Hear me out. Your reach in the analytics is divided into several segments. Explore. Directly through your profile (people browsing your page and intentionally selecting a post to preview). Hashtags. And Home feed.

I noticed in the world that is post the introduction of Instagram reels that the home feed reach is higher for posts that are not reels, or IGTV. It may be even higher for reels. But that increase didn’t come at the expense of the normal reach of posts that are not reels. That is either the same or even higher.

That said, it is important to note that the home feed reach is what the algorithm does for you. So any changes in the algorithm will be immediately reflected in the reach of your posts in the home feed of other people. Since that hasn’t changed, then you can declare that Instagram didn’t screw us over to push us all into marketing their new reels feature, which is smart, because they want to become the next TikTok, without giving up being Instagram in the process.

However, I noticed a huge decrease in the hashtags reach for normal posts. That has nothing to do with the algorithm. Reasons for that might be people who follow those hashtags are no longer interested in the type of content you put out into them.

I noticed that just because you targeted many hashtags under 100k doesn’t mean you will get traffic over there. I tried hashtags that other people went viral because of and didn’t get any good reach from them. Several times. The point is in the past any hashtags almost did the job. Now it’s all spam and repetitive hustle culture or workout girl posts. This is why many are saying hashtags don’t work anymore. Not because of the algorithm or Instagram itself, but because of the people abusing these hashtags and diluting what’s under them with their spam. Also the explore page is awesome and people have become divided between it and hashtags now more than before.