketers to share their favorite Instagram update from Summer 2025 — and the features or insights they’re still hoping for next:

💡 What’s your favorite recent update and why?

“I’m a huge fan of the multi-surface infographic Instagram recently released. From a brand strategy perspective, it underscores the importance of thinking about what audience you're ultimately interested in reaching on the front-end of the content creation process. Different objectives for different spaces. Getting transparency and clarity from the platform that messaging delivered as images has a greater likelihood to be viewed by followers reinforced our decision to format our public media defunding-related posts into mini-narrative graphics packages knowing that educating and mobilizing our core viewers and listeners was a top priority”

- Zack Waldman, Sr. Social Media Strategist at Boston public media organization GBH

“I’m excited to test the impact of Instagram’s new “reposting” feature. Instagram has been encouraging brands to create shareable content for years, and this feature feels like them underlining the fact that your content should be something people will want to share with (and now literally repost to) their friends”

- Katy Stankevitz, Social Media Manager at Anthropologie

“In past years I feel like Instagram have just thrown stuff our way hoping something sticks but we've been given the goods recently! I'm a carousel girlie through and through, it's grown my Instagram audience to 130,000+ and is what my brand is known for so the new insights showing when people liked your Carousel is so exciting to me - to be able to pinpoint when someone made that choice and leverage that in my future content really excites me!”

- Sophie Miller, Founder of Pretty Little Marketer

“Reposts is my favorite! It’s something I’ve actually been hoping Instagram would add for a long time. I think some people are too shy to repost certain content directly to their stories, so I love that there’s now a way for our audiences to support our work and amplify it more easily. I’m also excited to use it to support creators I follow and enjoy!”

- Francesca Murray, Founder One Girl One World

“Instagram letting Google finally crawl their platform to index IG profile pages, posts and more. This is a major step of "YouTubification" in which the content we create and share on Instagram (Reels, carousels, single images) can have longer shelf-life due to discovery beyond the native platform, on the world's largest search engine, days, weeks and years after it's been published”

- Heston M. Roberts, Founder of Social Varsity

“As a creator, I love reposts. It’s a great method to get introduced to new creators and the Instagram algo is slowly getting more sensual like the TikTok FYP. As a marketer, reposts is frustrating because it shifts algo priorities for the third time in the past year. No other marketing channel has to deal with as many product changes than social media”

- Nathan Jun Poekert, CMO Advisor and Brand Marketing Consultant

“Post specific insights are the feature that excites me the most. We can finally see when someone like our carousel post (slide by slide) or at what point people interacted with our Reel. For testing out hooks and audience retention (two massive focuses of content creators at the moment) this is huge!”

- Lucas O’Keefe, Content Creator

💡 What’s still on your Instagram wishlist?

“I was happy to see Instagram add the “When people liked your carousel” feature, although I’d rather be able to see how many people saw each frame. I’m eager for insights that would share how far in carousels our audience is swiping and which types of content without carousels causes them to stop swiping and move on”

- Katy Stankevitz, Social Media Manager at Anthropologie

“I wish the chronological "following feed" could be toggled on permanently from our account settings. Instagram brought back the old chronological feed a few years ago (rather than just having the algorithmic feed). However, it's hard to find! You have to go to the Instagram feed, tap the instagram logo in the upper left corner, and then select "Following" to see the real time posts from your community. I'd like the option to make this the default”

- Lucas O’Keefe, Content Creator

“I’d love to see playlists so we can organize content into categories. As a creator who’s expanded into multiple niches, it would be great if audiences could get exactly the type of content they’re looking for from me in one space without having to scroll through my entire feed”

- Francesca Murray, Founder One Girl One World

“I’d love for 10 minute videos on IG without being forced to use their in app edit app. I think it could make IG a new podcast destination and take back chunk of the screen share they lost to YouTube”

- Nathan Jun Poekert, CMO Advisor and Brand Marketing Consultant

“I love IG Lives and think it's the most underrated feature on Instagram. I think Instagram needs to do a lot to get it back into good graces with the user-base but a major aspect of that would be to make IG Lives "Picture-In-Picture (PIP)". The idea of watching/listening to an Instagram livestream in a small window on the screen while DMing, scrolling and more would be great!”

- Heston M. Roberts, Founder of Social Varsity

“I’ve long wanted to see a more user-friendly on-platform captioning feature from Instagram. Particularly being in public media, making our content as accessible as possible to the widest spectrum of audience is always top of mind. And while I think Edits has made up some ground in that area, I still find the process of correcting auto-generated caption inaccuracies to be super clunky, labor intensive, and, at times, incredibly frustrating. I’d also love to know how much, if at all, the algorithm suppresses content where captions are burned-in elsewhere”

-Zack Waldman, Sr. Social Media Strategist at Boston public media organization GBH

“I'm cheating, I have two: A/B testing for posts to see which caption or timing performs better (Trial Reels but better), and I really miss guides so a feature that auto-categorize your posts into albums (travel, food, friends, etc.) using AI would be pretty fun!”

- Sophie Miller, Founder of Pretty Little Marketer

Instagram, are you listening?!

Where do you go from here on Instagram?

1. Use all the Meta surfaces: Instagram is continuing to invest heavily in making Edits — it’s new video editing app — a success. During a recent AMA, Adam Mosseri confirmed that using Edits does help “a little bit with reach.”

Mosseri also recently named a new head of Threads, Meta executive Connor Hayes, because the platform needed a “dedicated app lead who can focus all of their time on helping Threads move forward.” So you can expect to see updates accelerate there.

2. Test different content formats: Yes, Reels dominate reach and account for nearly 50% of time spent on Instagram. But don’t sleep on Carousels — they actually generate 12% more engagement than Reels and a whopping 114% more than static image posts. Smart creators will experiment across formats, and not just lean on short-form video.

3. Instagram is building for creators (and creator-led content): Mosseri previously said power is shifting “from institutions to individuals” — with athletes becoming more relevant than teams and journalists outshining legacy media organizations. Drafts was just one new initiative announced as a symbol of Meta’s investment in creators. Expect to see updates continue to be tailored mainly to creators.

It is worth noting that the creators seeing the greatest support tend to be emerging talent who are most relevant with young people.

4. Optimize for sharing: Meta shared with me that DMs on Instagram are up 15% year-over-year — a big signal that private sharing is driving discovery. With the introduction of Reposts this week, it seems public sharing is equally important. Want more reach? Make content people want to send or share with friends.

Instagram previously revealed that the 5 categories of content that people are most likely to share are Gift, Mirror, Idea, Gossip, and Mood content. (I gave ICYMI member a shareable content breakdown last year)

5. The AI of it all: Obviously, Meta is investing heavily in AI and superintelligence. In my opinion, the biggest gains will be in productivity (eg. video editing) and insights — but not content generation.

My favorite take on this topic comes from a conversation I had earlier this year with Fixated’s Chief Business Officer, Phil Ranta: “AI reminds me of reality TV in the early 2000’s. Everyone thought scripted TV was going to die because reality TV was so much cheaper and popular. But it just became another genre. And AI content will be a genre, as will human-created content.”

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📲 YouTube Updates

• YouTube is testing a new collaboration feature. Adding a collaborator to your video allows the content to be recommended to each others’ audiences.

📲 Snapchat Updates

• Snapchat published a new report with insights on reaching Gen Z: A misunderstood generation: How to build better brands with Gen Z. For example, this generation cares less about what brands sell and more about what they stand for.

• During an earnings call, Evan Spiegel told investors the company’s seen a rise in content sharing. Products that encourage Snapchat users to share more content with each other will be an area of focus later this year.

📲 LinkedIn Updates

• LinkedIn released some data around B2B marketing activity on the platform, pointing out that posting on LinkedIn is up 41% in the past three years and CEO posting has increased by 52% in the past two years.

📲 Pinterest Updates

• Gen Z now makes up more than 50% of Pinterest’s 578 million users, the company revealed in their Q2 earnings this week.

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🧮 DATA DROP

There’s a generational divide when it comes to how and where people search.

Gen X and Boomers prioritize efficiency and view search as a question and answer system. Gen Z and Millennials see it as a more dynamic experience and, Gen Z especially, prioritize search on social and video platforms.

• The top search motivation for Gen X and Boomers: “to find specific information”

• The top search motivation for Gen Z and Millennials: “to explore my personal interests”

- Insights from WARC Advisory’s report in partnership with TikTok, The Search Before Search: How social and video have changed the way we seek, find and buy — based on on a survey of 1,016 US adults.

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👀 TREND IN THE MAKING

Is love the way to an audience’s heart — regardless of the platform?

Creator Serena Kerrigan just partnered with Neutrogena to write a series of short love stories on Wattpad to help promote a Vitamin C serum.

• Amelia Dimoldenberg hosted a “Chuckmates” dating show on YouTube as part of a Converse campaign

• l’Oreal is using creator Ava Rae and a summer love stories spin to promote its mascara on TikTok

• Hinge famously joined Substack with an anthology of love stories penned by 5 well-known writers

• The US Open is filming an unscripted dating series on-site at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center that will play out on their YouTube channel

serenakerrigan

A post shared by @serenakerrigan

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👀 ICYMI: JUST THE HEADLINES

• Instagram Maps feature raises privacy concerns among some users - NBCNews

• Patreon and Kajabi have now helped creators earn a combined $20 Billion - Inc

• Amazon wants podcast sponsorship dollars, and expects that celebrity- and creator-led programs will pay off - Tube Filter

• Looking back on 25 years of marketing - Marketing Brew

• Search or social? Influencer marketing finds itself in the middle - Digiday

• There is no standard creator rate set in the industry right now - Digiday

• ‘Hook up?’ College kids schedule literally everything on Google Calendar - WSJ

• Gen Alpha drives almost half of household spending: “Their economic influence is enormous" - Axios

• 5 influencer marketing predictions for the second half of 2025 - AdAge

Thanks for reading… I never know what to say at the end. Please consider this today’s awkward goodbye 👋🏼 🤓