How to grow on Instagram in 2026

Welcome to Shining New Clients, the marketing podcast that helps you attract shiny new clients to your business. We talk about social media marketing. I'll give you actionable strategies to get more clients today and the mindset that it takes to grow a business all in 25 minutes or less. Whether you're an online business owner or have an in-person service or even a course or membership. If you've got a service-based business, this is the show you need to fill your calendar. I'm Jenna Harding, your new marketing coach, and this is Shining New Clients. This week someone asked me for my opinion on whether Instagram just maybe doesn't work for some people. And my answer was a very fast and immediate "No, I don't think that at all. I think it'll work for everybody." And I know, no one should make sweeping generalizations about anything online marketing related. But the thing is Instagram is a computer code. It's a computer code. The algorithm is looking for what's called signals. That's the technical term for it in order to decide if it should show your content to someone. So it doesn't rely on liking you. It's not mad because you posted a bikini pic last week. It doesn't get angry at you because you broke a rule and it gave you an alert being like, "Don't do that." You unfollowed too many people in a row. Don't do that. It doesn't punish you later on for that decision. That's not how it works. Today I'm going to tell you how the Instagram algorithm works based on what we know right now today in 2026. And if your account isn't growing, why that might be. And what to do to fix it. Over the years, I have managed dozens of accounts. I know that might not sound like a huge number because I haven't quite managed 100 accounts or projects on my own. So the next way that I can position it is dozens, which is actually a freaking lot, right? Between the accounts that I've run for like one-offs, the people that I've consulted for, the businesses where I have run their social media with my own two thumbs, the ones that my agency ran. Actually, if I include consulting, it might have got 200. And through my program, Magic Marketing Machine, I have supported over 1200 business owners now. So that's awesome. I've seen inside a lot of accounts. Here's how the algorithm works in a nutshell. And I say in a nutshell, because there are hundreds if not thousands of elements that go into the Instagram algorithm. And we don't know them all as marketers. Like only a select few elite people over at meta actually know what's going on. If that actually probably the algorithm has a bit of a mind of its own at this point. But anyway, the point is they don't tell us everything that goes into the algorithm because otherwise everyone would gain the system, right? There's only one thing that you actually need to know. Out of all of the algorithm updates, out of all of the hype, out of all of the Instagram is changing again. Algorithms changed again. No matter what, this one thing has been true. And this one thing, I have been preaching and teaching four years and it has not changed and it will not change. And it's true for every platform. How about that? Have you heard the term the attention economy? We're in the attention economy. Everyone is vying for attention. That's a clue. So here's how the algorithm works. You put up a post. Instagram's going to show it to some of your followers and some strangers. If those people touch their screens or hover over your post for a long period of time, that is an engagement signal. And the algorithm will test this post on another small group of people. Okay? If those new eyeballs touch their screens or watch your video all the way to the end or better yet, watch your video at least 50% of the way through and touch their screens, then the algorithm goes, "I am just a computer code. You have just fed me my love language, which is people touching the screen. People have touched the screen on this post, so I will show it to more people and so on and so forth." That's it. So why every social media manager and content teacher on the internet is telling you that you need engagement? Because that is what is going to make the algorithm show your post to more people. Where people go wrong is they wish for engagement. They hope for engagement. They put their hands on their hips and get grumpy and say, "I need more engagement. No one's engaging." But then you don't actually actively design your posts to get engagement. So that's why I created engagement attractors. A term meaning how you're going to optimize a post to get it to be touched, right? And I teach this in magic marketing machine. It's one of the first things I teach my clients. You design your post to be touched. Here's the simplest one. So just hoping someone comments, ask a question in your caption. Instead of seeing people commenting and just like being proud of yourself and closing your phone, respond to their comments like their comments, all of that counts as the post getting more engagement. Better yet, answer their comment with a question. So they come back and comment a third time. Now the algorithm is going to get all these signals that people are enjoying your content. So every piece of content my clients put up, they are building in engagement attractors so that the algorithm is happy and gives them more views and their post gets in front of more people. Do you want to know what time I got so many views on the stupidest thing? So picture this, I'm living alone in my bachelor apartment and it's like a cheap bachelor apartment in not a very good area. And my toilet broke. It stopped flushing and I was like, well, I am going to woman up and be my own handy man and fix this toilet. And it turns out, you know, what broke was very simple, but I had only ever lived in apartments or with my family and I'd never been in charge of fixing stuff. So I googled it, I went to the hardware store, I got the things I needed and then I don't know what came over me, but Facebook live had pretty much just been invented. I just launched. So this would have been like, I don't know, 2017, like something like that. And so I prop up my camera and I go live fixing my toilet in my tiny little bathroom. This bathroom was so small when I first started dating my husband Jordan, he couldn't stand in this bathroom in order to pee to like lean back and his head went clear over the shower curtain in the shower. It was fine for me. It was perfect me sized, but he did not fit in this apartment. It's one of the big reasons that we moved in together as he goes, he didn't fit in my house. So anyway, I prop up my camera and I fixed my toilet while narrating the whole thing. And I didn't know how it was going to go. I didn't know if I would actually fix it. But people watched it and people commented so much on it, whether they were laughing, whether they were confused, what is this? What are we watching? Oh my gosh, go Jenna, whether they're cheering me on, whether they're giving me advice, so many people watched this and it got so many views, so many people tuned in for this nonsense. And let me tell you, I was not an influencer at the time. This was my personal Facebook. The people following me on here were just like people I'd worked with over the years. People I knew from college, like that sort of thing. And then so many people brought this up to me over the next couple of years. Like I would go see cousins I hadn't seen in ages and they'd be like, "Ha ha, that time you fixed your toilet." It got traction because people commented on it, because people watched it for several seconds or minutes, right? It got engagement and so the algorithm showed it to more and more people. A lot of times the reason your account isn't performing well is because you have this sort of like, if I build it, they will come mentality, which just isn't true, right? And I'm not going to lie, photographers are really guilty of this. More so than anybody else, they want to post their work, their art, understandably, and just hope that people like it. But if it's not built to be touched, like a single photo is the worst thing that you can post on Instagram right now. There are very few ways for somebody to interact with a photo. We look at it, we admire it for a second. It only takes a millisecond for us to admire the photo, unlike a video that we're going to have around for longer. So we look at that photo, we admire it, and we scroll on. Plus, if it's not formatted, right, it's only going to take up a snippet of someone's screen versus a video that's going to take up more of someone's screen, which means they stay on it for longer. So a photo is like the least optimized thing that you could post on Instagram. People post flyers promoting their work or flyers promoting their offer. No one's going to engage with that. If you build it there, we'll come and tell you it doesn't work. We need to be optimizing our posts. We need to design our posts to be touched, to be optimized in order for the algorithm to stay happy and for this to get in front of people. And it's a very simple learning curve. It does not take very much to learn this stuff. Like I said, it's one of the first things I'm going to teach you in Magic Marketing Machine. My program to help service business owners get clients from Instagram. It's very simple, but you need to know how to do it. So a lot of people when Instagram isn't working for them, that's why they're just not optimizing their posts period. The next one is not quite so black and white because it's mindset. Unfortunately, even me just saying this right now will probably fall on deaf ears. The people, other people, not you, not you, of course, not you. I don't mean you. I mean the other people listening to this show, who this, who need to hear this, they're not going to be able to hear it. because that's the nature of the beast. So sometimes our mindset is one giant earplug, and it's keeping us from hearing the advice that we need to hear. Let me give you a really simple example of how mindset can get in the way here. And that's also sidebar why this show has so many mindset episodes, because I'm not a mindset coach. MMM will change your mindset, and people tell me that all the time, when my clients tell me that all the time that they have a new lease on Instagram and vigor and stuff, but those aren't their words. They say it changed my entire mindset. Somebody just said that to me. Anyway, so the program will change your mindset, but it's not a mindset program, which is why I make shiny new clients have so much mindset, because I know that that's often what people need, and all of us benefit from. So let me give you an example of where someone's mindset might get in the way. Say someone deep seated has a serious fear of people thinking they're stupid, all right? Who knows where it came from, no place good, but you've got this like deep fear of people thinking you're stupid. What's gonna happen then in your content? You're going to use big words, because you want people to think you're fancy, and then instead you end up not communicating effectively to your target market, because you're using like expert jargon, and then you over-explain yourself, and another side effect of being really afraid that people are gonna think you're dumb, is you're afraid to do anything with personality, because personality isn't professional and smart, so then you limit all your personality, all your graphics are blue and white, and really corporate looking, and you only show up in a blazer in front of a white wall, and the internet goes, this isn't what we're here for. The internet can sense that you have a wall up, and they can sense that fear, even if people don't know they're sensing it. So then the mindset of you like, fearing looking dumb, makes you film things a certain way, which makes it perform poorly. Showing up is vulnerable. Being on camera is inherently vulnerable. Sometimes we're gonna need to look inward at those things about us, and break through those fears in that mindset, and then it directly improves your marketing. I wish it wasn't so, but so it is. Once you know how to optimize your posts, and you're on the lookout for these mindset things, especially if you're getting feedback on your posts, like you get in the program, which I'm launching right now, so I'm talking about Magic Marketing Machine a lot. So if you wanna get clients from Instagram in 2026, now is the time to enroll, especially if you're streaming this the week that it comes out, because you're gonna get a bonus when you enroll by Friday. So there's more information on the program below if you wanna work personally with me, inside the program, get more views, get more engagement, learn super speedy systems, and most importantly, use a proven strategy, which is the other place people are going wrong, which is stopping their account from converting. The high level of the strategy that you're gonna get in Magic Marketing Machine is growth nurture sales. The growth content gets you followers and views, and gets people's eyes on you. The nurture content makes them trust you and fall in love with you. The sales content makes them buy and no one will buy until they trust you. So all these pieces are integral to the puzzle. Now, sometimes people take that and they go, okay, God is Jenna, God is growth nurture sales. I can't express enough, that's the high level of how this works. Each of these buckets has important ingredients in it, but you do get guided support all the way along to implement every piece of it. Magic Marketing Machine is a roadmap. We're right there holding your hand with a space where you can ask coaches questions five days a week. We walk you through how to effectively use this proven strategy, and I have seen this just blow up people's accounts. I've seen people use this strategy and make $100,000. I have a school teacher who made $100,000 with her side job using this strategy. What most people do is you're just trying to survive on Instagram, right? You're just trying to get stuff up online. You're just trying to post. You're just trying to keep up, which I understand like that's where most people are at, and that's also why their accounts don't convert. Even if they grow, they don't sell. Even some of them that are huge because they get good at growing and they start to understand how that works, but then they don't sell. I told you before about my client who had almost a million followers across platforms and she was not selling until we came and worked together and now she sells out her launches in less than 20 minutes. Yes, sells out. Sells out. Insane. So all these pieces come together, right? You learn how to optimize your posts. Then you learn what to post and then you learn how to do that quickly. Do you use everything that I learned when I was managing all those accounts all those years by myself to do this quickly, to make content faster, to release perfectionism, to batch your content if you want to. So you get more views, you use the strategy so you can actually sell and then you do it quickly. And that strategy's not going anywhere because it is based on no like and trust. It is based on human psychology. It is based on what works. You get people's attention, you earn their trust and then you sell to them. We're just doing it on Instagram. That's why you can also use this in your email marketing. You can use this. My sister uses this strategy for her Facebook marketing and gets like, she's doing great on Facebook. She's like going wild on Facebook. She gets paid for her views now and everything. Someone in Magic Marketing Machine actually just asked. She's like, my carousels are performing really, really well, better than my Reels. And she looked at her insights and she was asking some questions about it. And she's like, what does this say about my clientele? What does this say about my followers? Or am I taking this too seriously? And I was like, listen, if it's working, keep doing it, right? When something works, do it again. But the way that I like to look at this is the best content always wins. The best content always wins. Something that interests people and they interact with is gonna win. You could post the most ground breaking reel. But if it's got a slow start, no engagement attractors, goes over three minutes, no one has an easy way to interact with it, then the algorithm doesn't get the signals it needs. It doesn't show it to more people. And the reason I told her this in this way is because even if there was more that we could like psychoanalyze about her people, it doesn't really help us as much as keep doing what works the best content wins. Like, maybe it was the hook on her carousel, maybe it was what she was talking about, maybe she had a great call to action and lots of people interacted with it. The content, it's you elbow deep in your toilet tank. All right, loves. That's it for today. If I'm gonna see you this week at the free Instagram strategy session that I am teaching on Tuesday and Wednesday, amazing, can't wait to see you there. If you're listening to this retroactively and you missed it, come follow me on Instagram, get on my mailing list so that you don't miss these three events because I only do them once or twice a year. And they're always super full of value and very generous on these trainings. I'll put the link below. If you wanna be part of the huge wave of entrepreneurs joining Magic Marketing Machine this week so you can get support and grow on Instagram and sell the heck out of your offer. I am here for you. I'll put the link below for that as well. meantime I'll see you in the next episode.