Audience growth

Instagram creators can also find prospective followers through friends sharing their content: Instagram for Creators reported in February 2025 that people reshared Reels more than 4.5 billion times daily across Instagram and Facebook combined.3 Discovery can extend outside Instagram through image previews of public posts shared to Twitter, which show people what a link contains before they open it.8 Instagram for Creators’ profile of Erling Haaland provides an example of video publishing alongside audience growth: in 2025, he shifted toward camera-roll videos and more personal glimpses of daily life.9 Instagram reported that he received more than 500 million Reels views in a year and had the fastest follower growth of any footballer on the platform.9

To understand what contributes to audience growth, Mosseri’s February 2025 guidance identifies three useful measures: average watch time for Reels, likes divided by the number of people reached, and sends divided by the number of people reached.10 He explains that these measures indicate how watchable, likable and shareable content is, and recommends looking for patterns across posts.10 A May 2022 Meta patent describes another way to examine growth: counting people who follow or unfollow after interacting with a particular piece of content.11 The Meta patent proposes showing those two counts and their difference as insights about growth from that content; it describes a networking-system design rather than announcing an Instagram feature.11

For audience growth, Mosseri recommends repeatable content concepts because they reduce the need to invent something entirely new each day and give people a reason to follow an account.12 He also advises continued experimentation because people’s interests can change and familiar ideas can lose their appeal even when Instagram’s system for ordering content does not change.12 For personalized help with that work, Instagram for Creators directs creators to open its in-app Best Practices destination, which offers tips and educational Reels.13 The NCAA x Meta NIL Empower Program illustrates a structured approach to content creation, with biweekly content recommendations and sessions covering personal branding, growing an audience and using Reels.14

For audience growth during a larger change in content, Mosseri’s May 2025 advice is usually to keep the existing account rather than start again.4 Keeping the existing account allows creators to maintain their follower base and helps Instagram understand who is interested in them, which he says can support growth over time.4 A new account may make more sense when the new subject has nothing to do with the old content, or when the creator wants a different identity without an association with their previous name or pseudonym.4