Will Instagram’s algorithm update hurt your business (or cure your brain rot?) - 2025

It's Fall /25 and Instagram is testing algorithm updates that could change how often you show up in front of your ideal clients.

In this episode we talk about how this change could be good for business, rage bait, the rise of AI-generated content and actionable tips for enjoying your time spent online and protecting yourself from brain rot.

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➡️ The Hank Green Video I mentioned: https://www.tiktok.com/@hankgreen1/video/7561220435745049886?lang=en

This one’s part digital detox, part Instagram strategy. Listen now if you want your social media to feel like a place you want to hang out—so your business content reflects that energy too.

✨ Keywords: social media marketing, business, Sora, AI Generated content, Instagram updates.

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Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

Jenna Harding: My husband and I hopped on a plane to France for our annual vacation, what has become annual, so I am just claiming it and I'm just gonna call it that so that it continues forever until we die. in France right now. I'm actually in Nice on the floor of my Airbnb and... A couple of guys in front of me in the plane were having a conversation that I obviously eavesdropped on. it was a little bit pretentious, I'm not gonna lie, but I was eavesdropping so I don't get a vote. they were talking about food and nutrition and wellness. These guys don't know each other, but they both looked, I don't know, they look like healthy guys. We were in business class, so this is the type of conversations that you're hearing up there, like I don't know, everybody's got like something to prove. Anyway, the one guy said something I had never heard before he said this saying I think it's a saying he said if you eat shit you die young and They were going on to talk about processed foods and I think one of them worked in the egg industry I thought that was an interesting thing to say. You know, immediately made me feel a little bit guilty for the hot, salted cashews in front of me. but it popped back up into my head again later on in the week. Cause we're going to be talking today about a change that Instagram is beta testing and how it might affect your business. But first I want to look at it for how it might affect you. Stay with me as I put all the pieces together here. Hank Green is this scientist guy on TikTok and he's really fun to listen to and he often explains sciencey things to us. And I saw him go on a bit of a tirade on TikTok the other day, talking about rage bait on the internet. the story goes, there was, and content warning like this, yeah, whatever, this isn't cute. Sora is the new AI platform where you can put in a prompt and it makes a really realistic looking video and you don't need any skills. You just need to pay to use Sora and you can make these really realistic looking videos. You've probably seen some online and just thought they were real. That's how real this stuff is looking right now. Jenna Warriner (02:07) someone made a Sora generated video of someone climbing Mount Everest. Jenna Warriner (02:14) with their dog and then their dog dying and burying it on Everest. Now that did not happen. That did not happen. This was a rage bait video. And as Hank said in his video, half the audience was saying RIP and feeling so bad for the dog. Half the audience in the comment section was angry at this person for putting her dog in this position, but none of it ever existed except for as an idea in some creeps head that they inputted into Sora to make this video. And he went on to say, this is rage bait. what's crazy about this particular video is it was rage bait from both sides. from two different perspectives of people had rage at this. But people create content like this because they know it gets views, because it gets comments from angry people. And if it elicits an emotional reaction, which is one of our rules we know about viral content, right? It elicits an emotional reaction, in this case, rage. So then it gets a ton of views. So people create it to make us angry so they get views. And then what ends up happening is you open your phone and get mad and then you keep scrolling mad. We're not getting mad once, not commenting and closing our phones. If you are, kudos. Keep doing what you're doing, that's amazing. But billions of people are getting angry and continuing to watch and continuing to scroll and comment and then the videos get seen by more people because they get comments. And what he said was, you know, with Sora and with people understanding this now about psychology of virality, people get this, so they're doing it more. And we risk this world where media becomes predominantly just this rage bait. Especially since apps like this make it so easy for people to create I was hiking along the Mediterranean Sea today telling my husband about this whole situation, everything that's going on, And I told him that Hank says you are the content you consume. And then my husband said, yeah, I mean, we've been told since we were little kids, you are what you eat. And it's kind of just the new version of that. And I loved how he put that you are what you eat. You are what you consume. eat shit die young If you're watching this angry content, you're going to get more angry. Then you're going to be bad at running your business. Then you're going to be bad at your relationships. You're just going to be angry, right? And have all of this enter this. negative energy inside you. and if you're even not quite sold on that, think about how different your life would be if you listened to business books and podcasts that lift you up and make you feel good and... Happy music. Like you're gonna have a completely different energy about yourself and about your life and then you're gonna attract more things to you because people want to be around people who are listening to happy music in their ears. You know what I'm saying? Now there is an upside. There is an upside. So let's talk about this. feature that Instagram is slowly rolling out, because it's really interesting. So you can now choose a handful of topics that are things that you're interested in. in pretty much every platform, even really random platforms when you sign up for them, it's not uncommon to choose from a list of topics. And then it says, OK, great, we're going to feed you more of those things. That's not uncommon, but basically they're leaning into it right now and they want to make it more possible for users to control their own feeds. So, before this change, the algorithm is in charge of showing you what you want to see based on your activity, based on what you interact with, based on a bazillion factors, But what they're going to add to this now is what you have told the platform you want to see. Think of it like every morning they're feeding you breakfast, they're putting this beautiful frittata in front of you, and now there's gonna be one more ingredient that goes into this frittata, right? One more new vegetable. It's still the same old frittata, but it's gonna be influenced by the flavors of this new addition. Should you worry? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Because if you've been to any of my seminars or worked with me at all, you know that there is one thing you need to do to get more views on Instagram and that is to get when you work with me at Magic Marketing Machine, I'll tell you about my engagement attractors strategy so that we can build your posts intentionally to get engagement instead of just hoping for it. So you know you need to get engagement and in that way, the best content is going to win. The best content always wins. If that is a Sora generated rage bait video, it's gonna win. But if your content is amazing and you show up with amazing messaging and eye contact with that camera and happy music in your ears, then you will win. Plus, wouldn't you rather that your content is shown to the people who are interested in it and who want to see it? Isn't that a good thing? If people say they want to see... business advice, I hope I show up in front of them. If they want to see social media marketing tips, I hope I show up in front of them. If they're already choosing that, this is actually better for the industry that they've selected. By the way, I just whispered about an offer that we're playing with right now. So my private clients in Magic Marketing Machine get weekly coworking calls. We started it this September and they've been a huge hit. So the is every Tuesday morning in your inbox you get a prompt. And usually this post prompt, it's a bit of a formula and it's often based on something that I've posted that's performed well or a new skill like how to do a transition or a voiceover we did last week and a bunch of people who had never done voiceovers tried a voiceover We told them exactly how to do it and they realized hey This is easy for me and I don't need to wash my hair. So anyway everybody meets up on a Tuesday. we spend 10 minutes explaining the prompt and then do quiet working time while my team supports you in the chat. So if any questions come up or you write your hook and you want somebody to look at it, you can pop it into the chat. And then in the last 10 minutes, we come off mute. And if anybody has any final questions, they can ask you can hit publish on your post and share the link in the chat. And everybody hipes each other up and it's become this really fun community to make hyper speed, fast, fast, fast content, to be accountable to yourself, to show up and stay super consistent. in that hour every Tuesday, you know for sure you're gonna get a post up for your business. the reason I'm telling you this is if you're already in Magic Marketing Machine, come join us on a Tuesday. They've been so fun, but we've also now opened it up to the public. So what we've done is created a membership and we're still sort of beta testing this to see how it goes. But I just whispered about it on Instagram this week and people seemed really into it. So I'm going to put the link below this episode. You can sign up come to these calls, get your weekly prompt, spend time with my MMM coaches, spend time with the community feel the energy in these rooms, stay accountable and create content fast. It's a membership, you can cancel at any time. We're meeting every Tuesday. We'll let you know if we have to take a day off for the holidays or anything like that. But yeah, I think it's gonna be really cool. So if you wanna hang out with a bunch of cool people who are really good at social media, because it's my clients, right? So a lot of them are very good. They're not necessarily beginners, but it's okay for it to be all levels as well. One last thing I wanted to say on this topic of curating your feed. Please use the block button. Please use the mute button. Please follow and unfollow. you're allowed to follow whoever you want. It's not gonna like the algorithm isn't going to show you to fewer of your idle clients because you follow a bunch of funny dog accounts. Okay. So you're allowed to follow whoever you want. And I've always encouraged my clients to do that because you should be happy when you open Instagram. It should be a place that you want to hang out because then your content is going to be better and you're going to post more. to hate it and you don't feel like you need to just follow your idoclines or stay in your industry, that's actually a myth. And if you follow somebody that triggers you, you can always mute them and they won't know that you muted them. You can protect their relationship, like they won't feel like you unfollowed them if it's someone you know. Anyway, my dears, Au revoir from France and we have some really juicy episodes coming up. They were all too long and too intense for me to post this week, but We're going to talk about pricing. I brought in a expert copywriter. There's a lot of really good stuff coming up. So I will see you next Monday.