📊 Threads’ 5 new insights and what to change

Welcome back to TWISM!

Should you be posting on Threads at all? Or is it the account you post to and never check?

On Sep 8, Threads rebuilt Insights, its built-in analytics. Connor Hayes, head of Threads, said the old panel "told you what happened but not why" (Connor Hayes on Threads). The new one is built to show what drove each post's results.

Threads also just passed 500M monthly users in June. Zuckerberg says it's "either bigger than X at this point" or very soon about to be (Social Media Today).

One of the new numbers answers that in about 10 minutes. 👇

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Last call for the social media reality check.

This is the final push for the State of Social Report 2026.

We still want the real story: what's working, what's breaking, what nobody says out loud. 8 anonymous minutes gets your voice into the report, plus a shot at a $250 gift card.

After this, the survey closes for good.

Take the Survey →

🆕 What changed: 5 new numbers in Insights

It's rolling out now, so not every account has it yet. If yours has updated, open Insights from the icon at the top left of your profile in the app (Threads).

Here's what Threads added (Engadget):

• Summary — an AI-written paragraph on each post and on your month, like "This post got about 8 times more views than your recent posts, and reach was higher too. Fewer viewers liked it compared to your recent posts."

• Benchmarks — views, viewers, Likes and reposts each get a "higher," "typical" or "lower" tag against your recent posts

• Reach split — how much of each post's reach came from followers vs. people who don't follow you yet

• Communities — which Communities sent a post its views, and which ones your viewers and your followers belong to

• Timing — your best days and times to post, plus your audience's age and gender

The reach split is the one I'd open first.

—

🔎 The number I'd check first: how much of your reach is non-followers

For most accounts, most views seem to come from Threads recommending the post to people who don't follow you, even if you have a lot of followers.

Meta's own description backs that up. The main feed is "composed of content from people you follow and recommended content" (Meta Transparency Center). It ranks posts by how likely you are to like one, reply to it or open the profile. Eligible posts "can be recommended to people on Instagram and Facebook," which pushes your reach outside the app (Meta Newsroom).

So a post with a high non-follower share is probably a post the recommendation system picked up. That's probably the clearest sign Threads gives you that a post worked.

There's no published number for what a "good" share looks like, so your own posts are the benchmark. Here's how I'd read it:

• Compare — open your last 10-20 posts and note which ones have the highest non-follower share

• Pattern — look at what those posts have in common, like the topic tag, the Community they landed in, or a reply thread that kept going

• Repeat — post more of that and tag the topic. (Meta's own data says tagged posts generally get more views.) Then post it in the Community that showed up in your summary

If Communities are new to you, they're the public topic spaces Threads opened last October, like NBA Threads and Book Threads. You join one by searching its name or tapping the community tag on a post (Meta).

One caveat before you chase a high non-follower share: In Nov 2024, Mosseri said Threads was "rebalancing ranking to prioritize content from people you follow." He called it "a work in progress" (Mosseri on Threads). So treat the split as a signal that can shift under you, and re-check it every month.

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🔗 The metric Meta deleted: link clicks

In May 2025, Threads added link-click stats to Insights (TechCrunch). Meta said at the time it wanted to help you grow your reach "even outside of Threads."

Today the stat is gone. Engadget reports it was removed sometime before this redesign, and a Meta spokesperson would only say they're "exploring" the feature. Engadget's take is that as Threads leans into Communities, Meta is "once again de-emphasizing off-platform content."

The link history makes the decision less surprising. Chartbeat, which tracks traffic for major news publishers, measured Threads at "less than one tenth of a percent" of referral traffic. Mosseri has said, "we don't place much value on" links (Engadget, July 2025). His reason: "people don't Like and comment on links much."

The fix: UTM-tag every link you post (utm_source=threads) and read the clicks in GA4 or your link shortener tool.

The honest read: don't build a Threads plan around link traffic. Threads seems to reward posts that keep people on Threads.

—

🤔 Does Threads deserve a slot in your week?

If your Insights has updated, this takes about 10 minutes:

• Monthly summary — is the views trend up, flat or down?

• Reach split — are non-followers finding you at all?

• Communities — did any show up, and are you in them?

If all three come back weak, there's a cheap test before you quit. Zuckerberg says he posts the same things on Threads and X. Cross-post what you already make for 3-4 weeks, then read the monthly summary.

The win? Threads now shows you exactly how much of your reach comes from people who don't follow you yet. That's the number I'd want on every post.

☝️ The one-sentence version

Non-follower share tells you whether Threads is working for you. So open Insights, find the posts where non-followers made up most of the reach, make more of those, and UTM-tag every link you post.

Hit reply and tell me: what share of your Threads reach comes from non-followers?

—

📚 Sources

• Connor Hayes on Threads — Insights update announcement, Sep 8, 2026

• Social Media Today — Threads might be bigger than X, says Zuckerberg

• Threads — Where to find Insights in the app and on web, July 2025

• Engadget — Threads is overhauling its in-app analytics with more details, except for link clicks

• Meta Transparency Center — Threads feed AI system

• Meta Newsroom — New Threads features for a more personalized experience you control

• Meta Newsroom — Introducing Threads Communities: find your people

• Adam Mosseri on Threads — Rebalancing ranking toward people you follow, Nov 2024

• TechCrunch — Threads now lets creators add up to 5 links to profiles, track clicks

• Engadget — Threads users still barely click links

• Threads — Insights revamp announcement, Sep 8, 2026

• Meta Newsroom — Meta launching new features for 500 million monthly Threads users

• Social Media Today — Threads updates profile analytics display

That's all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from "This Week in Social Media"

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🔁 Facebook paid one creator $3,500 for one post — here's his 4-step formula and the fine print

Welcome back to TWISM!

How much has Facebook paid you for everything you've posted this year?

A creator named Jeff Rose says Facebook paid him over $3,500 for ONE post. Rose is a certified financial planner with ~455k Facebook followers, and he published a post he says reached 44M views. Then he made a YouTube video breaking down exactly how he did it, step by step (see the video here).

Today, Meta's creator program pays for engagement on photos, memes, and text posts, the same way it pays for video.

Rose's formula is easy to copy. But Meta is also demonetizing accounts that repost other people's content. So whether you recreate a post or just re-upload it decides whether you get paid or get flagged. 👇

Together with Sked Social

Is it just your social team… or is everyone dealing with this?

You know what's happening inside your social team. But what about everyone else?

We're building the State of Social Report 2026 to find out how social teams are actually working right now. What's delivering, what's eating up time, where budgets are going, and which challenges are showing up everywhere.

Give us 8 anonymous minutes, and we'll turn the answers into a report you can use to see how your experience stacks up against the rest of the industry.

And because 8 minutes is still 8 minutes, you'll also have a chance to win a $250 gift card.

Take the Survey →

💵 The $3,500 post: what happened

Rose says he found the idea in the back catalog of a 4.4M-fan page: a post with 253k Likes and 100k+ shares. He rebuilt it as his own and posted it on Jun 25.

What it did: Rose shows the post reaching 44M views and ~500k interactions. His version pulled 113k engagement, 7k comments, and 87k shares, which he says makes it his most-shared post ever.

What Facebook paid: over $3,500 for that one post, as shown in his video.

How the money works: Facebook Content Monetization is one program that pays creators a share of ad revenue for reels, videos, photos, text posts, and stories, based on engagement, and it's invite-only for now (Facebook for Creators). Until recently, the payout path on Facebook ran through video. Today, a meme or a text post can earn too.

If a payout screenshot in his own video isn't enough proof for you, Niche Pursuits separately profiled Rose's whole Facebook monetization run (Niche Pursuits).

—

🧰 The formula: 4 steps

Here's what Rose says he does:

• Train your feed: Like and save every high-engagement post in your niche. The algorithm serves you more of them, and your feed turns into an idea mine.

• Research the winners: when a post pops, pull up that page's proven top posts. Rose used Post Planner's content discovery tool to sort any page's posts by Likes or shares going back 3 years, instead of scrolling by hand.

• Recreate, never repost: he had ChatGPT rewrite the caption in his own voice and regenerate the image to fit his brand (the source image showed two women… his shows two men). His own warning: downloading and re-uploading someone's post is copyright infringement.

• Post and watch the engagement: the payout follows Likes, comments, and shares. The bar for every post is "would my audience actually share this."

Together with Post Planner

Post what's already going viral in your niche today — even with zero ideas and no designer.

The hard part of posting isn't posting. It's knowing what to post.

Post Planner shows you the top posts in your niche, rated by how viral they went. Pick a winner, describe your own take, and AI turns it into an original image in seconds. Then schedule it to every network without leaving the app.

AI images are now on every plan, Free included.

No ideas needed, no designer needed.

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⚠️ 4 catches before you try this

• ⚠️ No invite, no payout: Meta says it's sending invitations to millions of creators this year and plans open enrollment "in the near future." Until yours lands, fill out the interest form: Professional dashboard → Monetization → Content Monetization.

• 🛑 Meta is demonetizing copycats: the unoriginal-content push started in Jul 2025 (500k accounts actioned in half a year), and automated enforcement switched on in Mar 2026. Re-uploading someone's post, adding a border or caption, or making minor edits can all get demonetized. It has hit legitimate publishers, and Meta's own Oversight Board criticized the enforcement's transparency in Jun 2026 (Interesting Engineering). A new image plus your own words can be defended as original. A re-upload with a fresh caption probably gets flagged.

• 📉 No rate card: Meta doesn't publish what it pays per view or per engagement. $3,500 is one creator's result on one outlier post, and your numbers will differ.

• 🤷 Engagement or nothing: a recreated post nobody shares earns $0, invite or no invite.

The win? The interest form takes a couple of minutes, and every step in Rose's formula (training your feed, researching proven posts, rebuilding them in your own voice) seems to build engagement whether or not Facebook is paying you yet.

—

☝️ The one-sentence version

Find a proven post in your niche, rebuild it with your own caption and your own image, and Facebook can pay you for the engagement — but only once you're invited into Content Monetization, so fill out the interest form now and never re-upload someone else's post.

Hit reply and tell me: would you run Rose's formula on your page?

—

📚 Sources

• YouTube — Steal My $3,500 Facebook Post Formula

• Facebook for Creators — Facebook Content Monetization

• Interesting Engineering — Meta's enforcement system is demonetizing legitimate publishers

• Niche Pursuits — How Jeff Rose monetized his Facebook page

That's all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from "This Week in Social Media"

Disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links that pay us commissions.

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🗳️ TikTok comments can now be polls, voice notes, and 9-photo carousels — here's what to post in them

Welcome back to TWISM!

Your comment section is for more than just collecting 🔥 emojis.

TikTok just gave it a job. On Sep 3, TikTok announced 4 new comment formats: voice comments, comment polls, photo carousel comments, and Live Photo comments (TikTok Newsroom).

TikTok says over 1.7B comments get posted every day. Until last week, the most a brand could drop into those comments was text and a single photo. Now it can be a poll, 9 photos, or 60 seconds of a real voice.

These formats are HOT this month. Here's how to use them while they still stop the scroll, and the 4 catches that come with them. 👇

Together with Post Planner

Post what's already going viral in your niche today — even with zero ideas and no designer.

The hard part of posting isn't posting. It's knowing what to post.

Post Planner shows you the top posts in your niche, rated by how viral they went. Pick a winner, describe your own take, and AI turns it into an original image in seconds. Then schedule it to every network without leaving the app.

AI images are now on every plan, Free included.

No ideas needed, no designer needed.

🇺🇸 Labor Day deal: get 25% off your first payment on any monthly or annual plan with code LABOR25 — ends Sep 13.

Grab 25% off + see what's viral →

🆕 What launched: 4 formats, 4 different rollouts

• Voice comments: record up to 60 seconds with the mic icon, transcript included. 18+ only, rolling out over the next month.

• Comment polls: up to 5 options on your own videos, results update live. Available globally now.

• Photo carousels: up to 9 photos in one comment, up from 1. Rolling out over the next month.

• Live Photos: camera-roll Live Photos with a short burst of motion. Available now.

So 2 of the 4 work today, and the other 2 will show up on your account in the next few weeks. TikTok moderates the new formats like any other content, with speech-to-text plus human review (TechCrunch).

—

📈 Comments feed a ranking signal TikTok says it counts

TikTok's own recommendation documentation lists comments among the user interactions that shape the For You ranking (TikTok). So a format built to produce more comment activity is a format built to feed a signal TikTok says it uses.

Polls do this on your own video. A viewer who votes has interacted with your post, and the live results give them a reason to stay in the comment section and come back to check the score.

TikTok's own framing in the launch post is that "the comment section isn't just a place to react — it's where a video's story keeps going," and that photo comments are "one of the most loved ways people express themselves on TikTok."

Expanding comments adds posting volume that strengthens TikTok as a search engine, and voice comments could spawn the viral audio soundbites TikTok trends run on (Tubefilter).

Comments count toward ranking, polls hold people on your post, and a comment on a viral video in your niche puts you in front of way more people than your own posts do.

Time to take action: a comment poll feels new this month. By November, expect every account to have run one and viewers to scroll past them the way they scroll past "link in bio." That gap is why you should start this week.

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Nobody asks social media managers what's actually happening.

We're changing that. The State of Social Report 2026 is the industry's biggest snapshot of what social teams are really dealing with.

8 anonymous minutes, and you'll get the full report back. Plus a shot at a $250 gift card.

Your feed can wait.

Take the Survey →

🛠️ 4 plays to run this week

• Poll your next decision: next product drop, next tutorial topic, this-or-that on a design. Announce the winner in a follow-up video — a second post built into the first.

• Answer with a carousel: turn your most-asked comment questions into a 9-photo mini FAQ, posted right under the question.

• Reply big on big videos: drop a photo or voice reply where your audience already hangs out. Add a real answer, not a product dump (spam gets treated like spam).

• Voice for personality: 60 seconds of a real human voice is the cheapest brand-voice play on TikTok right now. Check whether your account has it first.

⚠️ The catches

• Rollout: staggered — you may have 2 formats today and the rest in 3 weeks.

• Age gate: voice comments are 18+ only, on both the recording and the account.

• Moderation: richer comments mean more spam in your own section. Keep someone watching it.

• Weak videos: a poll under a post with 40 views is a poll with 3 votes.

—

☝️ The one-sentence version

TikTok says comments count toward For You ranking, and it just handed brands 4 richer ways to post there, so run a poll on your next video, answer your most common comment questions with a 9-photo carousel, and do it this month while the formats are still new enough to get noticed.

Hit reply and tell me: which of the 4 formats would you actually use?

—

📚 Sources

• TikTok Newsroom — Say More in the Comments

• TechCrunch — TikTok comments are getting more interactive with voice comments, polls, and more

• TikTok — Introduction to the recommendation system

• Tubefilter — TikTok adds polls, photo carousels, and Live Photo comments

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”

Disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links that pay us commissions.

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📦 YouTube just became an Amazon storefront — here's who qualifies and how to turn it on

Welcome back to TWISM!

How many "I use this product" moments are in your videos right now, earning you nothing?

YouTube just decided to pay you for that. On Aug 27, YouTube announced a partnership with Amazon that lets eligible US creators tag Amazon products in their videos and earn a commission when viewers buy, without the viewer ever leaving YouTube (YouTube Blog).

The part that matters for most of you: product tagging like this used to sit behind a 10,000-subscriber wall. Today, the bar is 500.

It’s about to get a lot easier to make real money from your product mentions, but the fine print has 4 catches. 👇

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🛒 What launched: Amazon tags in Shorts, long-form, and livestreams

Creators can now tag Amazon products in Shorts, long-form videos, and livestreams, and viewers check out directly inside YouTube.

The commission is Amazon's standard affiliate cut, reportedly averaging 2-4% of the sale price, and it gets paid out bundled with your AdSense money.

For scale, over 1M creators have signed up for YouTube Shopping, and Shopping sales volume grew 13x from Q1 2024 to Q1 2026. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says the platform is "focused on" becoming a "premier shopping destination" (Tubefilter).

Where the money shows up: YouTube Studio shows your overall daily earnings, with no breakdown by product or by video. If a viewer returns the item, the commission comes out of your next payout. Tags are visible worldwide, but viewers outside the US get routed to Amazon US or matched to a local merchant (TechCrunch).

—

✅ Who qualifies: 500 subscribers, a US address, and an Amazon account

Until March, you needed 10k subs to join YouTube's Shopping affiliate program. In March 2026, YouTube dropped that rule, so now you just need to be in the YouTube Partner Program, which requires 500 subscribers and 3k long-form watch hours or 3M Shorts views (PPC Land).

Here's what you need to be eligible:

• YouTube Partner Program: you have to be in it, and 500 subs gets you the expanded tier (plus some recent uploads and watch time)

• YouTube Shopping affiliate program: you have to be enrolled

• Amazon account: an active Amazon Influencer Program or Amazon Associates account, linked to your channel

• Location: US only for the Amazon piece

• Excluded: music channels, Official Artist Channels, and Made-for-Kids channels

• One channel: each Amazon account links to exactly 1 YouTube channel

⚠️ Amazon approves you by application. So getting approved for Influencer or Associates is its own step.

—

🔗 How to set it up: link Amazon first, then tag in Studio

Once you're in both programs, it's 4 steps to start earning (YouTube Help):

1. Link: Amazon Storefront → Edit profile → Link your account → follow the on-screen steps to verify your YouTube channel

2. Wait: you get a notification when your account is enabled

3. Tag: in YouTube Studio, open the product picker and tag Amazon products in your content

4. Pick a mode: manual tagging (you choose from the catalog) or auto-tagging (YouTube reviews your recent uploads and tags eligible Amazon products for you)

Auto-tagging is the convenient option. But I'd still review what it tags on the first few videos, because a wrong product under your video looks like your recommendation.

Together with Post Planner

Post what's already going viral in your niche today — even with zero ideas and no designer.

The hard part of posting isn't posting. It's knowing what to post.

Post Planner shows you the top posts in your niche, rated by how viral they went. Pick a winner, describe your own take, and AI turns it into an original image in seconds. Then schedule it to every network without leaving the app.

AI images are now on every plan, Free included.

No ideas needed, no designer needed.

See what's viral in your niche →

⚠️ The catches: 4 things the announcement skipped

• The catalog is Amazon's, not yours: Amazon curates it around "highly requested and trending products," so you can't tag any product you want. You can ask YouTube Support to add one, but addition "isn't guaranteed."

• Returns come out of your pay: a refunded order claws the commission back from your next payout (standard Amazon affiliate terms)

• No per-video analytics: you get one daily total, so you can't see which video or which product actually sold

• Non-US sales may pay you nothing: your tags show up worldwide, but when a viewer outside the US clicks one, YouTube sends them to Amazon US or to a local store. If it's a local store, you earn nothing.

My honest verdict: 2-4% of what your audience buys off your videos is not life-changing money for a small channel. But it's revenue from mentions you're already making, and the setup is a one-time link. If you already say "I use this" on camera, tag it. The big win? This should DRASTICALLY increase your CTR when promoting Amazon products compared to linking to them in your bio.

—

🎙️ The ad side: Google says keep a human in your YouTube ads

If you also spend on YouTube ads, Google just published data on what converts, and it's a hit on AI-built creative.

Google's analysis of Demand Gen campaigns found that human voices in ad creative lift conversion rates 12%, and that "images with a visible human presence consistently outperform other assets." Text overlays plus a product shot in the first 5 seconds also got conversion upticks. Google's summary: AI tools help with efficiency, but "nothing can replace a human touch" (Tubefilter).

Before your next YouTube ad goes live:

• Voice: use a human voice in the audio

• Face: put a visible person in the imagery

• First 5 seconds: text overlay plus the product on screen

• Buttons: remove any element that looks clickable but doesn't do anything

☝️ The one-sentence version

The barrier to entry is now 500 subscribers, so link your Amazon account to your channel, tag the products you already talk about on camera. And if you're spending on YouTube ads, keep a real voice and a real face in the creative.

Hit reply and tell me: would you turn auto-tagging on, or tag by hand?

—

📚 Sources

• YouTube Blog — YouTube Shopping partners with Amazon for creator affiliates

• Tubefilter — YouTube and Amazon let creators sell products via affiliate tagging

• TechCrunch — YouTube now lets creators tag Amazon products and earn commissions from purchases

• PPC Land — YouTube opens Shopping affiliate program to creators with 500 subscribers

• YouTube Help — Tag Amazon products in your YouTube content

• Tubefilter — Google's YouTube guidelines for advertisers: human voices

That's all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from "This Week in Social Media"

Disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links that pay us commissions.

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✂️ Instagram will now rough-cut your Reels in one tap — I ran 3 tests so you don't have to

Welcome back to TWISM!

Be honest: how many minutes of footage are sitting in your camera roll right now because editing them feels like a second job?

Instagram just made a play for that footage. On Aug 25, IG launched First Draft — select your clips, tap one button, and it hands back a rough-cut Reel. Instagram says the whole thing takes under ten seconds, and it's iPhone-only for now with no Android timeline (TechCrunch).

But does it solve the "tedious and frustrating" process of manual trimming?

I ran it through three tests to find out... with very different kinds of footage, from the easiest case to the one that breaks it.

Hint: it legitimately could save you hours, but it's far from perfect. 👇

Together with Sked Social

The industry's biggest social media reality check is here.

We're building the State of Social Report 2026, and we need people in the trenches.

What's working, what's broken, what nobody talks about.

Your answers stay anonymous. The insights get shared with everyone. And you could walk away with a $250 gift card.

Take the Survey →

🥾 Test 1: Five hiking clips — First Draft's best case

I fed it 5 videos from a hike — 7 min 38 sec total, mostly scenic B-roll with some spoken commentary mixed in.

Processing took ~20 secs.

What came back: dozens of clips, 1-5 secs each, totaling 2 min and 16 secs for me to review.

So First Draft didn't finish the edit for me. It sorted through my footage and picked out the moments worth keeping. (Still a win!) 🤯

Instagram's own press demo compressed ~5 min of footage into a 17-sec Reel — a ~94% cut (Mashable). Mine was ~70%.

Then I spent ~5 min deleting filler — roughly half the clips — and ended with a ~1-min Reel.

Total time: about 5 minutes. By hand, that edit would've cost me 45-60 min (I'm not a pro video editor). It also felt faster than my runs with Descript or OpusClip.

💎 The pleasant surprise: it found and kept the funny commentary buried inside the scenery — the exact thing I assumed it would miss.

⚠️ The gripe: I couldn't find a bulk delete, so I spent those 5 minutes deleting clips individually.

—

🎙️ Test 2: A talking head vid — the cuts land mid-word

Next I filmed myself talking straight to the camera inside Instagram (the camera path) and ran it through.

The cuts kept landing a fraction of a second early — mid-word — clipping me off. On scenic b-roll vids, you'd never notice. On a talking head, the cut point can ruin the content.

Verdict: usable. But this is not what it's good at.

I'm not the only one with this problem. PetaPixel caught Instagram's own promo demo cutting a quad skater right before the tricks and called the result "totally unusable" (PetaPixel). It seems to pick moments, even if it doesn't understand them.

The good news: the Audio/music button sits right on the first-draft screen, and reordering clips by hold-and-drag is easy.

—

🛑 Test 3: One raw 7-minute take — where it breaks

Lastly, I tested footage most of you probably have: a single 7 min 12 sec raw, unedited talking-head vid with normal pauses, false starts, and gaffes.

Processing took 10-15 seconds. One long video processed faster than five separate clips.

Output: 44 seconds — a ~90% cut — and... totally unusable.

Why? It can't tell a good take from a bad one. It just trims down whatever you give it. Bad footage in = a tight edit of bad footage out.

—

📏 The rule: garbage in, garbage cut

First Draft is exactly as good as what you feed it.

✅ Feed it: multi-clip B-roll or long-form vids you've already trimmed are the sweet spot (Business Standard).

🛑 Don't feed it: raw, unedited long-form (especially a single talking-head take).

My honest verdict: It's nowhere near a pro editor. But it got me, a non-editor, a decent Reel in 5 minutes — and for most people, the realistic alternative would have been not posting at all.

—

📲 How to run it (iPhone only)

You have 2 ways to use it (Instagram Help Center):

1. Gallery: Create → Reel → select clips → Next → First draft

2. Camera: Create → Reel → Camera → record → Next → First draft

On the First Draft screen:

• Reorder: hold and drag a clip

• Delete: tap a clip → Delete

• Music: tap "Add music"

• Skip it: choose Skip First Draft

• Go deeper: voiceover and captions live one level deeper in the full editor

—

🧲 Instagram wants the edit to stay on Instagram

Instagram already has a standalone editing app in Edits, yet First Draft landed inside the main Instagram app's Reels creation flow. That placement fits Instagram's push toward native video, rather than content edited elsewhere and imported back in (Tubefilter).

Instagram gives free clip selection, so users have one less reason to open CapCut.

☝️ The one-sentence version

First Draft finds your best clips, it doesn't edit them — so feed it multi-clip B-roll or long-form you've already cleaned up, spend 5 min deleting the filler, and post the Reel that's been rotting in your camera roll while everyone else waits for the Android version.

Hit reply and tell me: what are your first thoughts on First Draft?

—

📚 Sources

• TechCrunch — Instagram's First Draft feature aims to make editing Reels less tedious

• Instagram Help Center — Use First Draft to edit your Reel

• Mashable — Instagram's First Draft feature edits Reels for you

• PetaPixel — Instagram's new video editing tool quickly makes a first draft

• Business Standard — Instagram First Draft Reels editing feature (iPhone)

• Tubefilter — Instagram's First Draft editing feature for Reels

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”

Disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links that pay us commissions.

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🤖 FB Creator Studio is back — here's the 7-play cheat sheet to 10x your content

Welcome back to TWISM!

Remember Facebook Creator Studio? Meta killed it in 2023 and shoved everyone into Business Suite.

Well, it's back — and it's a completely different animal.

On June 24, Meta re-launched Creator Studio as a standalone AI companion app that "shows you exactly what to do next to succeed on Facebook" (Meta). Per TechCrunch, it's a direct shot at keeping creators from defecting to TikTok, YouTube… and even ChatGPT.

The timing isn't random. Mark Zuckerberg told employees AI efficiencies would let Meta ship more standalone apps than ever — and after Forum (its Reddit clone) and Instants, Creator Studio is the one aimed squarely at you (TechCrunch).

The AI isn't bolted on. It's the foundation. Meta is building the whole app "around how you work" — daily priorities, goals, and an assistant that already knows your page the moment you open it. The creators who learn it first will eat everyone else's reach.

Here are the 7 plays to run 👇

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1️⃣ Ask the AI why — not what

The built-in creator assistant already knows your page: your audience, your engagement trends, your top posts (Meta). No copy-pasting stats like you do with ChatGPT.

Most creators will ask lazy questions like "give me content ideas." Don't.

✅ The power move: ask "why did this Reel outperform the rest?" — then keep asking follow-ups until you can name the exact hook, format, or timing that worked. Meta says the assistant is built specifically to answer the "why" question that dashboards never could (Meta Newsroom).

"I don't know what to do with those numbers. So I really appreciate having something that can break it down for me." — creator Jen Hamilton (Meta)

—

2️⃣ Run the post → analyze → refine loop

Buried in Meta's own guidance is the closest thing to a stated growth hack:

• Post a piece of content.

• Come back and ask the assistant how it performed and what to change.

• Apply the fix to your next post. Repeat.

Per Meta, creators following this loop are "seeing real change in performance." That's Meta telling you the algorithm's own AI will coach you on beating the algorithm. 🤯

💎 Bonus: you can attach a specific post to your question and the assistant pulls in its real numbers — most people never notice this.

—

3️⃣ Let AI triage your comments (then reply FAST)

The new AI comment tool surfaces your most important comments and drafts replies in your voice — you edit and approve before anything posts (Meta).

Why this matters: fast creator replies drive more comment threads, and conversation is exactly the "genuine engagement" signal feeds are rewarding right now.

⚡ The play: hit your comment queue within the first hour of posting, approve 10-15 drafted replies, and watch your distribution climb. What used to take an hour takes minutes.

And because every reply ships in your tone (after your edit), you get the reach benefits of an always-on community manager without sounding like a bot — the thing that kills most auto-reply tools.

—

4️⃣ Mine the trend radar for your niche

When you're stuck, the assistant works as a brainstorm partner that draws on what's trending on Facebook right now — trending audio, cultural moments, and top-performing content styles in your niche (Meta Newsroom).

🎯 Don't ask "what's trending?" Ask: "What's trending with MY audience this week, and give me 3 angles based on my best-performing format." Specific questions get specific answers — Meta's own tip (Meta).

—

5️⃣ The sleeper: AI translations + lipsync

This is the one almost everyone is overlooking.

Over half a billion Facebook users now watch AI-translated videos every week (Meta Newsroom). The AI preserves your actual voice — and optional lipsyncing makes it look like you're really speaking the language.

Currently 9 languages, with Arabic, Bahasa Indonesian, French, Thai, and Vietnamese coming soon.

💰 One tap = your Reels compete in markets with a fraction of the competition. International reach used to cost a dubbing studio. Now it's free.

The compounding play: pair translations with play #4. Ask the assistant which of your top posts travel best across audiences, translate those first, and let the winners run in every language Meta supports.

—

6️⃣ Use the web power tools nobody mentions

While the app gets the headlines, Meta quietly consolidated serious tools into the web experience (Meta):

• A content calendar for visual planning and scheduling.

• Bulk upload to publish multiple videos at once.

• Advanced insights — the deepest analytics Meta offers creators.

✅ Batch-creators: record once a week, bulk upload, schedule on the calendar, and spend the saved hours on the comment loop from play #3.

—

7️⃣ Train it on your money goal

The assistant learns your goals over time — audience growth, engagement, or monetization — and tailors every recommendation accordingly (Meta).

So tell it what you actually want. Ask how you're tracking toward monetization eligibility. Ask which content formats drive earnings for pages like yours. Give it direct feedback when a suggestion misses.

🪪 The more it knows your goal, the more every answer compounds toward it. Treat it like a strategist you're onboarding, not a magic 8-ball.

—

⚡ How to get in

• The creator assistant is live now for eligible creators in the US, Canada, and India — open your dashboard in the Facebook mobile app to check (Meta).

• The standalone Creator Studio app is in early access — join the waitlist before the broad launch.

• Watch for the Professional Dashboard split rolling out over the next couple of months: creators get a dedicated Creator Dashboard, businesses get their own (Meta).

☝️ The one-sentence version

Meta just gave every Facebook creator a free AI strategist who knows their audience... so get on the waitlist, run the post→analyze→refine loop, and turn on translations before your competitors do.

—

📚 Sources

• Meta — Your Creator Tools, Reimagined: Introducing the New Facebook Creator Studio

• Meta — Meet Creator Assistant: Your AI partner, built right into Facebook

• Meta Newsroom — Introducing Creator Assistant, Plus More Languages for AI Translations on Facebook

• TechCrunch — Facebook rolls out an AI companion app for creators

• Creator Studio early access waitlist

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”

Disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links that pay us commissions.

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🔗 Instagram Caption Links Are Coming — You get 10 per month

Welcome back to TWISM!

Remember our link placement cheat sheet from May — the one I told you to tape above your monitor? Time for a fresh page, because Instagram is rewriting its half of it.

Instagram is testing clickable links in post captions!

After a decade of "link in bio" being the punchline of the entire creator economy, the wall is coming down.

Per Social Media Today, the test is live for Meta Verified subscribers, and Instagram itself calls it "one of the top requested features from our subscriber community" .

Today: what's actually rolling out, the Earned-Link Play I'd run on Day 1, and why Facebook and YouTube already proved it works.

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📰 What's actually happening

The details:

• Caption links are live for Meta Verified subscribers ($14.99/mo) in a limited test.

• You're capped at 10 links per month across all posts.

• No confirmed timeline for a wider rollout — but "top requested feature ever" tests don't get quietly shelved.

The cap is the tell. Adam Mosseri resisted this for years, warning links would pull Instagram "meaningfully away from being a visual platform… and towards links and publishers" (PetaPixel).

Instagram isn't opening the floodgates — it's selling 10 tickets a month. 🎯

—

🧠 The lesson every other network already taught us

Here's why the cap matters more than the feature: every algorithm punishes links that hijack a post, and tolerates links that ride on one that already earned its reach.

The receipts:

• Facebook: Meta's own Widely Viewed Content Report shows 97.3% of the most-viewed US post views went to content with no external link 

• LinkedIn: one link in the post body costs you 18.8% of median reach per Richard van der Blom's 1.3M-post study — and 26.5% per Ordinal's 900K-post study.

• X: for non-Premium accounts, link tweets have a median engagement of zero 

Why? Algorithms score a post on early engagement velocity — and a link is a leak in the boat. Every click out is a session ended, so the platform quietly shows link posts to fewer people.

The workarounds that keep winning (link in first comment on Facebook, add-by-edit on LinkedIn, self-reply on X) all share one principle: let the post earn its distribution first, then attach the link.

Instagram's algorithm is built by the same company, on the same incentives. Expect the same physics.

—

🎯 The strategy: The Earned-Link Play

Here's the system I'd run the day caption links hit your account. Three steps:

1. Budget like a media buyer.

10 links a month means caption links are premium inventory, not a default. Don't spend one on a random Tuesday post. Spend them on posts with proven demand: your recurring top formats, launches, and time-sensitive offers.

A useful filter — if you wouldn't put $50 of ad spend behind the post, it doesn't get a link.

2. Post first, link second.

This is the core move, borrowed straight from the LinkedIn playbook. Publish the post with no link, let it run 2–4 hours to catch the initial distribution wave, then edit the caption and drop the link in — inside the first 125 characters, so it's visible before the "more" truncation (the same above-the-fold logic that works on YouTube). The algorithm scores the original post; your edit inherits the reach. ⚡

One honest caveat: the test is new, and nobody has published data yet on whether an edited-in link performs identically.

Test it on your first two links of the month — winners of every platform shift are the ones who ran experiments while everyone else read think-pieces.

3. Stack your fallback layers.

The caption link is an addition, not a replacement. Keep the pinned first comment with the same link (Facebook's proven play), and keep comment-to-DM automation for campaigns — ManyChat's case study showed a brand converting 64 orders from ~100 commenters with auto-DM'd links.

Per BrndHouse, comment-to-DM is still the highest-converting link path on Instagram. Caption links won't dethrone it on Day 1.

—

✅ Facebook — the blueprint IG will follow

Facebook is the preview of Instagram's future, so make sure you're running the current meta there:

• Link in the first comment, pinned. Meta has formally advised Page managers to do exactly this (Social Media Today).

• Respect the Two-Link Rule. Non-verified Pages in Professional Mode get squeezed after roughly two organic link posts per month (Fuzion Digital). Sound familiar? Facebook already runs a link budget — Instagram just made it official.

• Native first, offer second. The highest-reach play in 2026 is a strong native post with "link in comments" as the CTA (Cloudix). The post is the audition; the comment is the offer.

—

📹 YouTube — above the fold or nowhere

YouTube is the other network that proves placement beats volume:

• Long-form: put the link in the first 1–2 lines of the description — visible without expanding — AND repeat it in a pinned comment (Automateed). Say it out loud in the video too: "linked in the description and pinned below."

• Add a card around the 60% watch mark — never in the final 20 seconds, where it cannibalizes your end screen.

• Shorts: links in Shorts descriptions and comments have been non-clickable since August 2023 (Youfiliate). The only play is "link in my bio" pointing to your channel page. Stop saying "link below" — there is no below.

Notice the pattern: YouTube rewards links that don't interrupt the content — above the fold, in comments, verbal callouts. Same principle, different chairs. 💎

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☝️ The one-sentence version

Instagram is finally handing you the link — 10 times a month — and the winners will be the ones who treat each one like ad spend…

Attach it only to posts that already earned the reach!

Hit reply and tell me: are you Meta Verified, and what's the first post you'd spend a caption link on?

—

📚 Sources

• Instagram Tests Links in Post Captions for Paying Users — Social Media Today

• Meta Is Testing Clickable Links in Instagram Captions for Verified Subscribers — Engadget

• Instagram Is Finally Testing Links in Captions — Planoly

• Instagram Begins Testing Clickable Links in Post Captions — PetaPixel

• Instagram Updates Tracker — SocialBee

• Should You Put Links in Your Facebook Posts? — Avocado Social

• Meta Advises Page Managers To Include Links in Post Comments — Social Media Today

• Should You Put Facebook Links in Comments? — Fuzion Digital

• Facebook Algorithm 2026 for Organic Reach — Cloudix

• LinkedIn Algorithm Insights — Richard van der Blom

• LinkedIn Link Penalty: 900K Post Study — Ordinal

• Does X Premium Really Boost Your Reach? — Buffer

• Comment-to-DM Automation Case Study — ManyChat

• Link in Bio vs. Comment-to-DM — BrndHouse

• How to Add CTAs in YouTube Videos — Automateed

• YouTube Shorts Affiliate Links — Youfiliate

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”

Disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links that pay us commissions.

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🚀 Instagram Just Handed Marketers 2 Cheat Codes — Here's How to Use Them

Welcome back to TWISM!

Instagram rarely ships this much in one month!

Between the new Instagram Plus subscription and a stack of upgrades to Edits and Reels, Meta just quietly handed social marketers two cheat codes.

The catch? They only pay off if you actually change your workflow.

Below is exactly how the sharpest creators are already exploiting them — and how you can copy the playbook this week.

Together with Postproxy

Social media automation gets messy fast.

Your content can come from many places: a SaaS product, an AI agent, a CMS pipeline, a content creation team or whatever internal tool you vibecoded over the weekend.

But getting that content onto real platforms means dealing with different auth flows, media requirements, publish failures, replies, and status updates that your system still needs to understand.

Postproxy gives every workflow one reliable social media API to publish, handle engagement, and return clear platform results back to your product.

Ship social features faster →

🧪 Cheat code #1: Trial Reels are a free A/B testing lab

Trial Reels — which show your Reel to non-followers first before your own audience ever sees it — just got a global rollout plus scheduling.

That second part matters more than it sounds. Per eMarketer, Instagram says 40% of creators who use the feature now post more often, and Trial Reels lifted reach among non-followers by 80%.

The play smart marketers are running: treat it like a hook lab.

Record the same Reel body twice with two different 3-second openers, publish both as trials, and let a cold audience ruthlessly sort which hook stops the scroll — no follower bias muddying the data (Manychat).

The workflow from Later is dead simple: publish two trials Monday, check insights Tuesday night, then promote the winner to your followers and archive the loser.

One creator documented hitting 1M views and 89% non-follower reach in 7 days running this loop (Leslie M. Lyon).

—

🎬 Your unfair advantage: the Edits app

Meta's standalone Edits app just got the update that makes it a genuine content engine.

New this round: Reels search inside the Inspiration tab, Project Versions for testing creative directions, 15 new in-and-out animations, 200 more sound effects, and faster font search (Social Media Today).

Here's the exploit: stop doom-scrolling for ideas.

Use the Inspiration tab to surface what's trending in your niche, then attach Stickies — notes on exactly how you'd remix each format — to build a reusable content bank you pull from when batch-creating (The Two Lauras).

Pair that with the new Project Versions to spin up multiple cuts of one idea, then feed your two best into the Trial Reels hook test above.

The rule that keeps you out of the copycat penalty box: analyze why a trend works, then remix it in your own voice — don't clone it (Planoly).

—

🔁 The 10-second carousel rescue

Instagram now lets you reorder carousel slides after publishing — long-press, drag, done — and crucially, it does not reset your likes, comments, or saves (Metricool).

Carousels already pull about 12% more engagement than single posts, so the slide order is real estate worth optimizing (ALM Corp).

Why this is a cheat code: the 2026 algorithm ranks on dwell time and swipe-through velocity, and it actively penalizes "dead stops" — people who bail after slide one (Marketing Agent). So when a post underperforms, don't delete it.

Swap in a stronger first slide to fix the dead stop, reorder the middle by what's actually getting saves, and add a "swipe left" prompt — a tactic that nudges engagement from 1.83% to 2% yet appears in only 5% of carousels (PostNitro). You're now editing live posts like landing pages.

—

💸 Cheat code #2: Instagram Plus is pay-to-play Stories — for $3.99

Instagram Plus launched at $3.99/month with 11 perks, and while it's pitched at superfans, several of them are quietly built for marketers (ALM Corp).

The ones worth the four bucks:

• Story Spotlight — boosts one of your Stories in the tray once a week. Save it for launch day or your highest-intent CTA.

• Story Rewatch Insights — shows how many times a frame got rewatched, so you can reverse-engineer which hooks and offers actually land.

• Multiple Story Audiences — unlimited custom lists beyond Close Friends, for real segmentation (warm leads vs. cold, by offer, by region).

• Story Extend — adds 24 hours to a Story's life, perfect for stretching a promo or social-proof clip.

• Story Preview — view others' Stories without triggering the "seen" tag, i.e. anonymous competitor research (Inro).

The strategic read from Colling Media: at $3.99 it's cheap enough that brands will pile in for the extra Stories exposure — which means early adopters get an edge before it becomes table stakes.

⚠️ The flip side is a creeping pay-to-play dynamic on what used to be free reach, so get the upside now while it's still an edge.

(Heads up: it's rolling out by region — currently live in the US, Mexico, Japan, and the Philippines.)

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📓 The weekly playbook (stack them together)

Individually these are nice. Stacked, they're a system. Here's the loop to run every week:

1. Mine — open Edits, scroll the Inspiration tab for 10 minutes, and Sticky 3–5 trending formats worth remixing in your niche.

2. Build — batch-shoot from your Sticky bank, then use Project Versions to cut two versions of your best idea with different 3-second hooks.

3. Test — publish both as Trial Reels early in the week so non-followers sort the winner with zero risk to your feed.

4. Promote — push the winning hook to your followers, and turn the same insight into a carousel — fixing slide one and the swipe order live if it stalls.

5. Amplify — on launch or offer days, burn your weekly Story Spotlight on the highest-intent CTA, then read Rewatch Insights to see which frame to double down on next time. 💎

Run that for a month and you're no longer guessing — every post is informed by what a cold audience already told you works. ⚡

—

☝️ The one-sentence version

Use Trial Reels + Edits to A/B test your hooks on strangers for free, use carousel reordering to rescue posts the algorithm stalled, and spend $3.99 on Instagram Plus to spotlight your best Stories and spy on competitors before everyone else catches on. 🎯

—

📚 Sources

• eMarketer — Instagram brings scheduling to Trial Reels

• Manychat — Trial Reels A/B testing

• Later — 3 strategic ways to use Trial Reels

• Leslie M. Lyon — 1M views in 7 days with Trial Reels

• Social Media Today — Edits gets new fonts, animations, audio

• The Two Lauras — Edits app for social media managers

• Planoly — Edits app review

• Metricool — Reorder carousel posts after publishing

• ALM Corp — Carousel reorder: what brands should do

• Marketing Agent — Carousel strategy & dwell time

• PostNitro — Viral carousel strategies

• ALM Corp — Instagram Plus features & pricing

• Inro — Instagram Plus: features & what it means

• Colling Media — Instagram Plus marketing implications

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”

Disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links that pay us commissions.

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🎯 Your followers don't get you reach anymore. Here’s what does…

Welcome back to TWISM!

There's a quiet revolution that just finished rolling out across every platform you post on — and most creators are still optimizing for a game that ended.

The follower count you spent years building?

It's no longer the thing that gets you seen.

Let's break down what actually moves reach in 2026, with the receipts.

Together with Creally

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Influencer deals die in scattered DMs, missed follow-ups, and inbox chaos.

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One client scaled from 200 to 5,000 monthly outreaches. Same team.

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⚰️ The social graph is dead — for real this time

For 15 years, social media ran on the social graph: you followed people, and you saw their stuff. That era is over.

Every major platform has migrated to the interest graph — a predictive engine that serves content based on what you're likely to want, not who you happen to follow (The Shelf).

TikTok proved the model works (it's why you can blow up with zero followers), and everyone copied it.

The clearest tell came from LinkedIn, of all places: only 31% of the average LinkedIn feed now comes from your first-degree connections, and up to 30% of a post's reach comes from total strangers based purely on topic affinity (Melanie Goodman). When LinkedIn is operating like a For You Page, the shift is complete.

Translation: your content now has to earn its distribution every single time it's posted. Your follower list is a starting line, not a guarantee.

—

📊 The reach collapse, in numbers

This isn't vibes — the decline is brutal and measurable. Instagram organic reach fell from roughly 10–15% of followers in 2020 to just 2–3% in 2025 — a drop of more than 75% (Addictive Digital).

The platform-wide average now sits near 3.5% per post, with accounts under 100K doing a bit better at around 6.8% (AutoFaceless).

Fewer than 1 in 10 followers see any given post.

Then came the gut-punch in May 2026: the "Great Purge," when Instagram wiped millions of bot and inactive accounts overnight. Kylie Jenner lost over 14 million followers; most creators dropped 2–5% (Inc.). Adam Mosseri's response said the quiet part out loud:

"It's not actual real followers that you have lost." (Yahoo Creators)

He's right — and that's the whole point. If a chunk of your follower count was never going to see your work anyway, the number was always a vanity metric. The purge just made it visible.

—

🎯 What the algorithm actually rewards now

Here's the good news: the new signals are knowable, and Mosseri has confirmed them on the record.

In his April 2026 update, Instagram officially demoted likes as a ranking signal. What replaced them (Dataslayer):

• Saves per reach — the single strongest "this is high-intent content" signal Instagram has.

• Shares per reach — especially DM shares, which the algorithm treats as network propagation (a human vouching for you).

• Watch time — how long people actually stay, not whether they tapped a heart.

• Profile clicks — proof the content made someone want more of you.

TikTok weights it even more starkly: watch time and completion rate are the #1 factor, carrying an estimated 40–50% of the algorithm's weight, with shares and saves now outranking likes (Buffer).

The throughline across every platform: likes are out, saves and shares are in. 

A save is a promise to return. A share is a personal endorsement. Those are the currencies now.

And it's why micro-creators are eating the giants' lunch — accounts with 50K engaged followers routinely out-convert million-follower accounts, because the interest graph rewards resonance over reach (Brandnation).

—

⏱️ The 60-minute window that decides everything

Every platform now runs a "distribution waterfall." When you publish, your post goes to a small seed group — roughly 5–10% of your network — and the algorithm watches them for the first 60–90 minutes (growleads).

This is where engagement velocity matters: not how many interactions you get, but how fast.

A post that earns 10,000 saves in an hour is treated completely differently from one that earns 10,000 over a week — even though the total is identical (Medium).

Pass the seed-group test, and you graduate to expansion, then potentially to interest-graph virality far beyond your followers. Fail it, and the algorithm quietly caps your reach to protect feed quality.

The practical takeaway: your first hour is the whole ballgame. Post when your most active people are online, and give them a reason to act immediately.

—

🚀 Zero followers, 560K views — proof it cuts both ways

If the death of the follower count feels like bad news, flip it over.

A creator opened a brand-new X account with zero followers and generated 560,000 impressions in 10 days — engagement 22× above average, with no ad spend (Indie Hackers).

The tactic: reply to bigger accounts in their niche within the first 30–60 minutes, riding the velocity of posts already taking off.

That's the interest graph working for the little guy. On Instagram, 55% of Reel views now come from non-followers, and Reels pull 2.25× more reach than static posts (AutoFaceless).

You no longer need a big audience to reach a big audience — you need content the machine wants to recommend.

Together with Post Planner

✅ Schedule multiple comments
✅ Delay each comment by as long as you want

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📓 The interest-graph playbook (7 moves)

1. Make content people save, not just like. Tutorials, checklists, "screenshot this" frameworks. Saves are your #1 lever.

2. Engineer the DM share. Ask yourself: would someone send this to one specific friend? That's the bar now.

3. Front-load your first 60 minutes. Post at peak active times and prompt instant engagement — a question, a hot take, a cliffhanger.

4. Lead with retention. On video, the first 3 seconds decide watch time, and watch time decides everything on TikTok.

5. Go where the velocity already is. Reply fast on bigger accounts in your niche — the borrowed-reach play works on every platform.

6. Pick a lane, not a crowd. The interest graph rewards niche resonance; "deep with the right 50K" beats "shallow with a million."

7. Stop reading the follower count as a scoreboard. Track saves-per-reach, shares-per-reach, and watch time instead. Those are the numbers the algorithm actually sees.

—

☝️ The one-sentence version

Followers used to be your reach — now they're just an audition.

Today every post has to re-earn distribution by triggering saves, shares, and watch time inside the first hour.

—

📚 Sources

• The Shelf — Interest graph vs. social graph

• Melanie Goodman — LinkedIn Algorithm 2026

• Addictive Digital — The decline of organic reach

• AutoFaceless — Social media algorithm statistics 2026

• Inc. — Brands and celebs lost millions of followers

• Yahoo Creators — The Great Purge of 2026

• Dataslayer — Instagram ranking signals Mosseri confirmed

• Buffer — How the TikTok algorithm works in 2026

• Brandnation — Social media updates to know, June 2026

• growleads — LinkedIn's first 60 minutes

• Medium — What is engagement velocity on Instagram

• Indie Hackers — Zero followers, high reach on X in 2026

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”

Disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links that pay us commissions.

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📱 Instagram just fixed 3 things creators have complained about for YEARS

Welcome back to TWISM!

Most weeks, Instagram ships features nobody asked for. This week it did the opposite — it fixed three problems every creator has cursed at:

• Blanking on your script mid-Reel (take 14, anyone?)

• Publishing a carousel with the slides in the wrong order… and having to delete the whole post

• Burning your engagement rate every time you test a new content style on your hard-won audience

The fixes: a native teleprompter, post-publish carousel editing, and the full rollout of Trial Reels. None of them is a flashy AI headline. All three will change what you ship this week. Let's go. 👇

Together with Hubspot

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A contact record tells you someone converted. Context tells you they watched your webinar, grabbed two checklists, and look exactly like your best customers.

That's the gap HubSpot's 2026 Essential Apps for Marketers closes — 14 curated apps across creative, ads, events, and more that plug into your CRM, so signal travels with every campaign, decision, and handoff.

Explore the 14 apps →

🎬 Fix #1 — A teleprompter built into the Reels camera

The retake era is over.

Instagram is rolling a native teleprompter into the main app's Reels camera (WeRSM). It debuted in Edits — Instagram's standalone editing app — back in June 2025, proved itself there, and is now graduating into the camera you actually use every day.

How it works:

• Paste in a script (or write one on the spot) before you hit record.

• Your text auto-scrolls right next to the front-facing camera while you film — so you read your lines while looking almost dead into the lens, news-anchor style (Open Magazine).

• Speed, font size, and position are all adjustable to match how fast you talk.

Until now, polished talking-head content required an external teleprompter rig or a third-party app. Now it's free and native — a straight giveaway to educators, coaches, and product reviewers.

Best use: Tightly scripted expertise content — the stuff you usually ramble through in 6 takes.

Worst: Reading word-for-word in a monotone. The teleprompter should kill your retakes, not your personality.

⚠️ It's a gradual rollout — if you don't see it, update the app and check back over the next couple of weeks.

—

🤯 Fix #2 — Reorder carousel slides AFTER publishing

The "finally!" feature of 2026.

Since March, Instagram lets you reorder the slides of a carousel that's already live (9to5Mac). No more delete-and-repost. No more sacrificing hundreds of comments and saves because slide 7 should've been slide 2.

The move: tap the three-dot menu on your live carousel → Edit → long-press and drag any slide where you want it.

What else you can now change on a live carousel (Inro):

• Delete slides you regret

• Update captions, tags, alt text, and location

What you still can't do: add new slides, swap in replacements, or change the music.

And the part brands will love — editing is completely invisible. ✅ No notification to followers or tagged accounts, the original post date stays put, and reordering doesn't touch your ranking or engagement metrics in feed or Explore (Inro).

Best use: Watch your first few hours of engagement, then drag your strongest slide into position 2. Your hook is no longer locked in at publish time.

Worst: Obsessively reshuffling old posts instead of making new ones. Fix the order once, move on.

—

📈 Fix #3 — Trial Reels are now for (almost) everyone

Trial Reels — Instagram's "test on strangers first" feature (Instagram for Creators) — launched in December 2024 for public accounts with 1,000+ followers. This year it expanded to all creator and business accounts above that bar, and the global rollout is now hitting everyone.

The mechanics:

• Post a Reel as a trial and Instagram shows it only to non-followers — it stays out of your followers' feeds, your Reels tab, and your grid.

• After 72 hours, you get the verdict from a completely cold audience (Storrito).

• Winners can be shared to everyone with one tap — or auto-shared if they clear Instagram's performance threshold.

Two upgrades make this sharper than the 2024 version. You can now schedule Trial Reels in advance, so experiments run on your content calendar like everything else (Social Media Today). And Instagram just reported that 40% of users who post Trial Reels end up posting more often. 💎 Translation: the fear of flopping in front of your own audience was a real bottleneck — remove the risk, and people ship.

Best use: Two trials per week, same topic, two different hooks. Share the winner, study why it won.

Worst: Trialing your safe, usual content. Trials exist for the weird stuff you'd never risk on your grid.

—

🧩 Why Instagram is suddenly so generous

All three updates do the same thing: they lower the cost of shipping content. The teleprompter cuts production friction, carousel editing cuts the penalty for mistakes, Trial Reels cut the social risk of experimenting.

That's not charity. Instagram is in a retention war for creators with TikTok and YouTube, and its play is to make the daily workflow so smooth that leaving feels expensive. ⚡ Platforms build tools for the behavior they want more of — and Instagram just told you it wants scripted talking-head Reels, iterated carousels, and high-volume experiments. Take the hint.

Together with Post Planner

✅ Schedule first comments
✅ Schedule a thread of comments
✅ Delay each comment by a custom time period 🤯

Post Planner gives you maximum flexibility with your scheduled comments — so you can:

Schedule comments that feel organic!

Try it! Schedule your first comment →

📓 Your 90-minute action plan

1. Film one scripted Reel with the teleprompter. Pick the topic you know best and always over-explain. One tight script, one take.

2. Audit your last 5 carousels. Find the one with your best slide buried, drag it to slot 2, and watch the saves.

3. Launch 2 Trial Reels — same topic, two hooks. In 72 hours, share the winner and make 3 more like it.

Three experiments. About 90 minutes. All compounding.

—

☝️ The one-sentence version

Instagram just handed you a free teleprompter, carousel do-overs, and risk-free content testing — and the creators who use all three this week will out-ship everyone who didn't notice.

Reply and tell me which one you're trying first.

—

📚 Sources

• Instagram Adds A Built-In Teleprompter For Reels Creators — WeRSM

• Instagram Finally Has a Teleprompter! — Metricool

• Instagram Rolls Out Native Teleprompter for Reels — Open Magazine

• Instagram now lets you reorder carousel images after publishing — 9to5Mac

• Instagram Now Lets You Reorder Carousel Posts After Publishing — Metricool

• How to Edit an Instagram Carousel After Posting — Inro

• Trial Reels: Try content with non-followers first — Instagram for Creators

• How Instagram Trial Reels Work and What the Data Shows After 72 Hours — Storrito

• Instagram allows creators to schedule Trial Reels — Social Media Today

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”

Disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links that pay us commissions.

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👀 Every Social Network just picked a side on AI Content… Are you compliant??

Welcome back to TWISM!

If you've used AI to draft, batch, or "10x" your social content this year, today's edition is the one to read twice.

On May 21, LinkedIn's Global Editorial VP Laura Lorenzetti posted a sentence that should be taped above every social manager's monitor:

"It's ok to use AI to help you write, but your posts and comments need to represent your voice and your perspectives. The ultimate value comes from the human behind the tool." (Social Media Today)

Translation:
✍️ AI as assistant — welcome.
👻 AI as ghostwriter — throttled.

All 10 major social networks are now enforcing their own version of this.

Below is a summary of each version, platform by platform.

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✅ LinkedIn — Reach throttling for "generic" AI posts

LinkedIn isn't deleting AI content. It's suffocating it.

Per The Next Web, the platform's new "AI solving AI" classifier flags generic AI posts with 94% accuracy in early tests. Flagged posts get capped at first-degree contacts — your network only, no recommendations. The same system now hunts AI comments and bot profiles, with new filters letting users restrict their feed to verified profiles only.

Best AI use: AI-assisted drafts of your own thinking.

Worst: "Rewrite with AI" → post unedited.

—

✅ Facebook, Instagram & Threads — Label or get downranked

Meta runs one framework across all three apps: realistic AI imagery, video or audio must carry the "AI info" label, applied either by industry-standard metadata signals (C2PA) or by your own self-disclosure.

Per Meta's Transparency Center, unlabeled realistic AI content is downranked rather than removed.

Instagram tightened the screws on May 4 with an opt-in "AI Creator" profile label that reads "This profile posts content that was generated or modified with AI" and follows you across Explore and Reels (Social Media Today).

Mosseri's January warning was the prequel: AI mimicry of any creator's style is now trivial, so the platform is leaning hard on transparency.

Best AI use: AI for production assistance (editing, captions, ideation) plus accurate labeling of synthetic visuals.

Worst: Photoreal AI faces / fake "behind the scenes" content with no label.

—

✅ TikTok — Auto-labels and a 73% reach cliff

TikTok is the most aggressive enforcer.

Per its Creator Academy guidance and AuditSocials' 2026 rules breakdown, any AI-generated content that depicts a realistic person or scene must be labeled — via the in-app AI toggle, an on-screen sticker, or a description note. TikTok now uses C2PA Content Credentials + invisible watermarking to auto-detect, and it has already labeled 1.3 billion videos this way.

Here's the part nobody saw coming: if TikTok auto-labels you after you posted unlabeled, that's an immediate strike and a 73% reach suppression within 48 hours. AI-assisted scripts, captions and hashtags are exempt. The line is realism.

Best AI use: AI editing, AI scripts, AI translations.

Worst: Realistic AI avatars, voice clones, or "footage" of events that didn't happen, posted with no toggle.

—

✅ YouTube — Disclose realism, or face automatic labels (and worse)

YouTube's synthetic content policy requires disclosure when you alter a real person, real event, or real place to look authentic.

Production-side AI — scripts, ideas, titles, captions, B-roll — is exempt. The Studio toggle is called "Altered Content."

The "Altered or Synthetic" label now appears directly under long-form players and as an overlay on Shorts (Variety). Skip the disclosure and YouTube can apply a non-removable label, demonetize you, or worse: in this year's "AI slop" crackdown the platform deleted 16 channels representing 4.7 billion views and roughly $10M in annual revenue under its Inauthentic Content Policy (OutlierKit).

Best AI use: AI in the pipeline that supports a human-led creative point of view.

Worst: Templated, mass-produced AI "shorts factories" with no original voice.

—

✅ X / Twitter — "Made with AI" toggle, with revenue-share teeth

X added a "Made with AI" toggle (BuzzInContent) and is layering AI into Community Notes itself.

The platform doesn't prohibit AI-written posts — but for sensitive categories (conflict, elections, crisis), unlabeled synthetic media triggers a 90-day revenue-sharing suspension, permanent on repeats.

Best AI use: AI-drafted text, satire, clearly stylized AI imagery.

Worst: Realistic AI imagery of news events without the toggle.

—

✅ Pinterest — Auto-labels, plus user-controlled "see less AI"

Pinterest auto-detects AI Pins via IPTC metadata and its own classifiers, then labels them in-feed (Pinterest Help).

The big shift is user-side: in the Manage GenAI settings (Pinterest Newsroom), users can now opt to see fewer AI Pins in beauty, art, fashion and home decor — the four categories most polluted by AI slop.

Your AI Pin doesn't get banned. Users just disappear it.

Best AI use: AI lifestyle imagery clearly labeled, paired with real product photography.

Worst: All-AI moodboards in the four "opt-out" categories.

—

✅ Bluesky — Composable labels, no central penalty

Bluesky takes the opposite approach. There is no central reach algorithm to throttle you. Instead, community labelers apply tags and individual clients decide what to do with them. You won't get downranked by HQ — but a major labeler tagging your account can make you invisible to half the network.

Best AI use: Transparency-first AI use, opt-in labels.

Worst: Posting AI content in feeds whose curators have publicly banned it.

—

✅ Google Business Profile — AI replies encouraged, but moderated

The outlier!

Google is actively shipping AI: its new Reply to reviews with AI feature is rolling out in the US, Brazil and India (Search Engine Land).

AI-drafted replies are compliant — but every reply now passes through a new ReviewReplyState moderation queue (PENDING → APPROVED or REJECTED). Per ALMcorp, templated AI replies erode trust faster than no reply at all. Edit them.

Best AI use: AI draft → human edit with specifics from the review.

Worst: Mass-sending unedited AI replies.

Together with Post Planner

✅ Schedule first comments
✅ Schedule a thread of comments
✅ Delay each comment by a custom time period 🤯

Post Planner gives you maximum flexibility with your scheduled comments — so you can:

Schedule comments that feel organic!

Try it! Schedule your first comment →

📓 The 5-step playbook for the next 30 days

1. Audit your AI ratio. Last 30 posts per channel — if more than half could've been written by any brand, your LinkedIn reach has already dropped and IG is next.

2. Switch "Rewrite with AI" to "Draft with AI, edit with you." That one workflow change is what every platform's policy is begging for.

3. Label realistic AI everywhere. TikTok toggle, YouTube "Altered Content," X "Made with AI," Meta "AI Info." The label costs nothing. Skipping it costs everything.

4. Pick one human signature per channel. Voiceover, on-camera moment, founder POV, BTS — the thing AI can't fake. That's your originality anchor.

5. For GBP: never send an unedited AI review reply. Add the customer's name, their issue, one specific fix. AI gets you to 80%; the last 20% builds trust.

—

☝️ The one-sentence version

Every major platform now rewards AI as an assistant and punishes AI as a substitute — and the cost of getting it wrong has moved from "fewer likes" to "no reach, no monetization, sometimes no channel."

Reply and tell me which platform's AI rule surprised you most.

—

📚 Sources

• LinkedIn wants to limit the reach of AI-generated content — Social Media Today

• LinkedIn cracks down on AI slop with 94% detection accuracy — The Next Web

• Keeping Conversations Real on LinkedIn — Laura Lorenzetti

• Labeling AI Content — Meta Transparency Center

• Instagram adds AI Creator labels — Social Media Today

• Instagram's "AI Creator" Label Could Put AI-Heavy Pages on Notice — Android Headlines

• TikTok AI-Generated Content Guidelines — Creator Academy

• TikTok AI Content Labeling 2026 — AuditSocials

• Disclosing use of altered or synthetic content — YouTube Help

• YouTube to start automatically tagging AI videos — Variety

• YouTube's AI Slop Crackdown: 4.7 Billion Views Wiped — OutlierKit

• X introduces "Made with AI" label — BuzzInContent

• Gen AI labels — Pinterest Help

• Pinterest rolls out new tools to give users more control over GenAI content — Pinterest Newsroom

• Labels and moderation — Bluesky Docs

• Google Business Profile tests AI-generated replies to reviews — Search Engine Land

• Google Business Profile AI Review Replies — ALMcorp

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”

Disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links that pay us commissions.

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Subscribe to “This Week in Social Media” here »

🔗 Where to add a Link in your Posts — 2026 Field Guide

👋 Welcome back to TWISM.

Today's edition is the one you should bookmark, print, and tape above your monitor.

Every major social platform updated its link rules in the last 12 months.

Some quietly increased link reach. Some quietly nuked the workarounds you've been using since 2019. Some changed which accounts even get to share links.

And the gap between "where I'm putting the link" and "where the link should go" is the biggest single drag on clicks for most operators I talk to.

Let's fix that platform by platform, with the studies supporting each tactic.

Together with AgoraPulse

Most social media content shouldn't exist. Here's the data that proves it.

A 2026 Agorapulse survey of 178 social media professionals reveals the structural reasons why most content fails to drive engagement.

Explore the data, patterns, and solutions required to create content that not only resonates with your audience, but contributes to your business objectives.

Download the Report →

🏆 Facebook → Link in the first comment (and pin it)

The headline stat from Meta's own Widely Viewed Content Report: 97.3% of US Facebook post views in 2025 went to content that did NOT contain an external link. 

Per Avocado Social's writeup, Meta has formally advised Page managers to keep the link out of the caption and drop it as the first comment instead — preferably pinned. Social Media Today confirmed the same: Meta itself is now telling brands to do this.

Two more things you need to know that nobody's talking about:

1. The "Two-Link Rule." Per Fuzion Digital's reporting, non-verified Pages running Professional Mode are now capped at two organic link posts per month before reach gets squeezed. Budget those.

2. Native first, link later. Cloudix's 2026 algorithm breakdown says the highest-reach Facebook play in 2026 is a high-quality native post (Reel, photo, video) with a caption that says "link in comments." Treat the post as the audition. Treat the comment as the offer.

—

🏆 Instagram → Bio link OR comment-to-DM automation

Caption URLs on Instagram have never been clickable, and per Inro's 2026 guide, that hasn't changed for the 99% of accounts that aren't Meta Verified (Meta is testing in-caption links for paid subscribers, but that's it).

The real 2026 fight is bio link vs. comment-to-DM.

• Bio link still works, especially with multi-link tools like Beacons or Linktree. Per Influencer Marketing Hub, 73% of creators use one, and expect roughly 30–80 bio link clicks per 1,000 profile visits as a benchmark.

• Comment-to-DM automation is destroying that benchmark. ManyChat's case study shows one fashion brand running a Live where every commenter got an instant DM with product links and a discount code — 64 orders from ~100 commenters. A 64% conversion rate. Per the BrndHouse comparison, comment-to-DM compresses the journey from 3–4 clicks down to 1 and is now the highest-converting link path on the platform.

The new IG default: bio link for evergreen, comment-to-DM for any campaign you actually care about.

—

🏆 LinkedIn → Native post, link added by edit 30–60 minutes later

This is the one that's changed the most and the one you're probably still doing wrong.

Per Richard van der Blom's 1.3 million post study, one external link in the post body reduces median reach by 18.8%. Ordinal's separate 900,000-post study puts the average penalty at 26.5%. And here's the killer: the old "drop it in the first comment" trick is dead.

Per Voketa's algorithm breakdown and DataSlayer's 2026 report, LinkedIn now detects "bridge behavior" — when a post obviously exists to push you to a link in the comments — and applies the same suppression. Comments with external links can see visibility cut by up to 80%.

The 2026 LinkedIn workaround that actually works:

1. Post the native value with no link.

2. Wait 30–60 minutes for the initial distribution wave to fire.

3. Edit the post to add the link (or add it to the first comment after engagement is already established).

The algorithm scores the original post — not your edit. You get the reach AND the link.

—

🏆 Threads → Put the link RIGHT IN THE POST

Plot twist. Threads is the only major platform in 2026 where you should increase the number of links you post.

Per Social Media Today, Adam Mosseri publicly confirmed Threads reversed its earlier link penalty: "Links have been working much better for more than a month now." 

Influencer Marketing Hub's followup confirms link posts are now elevated in both follower feeds and recommendation carousels.

Meta also added dedicated link click analytics and let you embed up to five bio links (EmbedSocial). If you've been holding Threads links back because you got burned in 2024 — that decision is now actively costing you traffic.

Together with Post Planner

✅ Schedule multiple delayed comments
✅ Delay each comment by a custom time period
✅ Publish comments randomly — within a 10min window

Post Planner gives you maximum flexibility with your comments so you can…

Schedule comments that feel organic!

Try it! Schedule your first comment →

🏆 X → Self-reply with the link (and Premium is now required)

The honest answer for X is uncomfortable. Per Buffer's analysis of 18.8 million posts, Premium accounts now reach roughly 10x more accounts per post than free accounts, and Premium+ users hit ~15x.

For non-Premium accounts, link tweets have had a median engagement of literally zero since early 2025 — they're algorithmically invisible.

If you're staying on X for distribution, the playbook from OpenTweet is:

1. Subscribe to Premium (link tweets without it are pointless).

2. Post the substance with no link in the main tweet.

3. Immediately self-reply with the link.

This roughly doubles the reach of link-sharing tweets vs. putting the URL in the body.

—

🏆 YouTube → First 1–2 lines of description + a pinned comment

Long-form: put the link in the first two lines of the description (above the fold, no click-to-expand required) AND repeat it in a pinned comment.

Per Automateed's 2026 CTA guide, this dual placement is the highest-converting setup, and you should align it with verbal callouts in the video itself ("the exact tool is linked in the description AND pinned below").

Add a card around the 60% watch mark (max 1–3 per video, never in the final 20 seconds where it cannibalizes the end screen) and an end screen on every video over 25 seconds.

Shorts is its own conversation. Per Youfiliate's guide: YouTube made all URLs in Shorts descriptions and pinned comments non-clickable in August 2023 and has held that line ever since. The only working CTA is "link in my bio" pointing at your channel page's link section. Stop saying "link below" — there is no below in the Shorts feed.

—

🏆 TikTok → Bio link, period (plus a comment-to-DM trigger)

TikTok is the simplest of the seven. Per Stan Store's 2026 guide and SocialRails, the only clickable link in organic TikTok content is the bio link. Captions and comments display URLs as plain text — copy-paste only.

Two things to know:

1. Personal accounts still need ~1,000 followers to unlock a bio link. Business accounts get it immediately. If you're under 1k and you need a link, switch account type.

2. Layer in a comment-to-DM trigger word. Same playbook as Instagram — tools like ManyChat will auto-DM the link to anyone who comments your trigger.

—

☝️ The one-sentence version

Treat the link like a guest at a dinner party: every platform wants it sitting in a different chair, and the host (the algorithm) is judging you for getting it wrong.

Reply and tell me which platform's link strategy you're fixing first this week — I'll feature the smartest reader plays in next week's edition.

—

📚 Sources

• Should You Put Links in Your Facebook Posts? Meta's New 2025 Update — Avocado Social

• Meta Advises Page Managers To Include Links in Post Comments — Social Media Today

• Should You Put Facebook Links in Comments? — Fuzion Digital

• Facebook Algorithm 2026 for Organic Reach — Cloudix

• How to Add a Link to Instagram Post (2026 Guide) — Inro

• Link in Bio vs. Comment-to-DM: Which Converts Better — BrndHouse

• Comment-to-DM Automation — ManyChat

• Beacons vs Linktree 2026 — Stack Influence

• LinkedIn Algorithm Insights — Richard van der Blom

• LinkedIn Link Penalty: 900K Post Study — Tryordinal

• LinkedIn External Links Penalty in 2026 — Voketa

• LinkedIn Algorithm 2026: What Works Now — DataSlayer

• Meta Says Link Posts on Threads Are Seeing Better Performance — Social Media Today

• Why Links Are Now Performing Better on Threads — Influencer Marketing Hub

• New Threads Features in 2026 — EmbedSocial

• Does X Premium Really Boost Your Reach? 18M+ Post Analysis — Buffer

• The X Algorithm in 2026 — OpenTweet

• How to Add CTAs in YouTube Videos: 2026 Guide — Automateed

• YouTube Shorts Affiliate Links — Youfiliate

• TikTok Link in Bio Requirements 2026 — Stan Store

• TikTok Link in Bio: Complete 2026 Guide — SocialRails

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”

Disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links that pay us commissions.

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Subscribe to “This Week in Social Media” here »

🫢 Instagram Just Made "Curated" a Four-Letter Word

Welcome back to TWISM 👋

If your Instagram strategy this year includes the words "we'll repost a bunch of UGC" or "we'll curate the best stuff in the niche," I have news that's going to ruin your afternoon and probably save your account.

Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri just said the quiet part out loud:

"If most of what you post to Instagram is someone else's content, your account is no longer going to be recommendable. That means we're no longer going to show your posts to people who don't follow your account proactively." (PetaPixel)

😳 That's not a tweak. That's a structural rewrite of who Instagram is willing to promote.

Let's break down what actually changed, why it matters more than the headlines suggest, and the five-step playbook to make sure you end up on the right side of the line.

Together with Post Planner

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✅ What Instagram actually did (the short version)

In 2024, Instagram applied an originality penalty to Reels.

Repost-heavy accounts got quietly throttled in recommendations, and Meta later reported that views and time spent on original Reels on Facebook approximately doubled year over year in H2 2025.

So they're doing it again — but this time across photos and carousels too.

Per Instagram's official creator blog:

• Accounts are evaluated on a rolling 30-day window.

• If most of what you posted in those 30 days is content you didn't create, you become an "aggregator account."

• Aggregators are removed from recommendation surfaces — Explore, Feed recommendations, the Discover tab. The whole growth engine.

• Existing followers still see your posts. New audiences essentially won't.

• The platform has already moved the needle: 75% of recommendations in the US now come from original posts.

This is the most important sentence in Instagram's blog post and almost nobody is quoting it.

The growth half of the platform is now an originality-first system. Everything else is a follower-only zone.

👀 Why this is a much bigger deal than the 2024 Reels change

The Reels version of this rule mattered, but Reels was already a creator-first format. The April 2026 expansion hits the formats where aggregators actually lived: photo dumps, meme carousels, screenshot-of-a-tweet posts, "best of the week" niche pages, recycled UGC walls.

Tubefilter put it bluntly: the app that once gave us an entire decade of meme empires is officially walking away from that model. The argument? Recommending the same recycled content over and over degrades discovery for users and disincentivizes the original creators Meta actually needs — including, as TechCrunch noted, the original creators Meta needs to keep its AI training pipeline fed.

Two other things you should know that aren't in the headline:

1. Instagram will now actively redirect reach from the reposter to the original. Per Planoly's reporting, when Instagram detects a reposted piece of content is identical or near-identical to your original, it surfaces your post in recommendations instead of the reposter's — and it sends you a notification when this happens. The aggregator's reach is being transferred to you, automatically.

2. Attribution labels are coming. Reposted content will begin carrying labels that credit the original creator, even in cases where the aggregator still reaches their existing audience. That's a permanent identity-level disadvantage for repost accounts.

This isn't just "ranking less well." It's the platform standing on the scale with both feet.

🧐 What counts as original (and what definitely doesn't)

The line is sharper than most people think. Per Instagram's creator guidelines and confirmed across TechCrunch, PetaPixel, and Disrupt's brand-side breakdown:

👍 Counts as original:

• Photos and videos you personally shot

• Graphics, designs, photo series, how-to guides, visual stories you made

• Third-party content materially transformed — meaningful commentary, real editorial overlay, voiceover, green-screen reactions, jokes, perspective the original didn't have

👎 Doesn't count:

• Reposting from TikTok, YouTube, Twitter/X, or another IG account with no meaningful edit

• Screenshot carousels of someone else's thread or post

• Watermarks, borders, speed changes, light cropping

• Adding "credit @soandso" in the caption

Instagram's own gut-check question: Does the edit add real value beyond just restating or referencing the third-party content? If the honest answer is no, the algorithm is going to treat it as no.

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💪 The 5-step playbook for the next 30 days

This is the only stretch of this email I need you to actually act on. Steal it.

1. Audit your last 30 days right now. Open your grid. Count the ratio of "we made this" vs. "we reposted this." If the second number is the bigger one, you're already inside the aggregator definition — and your Explore reach has likely already dropped. Disrupt's agency-side guide calls this audit the single most important brand action right now.

2. Check Account Status. Settings → Account Status. Instagram now tells you directly whether you're eligible for recommendations, and lets you remove flagged posts or appeal. Most marketers don't even know this screen exists.

3. Switch every UGC repost to a Collab post. This is the cheat code. A Collab post counts as original because you co-own the post and the original creator gets credit. A repost of the same content with "📷: @customer" in the caption is now algorithmically dead weight. Same content, totally different distribution outcome.

4. Kill the screenshot-carousel format. The "I screenshotted a tweet and made it a 10-slide carousel" play is the single most-penalized format under the new rules. If you want to use the underlying idea, rewrite it in your voice with your own visual design. That counts. The screenshot doesn't.

5. For meme/aggregator-leaning accounts: layer in YOU. Per Mosseri directly, the workaround for aggregators is voiceover, green screen, your own text on top, your own commentary, or a Collab with the original. Anything that adds a perspective that wasn't there before converts the content from disqualifying to qualifying. (Planoly and TechCrunch both quote Mosseri on this.)

☝️ The one-sentence version

Instagram's growth engine now belongs to people who create things.

If your last 30 days say "curator" more than "creator," you're invisible to everyone who doesn't already follow you — and the only fix is the same one originality has always demanded: do the work.

Reply and tell me which lever you're pulling first — the 30-day audit, the Collab switchover, or rewriting your carousels in your own voice. I'll feature the smartest reader plays in next week's edition.

Sources

• Instagram updates algorithm to benefit original creators — Social Media Today

• Rewarding original creators on Instagram — Instagram for Creators

• Instagram cracks down on content aggregators — TechCrunch

• Instagram has a new penalty for unoriginal content aggregators — Tubefilter

• New Instagram Policies Target Reposted Content — PetaPixel

• Instagram Just Changed the Rules for Every Brand on the Platform — Disrupt

• Instagram Updates its Original Content Policy — Planoly

• Instagram's April 2026 Algorithm Change Favors Originality Over Reposts — MWM

• Reposted Photos And Carousels Now Face Reach Penalties On Instagram — Dataconomy

• Instagram doubles down on rewarding original creators — Storyboard18

• Instagram Algorithm 2026: Crackdown on Reposts Shocks Creators — Eastern Herald

• ICYMI: 7 Things to Know About Instagram in 2026 — Lia Haberman

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”

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😲 Instagram Didn't Change the Rules. Your Audience Did.

Welcome back to TWISM. If you've been doing everything "right" on Instagram and your numbers are still sliding, I've got bad news and good news.

👎 The bad news: the playbook you've been running for the last three years is officially obsolete.

👍 The good news: the new one is actually simpler. You just have to stop doing five things you were taught were "best practices" and start doing one thing nobody's been screaming loud enough about.

Let's get into it.

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👑 The hierarchy flipped — and most marketers missed the announcement

Here's the stat that should be tattooed on every social media manager's forearm in 2026:

1 DM share is now worth roughly 15 likes in Instagram's distribution score, per Adam Mosseri's Q1 2026 statements and confirmed across 32,000+ brand accounts in GOSO's analysis. Instagram's internal data shows DM shares correlate with purchase intent 4x stronger than likes — which is exactly why the algorithm now treats them as the most powerful single signal for reaching people who don't follow you yet.

The new ranking hierarchy, according to Mosseri and the Backlinko/DataSlayer breakdown, is roughly:

Sends per reach → Watch time → Saves → Likes per reach → Profile clicks

Notice what's at the bottom of that list. The thing every "Instagram growth guru" told you to chase for a decade. Likes are now the algorithmic equivalent of small talk: polite, but not the reason anyone actually invites you back.

💔 Three behavioral shifts that broke the old playbook

Later identifies three audience changes that explain literally everything about the new algorithm. Read these slowly:

1. People became ruthless curators. Every follow is now a deliberate decision. Users tap your profile, scroll your last 9-12 posts, and decide in seconds whether you're for them. Instagram's algorithm uses topic clusters to categorize accounts — if your content jumps between unrelated themes, the system can't figure out who to show you to, so it doesn't push you anywhere. Consistency stopped being a best practice. It became a distribution requirement.

2. Attention became the scarcest resource on the platform. When you post, Instagram shows your content to a small test pool first. It watches what happens in the opening moments — do people swipe through? Watch past the first 3 seconds? Engage quickly? If the test group bounces, distribution stops cold. The opening of your content is now an audition with a 3-second cut.

3. Sharing became the ultimate currency. A like is passive. A DM is a personal endorsement — someone putting their own credibility on the line to say "you need to see this." Sprout Social's 2026 data shows sends per reach is now the single most-weighted signal because Instagram has decided (correctly) that it's a near-perfect proxy for "this content actually mattered to someone."

That's the whole game now. Build content for the DM, not for the double-tap.

🎥 Reels still dominate — but the rules changed underneath them

A few stats to anchor where the platform actually is in April 2026:

• Reels now account for ~35% of all time spent on Instagram (Later).

• Reels reach roughly 2x more accounts than other formats on average (Buffer).

• The platform processes roughly 694,000 sends per minute (Later).

• Average Instagram organic reach has dropped to ~3.5% for non-Reels content (Sprout Social).

• Recommended content mix from Social Media Examiner and Hootsuite for 2026: 60-70% Reels, with carousels for depth and Stories for retention.

But here's the part most marketers haven't internalized: watch time and completion rate now matter more than view count. A Reel that gets 100K views with a 20% completion rate will get throttled. A Reel that gets 8K views with an 85% completion rate will get pushed.

Hopper HQ's 2026 data suggests 3-5 Reels per week is the sweet spot for most accounts, with best posting windows still landing around Wed/Thu 7-9am for B2B-leaning audiences. But frequency is no longer the lever it used to be.

Which leads us to the most counterintuitive finding in this whole research stack…

🙈 Posting more is now actively making it worse

Most "post 10x a week" advice is dangerously outdated. Per Sprout's 2026 analysis: if your content isn't earning attention in the first few seconds, posting more of it just feeds the algorithm more data confirming that your content doesn't resonate.

You're not solving a reach problem. You're amplifying it.

The brands still growing on Instagram in 2026 aren't outposting anyone. They're out-intending them. Volume strategy is dead. Value strategy is the new floor.

✅ What to do this week (the actual playbook)

If you want one tactical changeover, here it is. Steal it.

1. Define what your account is about in one sentence. Not your niche — your promise. "I post about social media marketing" is a niche. "I break down what's actually working on Instagram right now, with real examples and no fluff" is a promise. People follow promises.

2. Audit your last 12 posts as a grid pitch. Open your profile. Imagine you're a stranger landing there. Are the last 9-12 posts answering "is this account going to consistently give me something I want?" If they're not — pause new posting until they are. Backfill consistency before you chase more reach.

3. Score every piece for shareability before publishing. Ask: who would someone DM this to, and why? Shareable content tends to fall into three buckets:

• It solves a problem someone's friend is dealing with right now.

• It articulates something people feel but couldn't put into words.

• It's so useful or surprising that keeping it to yourself feels selfish.

If your content doesn't fit one of those, it'll perform fine with your existing audience and basically zero strangers.

4. Earn attention on every slide, not just the first. Hooks get them in. Substance keeps them. Value at the end earns the share. Treat every carousel slide and every Reel transition as a micro-audition.

5. Stop optimizing for likes. Start optimizing for sends. Add a CTA that's actually share-friendly: "Send this to a [specific person] who needs to hear it." Lean into "tag someone who…" reframes. Make screenshot-worthy frames. The 15-likes-per-DM math means a single good share is doing more lifting than an entire mid-tier reach milestone.

☝️ The one-sentence version

Here's the whole 2026 Instagram strategy in 13 words:

Build content one specific person would feel compelled to DM to one specific friend.

Everything else — the cadence, the audio choice, the posting time, the captions — is downstream of that. The algorithm isn't punishing you. The audience is busier. The platform is just snitching on which creators figured that out and which ones didn't.

Reply and tell me which lever you're pulling first — POV, grid audit, or shareability rewrites — I'll feature the smartest reader plays in next week's edition.

See you next week, Josh

📚 Sources

• Instagram algorithm in 2026: rank signals for growth

• Instagram algorithm tips for 2026

• How the Instagram Algorithm Works: Your 2026 Guide

• Instagram Algorithm 2026: 5 Ranking Signals Mosseri Confirmed

• Instagram algorithm change 2026: the 4 signals that now matter

• Instagram Algorithm 2026: What Changed (+ How to Adapt)

• How the Instagram Algorithm Works in 2026

• Best Times to Post on Instagram 2026

• Instagram Algorithm 2026: What Changed, Ranking Signals & Growth Tips

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That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”

Disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links that pay us commissions.

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🎯 The Data-Driven Content Mix Winning on Every Platform Right Now

The biggest mistake social media managers make in 2026 isn't posting bad content. It's posting the wrong format.

Recent large-scale analyses of tens of millions of posts across every major platform have made one thing strikingly clear: the best-performing format changes dramatically from platform to platform — and most managers are using a one-size-fits-all approach that's leaving engagement on the table.

Here's the content mix that's actually working this spring and summer, platform by platform, with the exact ratios and data to back it up.

🌈 Instagram: Reels for reach, carousels for everything else

Instagram's content hierarchy has gotten surprisingly nuanced. The old advice of "just post more Reels" is now only half right.

The data: Reels generate 2.25x more reach than single-image posts and 1.36x more than carousels. But here's the twist — carousels actually achieve a 6.9% median engagement rate, outperforming Reels (3.3%), single images (4.4%), and even Stories (5.1%). Carousels are Instagram's quiet engagement powerhouse.

🏆 The winning mix:

• 60-70% Reels (15-30 seconds, hook in the first second) — this is your discovery engine

• 20-30% Carousels (educational, story-driven, swipeable) — this is your conversion engine

• 10% Single images or culture posts — for variety and brand personality

• Daily Stories running alongside everything — your relationship layer

The nuance nobody talks about: Your account size should shift the ratio. Under 5K followers? Lean harder into Reels — you need discovery. Over 10K? Shift toward carousels — your audience already found you, now convert them into loyal followers and buyers. The best accounts in this bracket are posting 4-7 Reels and 2-3 carousels per week, with Stories filling the gaps daily.

Reels get you found. Carousels get you followed. Stories keep people warm. That's the system.

🔥 Facebook: The platform where format barely matters (but Reels still win reach)

Here's a stat that surprises most people: Facebook is the most format-agnostic platform in every major 2026 benchmark study. Images led with a 5.2% median engagement rate, video hit 4.84%, and text posts came in at 4.76%. That's less than half a percentage point separating the top three formats.

So format matters less on Facebook than anywhere else. But reach is a different story. Facebook Reels are getting 3-5x the organic reach of standard feed posts, and 22% higher engagement than regular video. The algorithm is clearly pushing short-form video hard.

🏆 The winning mix:

• 50% Facebook Reels (15-90 seconds) — your organic reach driver

• 25% Native images or carousels with text overlay

• 15% Facebook Live or longer video — still valuable for community depth

• 10% Community engagement posts — polls, questions, UGC

The key insight: Text posts from brand pages without a visual element are getting algorithmically deprioritized — reach can drop to near zero. Always pair text with an image or video, even if the image is secondary.

Facebook's real superpower in 2026 isn't any single format — it's Groups. If you're running a brand community, the format rules above are secondary to showing up consistently in discussions and building trust through replies. Accounts that reply to comments outperform those that don't by significant margins on every platform — but Facebook rewards participation especially hard.

🎥 TikTok: Video is still king, but photos are the sleeper

TikTok remains a video-first platform — that hasn't changed. Video earns a 3.39% median engagement rate, which is 77% higher than carousels and photo posts. But here's what's shifting: TikTok now supports image carousels (photo slides), and they're quietly becoming a testing ground for creators who want to diversify.

🏆 The winning mix:

• 80% Short-form video (15-60 seconds performs best, though TikTok now supports up to 60 minutes)

• 10-15% Image carousels/photo slides — for listicles, tips, and educational content

• 5-10% Trend participation — sounds, challenges, duets

The cadence that works: 1-3 posts per day, built around 3-5 content pillars. The best TikTok strategies in 2026 are balancing educational/how-to content, entertainment and brand personality, UGC and customer stories, and trend participation — rotating so the feed never feels one-note.

The big 2026 shift: TikTok is rewarding longer watch time more than ever. A 60-second video that holds attention will outperform a 15-second video that gets fast swipes. Hooks still matter enormously (first 1-3 seconds), but the algorithm now values retention over raw views. Don't just be catchy — be worth watching.

📺 YouTube: The three-layer system

YouTube's content strategy has evolved into the clearest funnel of any platform. The best creators are running a deliberate three-layer system.

🏆 The winning mix:

• 3-5 Shorts per week — your awareness layer and testing ground

• 1-2 long-form videos per week — your loyalty and monetization engine

• Community posts between uploads — polls, updates, and behind-the-scenes to sustain engagement

Why this works: YouTube Shorts now feed 25-30% of new long-form audience discovery. Channels using Shorts as a funnel to long-form see 30-40% higher subscriber conversion rates. The strategy is straightforward: Shorts cast a wide net, long-form converts that attention into subscribers and revenue, and community posts keep the relationship alive between videos.

The monetization angle: Shorts CPMs are still dramatically lower than long-form (average RPM of $0.75-$2.50 for Shorts vs. much higher for long-form). So Shorts are a reach play, not a revenue play. The money is in long-form — but you need Shorts to keep feeding the pipeline.

🪐 The universal rules across every platform

After digging through all this data, three principles hold true everywhere:

1. The 60/40 reach-to-engagement split. Allocate roughly 60-70% of content to reach-focused formats (Reels, Shorts, video) and 30-40% to engagement-focused formats (carousels, images, community posts). This keeps your audience growing while nurturing the people who already follow you.

2. Reply to comments. Seriously. The data consistently shows accounts that reply to comments outperform those that don't — by as much as 42% on Threads and 30% on LinkedIn. This isn't a format choice, it's a behavior choice. And it's the single highest-leverage activity most managers skip.

3. Consistency beats frequency. The biggest gap in the data isn't between posting three times versus five times a week. It's between posting and not posting. Three posts a week for 12 months will demolish seven posts a week for two months. Pick a cadence you can sustain and protect it ruthlessly.

🏛️ The content pillar framework that ties it all together

Formats are what you post. But you also need a system for what you talk about. The best managers in 2026 are running 4-6 content pillars with a clear ratio:

• 40% Educate — teach something useful

• 30% Entertain — personality, humor, trending moments

• 20% Inspire — success stories, transformations, motivation

• 10% Promote — direct product or offer content

Layer this pillar ratio on top of your platform-specific format mix, and you have a complete content system — not just a calendar full of random posts.

✅ The bottom line

The days of "just post Reels" or "video is king everywhere" are over. The best social media managers in 2026 are format-fluid — choosing Reels on Instagram for reach, carousels for engagement, Shorts on YouTube as a subscriber funnel, and leaning into Facebook's format-agnostic algorithm.

The data is clear: it's not about picking one winning format. It's about mixing formats strategically so each one does its job.

Sources:

• 2026 Instagram Organic Engagement Benchmarks — Social Insider

• Carousel vs Reels in 2026: Which Actually Gets You Followers — The Second Brain

• Instagram Reach in 2026: How to Grow Faster With Reels, Carousels, and Caption SEO — TrueFuture Media

• Facebook Formats in 2026: A Strategic Content Guide — Giovanni Perilli

• TikTok Content Strategy: How to Plan, Post, and Grow in 2026 — SEO Sherpa

• How to Balance YouTube Shorts and Long-Form Content for Maximum ROI in 2026 — Marketing Agent

• Social Media Strategy Template 2026: Full Framework — Digital Applied

• Social Media Engagement In 2026 Shows Clear Shifts — eCommerce Bridge

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🔥 Top 12 AI Image Generators for High-Quality Social Media Images

Stock photos had a good run. But in 2026, they're the fastest way to make your feed look like everyone else's.

Here's the reality: 71% of social media images are now AI-generated, and businesses using AI-created visuals report 15-25% higher engagement rates than those relying on traditional imagery. The AI image generation market has exploded to over $15 billion this year alone, growing 30% year over year.

Whether you're a solo creator or managing a brand's entire social presence, the right AI image tool can replace hours of searching for "close enough" stock photos with visuals that actually match your vision — in seconds.

I tested and researched the top tools so you don't have to. Here are the 12 best AI image generators for social media in 2026, what each one does best, and which ones are worth your money.

🏆 The Top Tier

1. Midjourney v7 — Best overall image quality

Midjourney remains the gold standard for stunning, artistic visuals.

V7 introduced a personalization system that learns your aesthetic preferences, so outputs get more "you" over time. It produces the most visually striking images across photorealism, illustration, and concept art — the kind of visuals that stop the scroll.

The catch? No free tier. Plans start at $10/month with unlimited relaxed-mode generations. If you post image-heavy content on Instagram or LinkedIn, this is worth every penny.

2. ChatGPT / GPT Image (OpenAI) — Best prompt understanding

OpenAI's latest image model (the successor to DALL-E 3) is the smartest generator on the market when it comes to understanding complex instructions.

Tell it exactly what you want — multiple elements, specific compositions, detailed scenes — and it nails it. Text rendering is solid too. Accessible through ChatGPT Plus at $20/month (capped at roughly 50 images per 3 hours).

If you already pay for ChatGPT, this is a no-brainer add-on.

3. Ideogram 3.0 — Best text-in-image rendering

Built by former Google Brain researchers, Ideogram was purpose-built for one thing most AI generators still botch: putting readable text inside images.

It achieves roughly 90% text-rendering accuracy — making it perfect for social media quote cards, promotional banners, infographics, and any visual where the words matter as much as the imagery.

The Style Reference feature also lets you maintain visual consistency across posts. Plans start at just $7/month for 400 images.

🎯 The Powerhouse Free Options

4. Canva Dream Lab (powered by Leonardo AI) — Best for integrated workflows

After acquiring Leonardo AI, Canva built Dream Lab directly into its design platform. Generate an image, then immediately drop it into a social media template, add your brand fonts, resize for every platform — all without leaving Canva.

It supports 15+ artistic styles and reference image uploads. If you already use Canva (and let's be honest, you probably do), Dream Lab removes the need for a separate image generator entirely. Free on Canva Pro plans.

5. Microsoft Designer — Best free DALL-E access

Microsoft Designer gives you DALL-E-powered image generation for free, integrated into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

It's surprisingly capable for social media graphics — you can generate images and immediately design posts, invitations, and visual content around them. Not the most powerful generator on this list, but the price (free) and the seamless workflow make it a strong choice for teams already in Microsoft's world.

6. Leonardo AI — Most generous free tier

Leonardo offers 150 free images per day — by far the most generous free allocation of any major generator. It runs on custom-built models (Lucid Origin and Phoenix) that produce high-quality results across styles.

If you need volume — say, generating dozens of visual options for a content calendar — Leonardo lets you experiment freely without watching a credit counter tick down.

7. Meta AI — Built into your social platforms

Meta's image generator lives inside Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

The quality doesn't match Midjourney or Ideogram, but the convenience is unbeatable — generate images without leaving the apps you're already posting to.

Best for quick, lightweight visual creation when you need something fast and "good enough" rather than portfolio-perfect. Free.

👩‍💻 The Specialists

8. Adobe Firefly — Best for commercial safety

If you work with brands that have legal teams (or you ARE the legal team), Firefly is your safest bet. Adobe trained it exclusively on licensed content and provides IP indemnification — meaning Adobe will defend you if there's ever a copyright claim on a Firefly-generated image.

It also recently launched custom models that let you train on your own brand imagery to maintain visual consistency.

The trade-off: outputs tend to be more conservative and less "wow" than Midjourney. But for commercial work where legal risk matters, nothing else comes close. Access through Adobe's Creative Cloud plans.

9. Flux 2 — Best quality-per-dollar ratio

Flux is the darling of the AI art community for a reason: its quality rivals Midjourney at a fraction of the cost.

The Schnell model generates images in under a second at roughly $0.015 per image. Flux 2 Max is particularly impressive for product photography — lighting, materials, and details look professional without post-processing. It also supports multi-reference conditioning (up to 10 reference images) for brand consistency. Available through various platforms and APIs.

10. Grok (xAI) — Built into X/Twitter

Grok's image generator, Aurora, is integrated directly into the X platform. If X is a major channel for you, the native integration means you can generate and post without switching tools.

Image quality has improved significantly, though it still trails the top-tier dedicated generators. The real value is speed and convenience for X-first creators. Included with X Premium.

11. Stable Diffusion — Best for full creative control

Stable Diffusion is open-source, which means you can run it locally, customize it endlessly, and never pay per image.

The learning curve is steeper than any other tool on this list — but for creators who want total control over their outputs (custom models, fine-tuning on brand assets, no content filters), nothing offers more flexibility. Best suited for technically inclined creators or teams with a developer who can set it up. Free and open-source.

12. NightCafe / SeaArt — Best for experimentation

These community-driven platforms give you access to multiple AI models in one place — try Stable Diffusion, Flux, and other models without setting anything up yourself.

Generous free credit systems, active communities for inspiration, and beginner-friendly interfaces make them great starting points if you're still figuring out which AI aesthetic fits your brand. Free tiers available.

📈 How to pick the right one for your workflow

The smartest approach isn't picking one tool and ignoring the rest. The creators getting the best results in 2026 are combining platforms strategically:

Use Midjourney or Flux for hero images — the high-impact visuals that anchor a post. Use Ideogram for anything with text — quote graphics, promotional banners, event announcements.

Use Canva Dream Lab for rapid production — generating and designing platform-ready posts in one workflow. Use Adobe Firefly when legal and commercial safety matters. And use Leonardo AI or Meta AI for high-volume experimentation when you need lots of options fast.

✅ Three rules for AI images that actually perform

Match the platform's visual language. A hyper-polished Midjourney render might crush it on LinkedIn but feel inauthentic on TikTok. Study what performs natively on each platform and generate accordingly.

Don't let AI make you lazy. 71% of marketers say AI-created posts outperform human-only ones — but platforms are also starting to penalize low-quality AI "slop." The bar is rising fast. Use AI to generate raw material, then add your creative direction, brand elements, and editorial judgment.

Be transparent. Close to half of consumers distrust unlabeled AI content. When your audience knows (or suspects) an image is AI-generated, owning it builds more trust than hiding it. A simple "created with AI" note goes a long way.

💥 The bottom line

The AI image generation landscape moves fast, but the opportunity for social media managers is clear: better visuals, faster production, lower costs.

Whether you start with a free tool like Leonardo AI or go straight to Midjourney, the important thing is to start experimenting now — before your competitors' feeds make yours look like a stock photo graveyard.

Sources:

• The 8 Best AI Image Generators in 2026 — Zapier

• Best AI Image Generators in 2026 (Tested With Same Prompts) — Alloy Press

• Best AI Image Generators for Social Media (2026 Edition) — ImagineArt

• 10 Best AI Image Generators in 2026 — fal.ai

• Best AI Image Generators 2026: 12 Tools Tested and Compared — Axis Intelligence

• 47 AI Image Generation Statistics for 2026 — Imagera AI

• AI in Social Media Tools Statistics 2026 — SQ Magazine

• AI Image Generation Report 2026: Market Size, Tools & Trends — ZSky AI

• Midjourney vs DALL-E (2026): The Ultimate Comparison — Neuronad

• Canva Debuts Powerful Dream Lab Image Generator — DesignTAXI

• Adobe Firefly Expands Video and Image Creation — Adobe Blog

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”

Disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links that pay us commissions.

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That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…

Go BIG or go home!

~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”

Disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links that pay us commissions.

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