Instagram Changed. The Advice Should Too.

We're not sure if you've heard, but Instagram's been busy lately.

Some of its recent changes are genuinely useful. Others have generated far more excitement among social media marketers than they probably deserve. And a few tell us something rather interesting about where Instagram is heading next.

You don't need to follow every update. But there are a handful worth knowing about.

Our 60-second round-up

You can rearrange a carousel after you've posted it.
Instagram now lets you rearrange carousel slides after publishing. Combined with individual slide analytics, that means you can move stronger-performing content further forward.

You can re-order your profile grid.
Posts no longer have to stay in chronological order, so you can move them around your grid and highlight your best content.

Hashtags are capped at five.
The days of adding 20 to 30 hashtags to a caption are officially over. Instagram now limits posts and Reels to five.

Instagram search is getting better at understanding content.
Captions and content give Instagram context about what you've posted, making clear language around subjects and locations more useful for discovery.

Instagram launched Instants.
You can now share quick, unedited photos with Close Friends and mutual followers. Think Snapchat, then ask yourself why, as an estate agent, you'd ever need it.

AI-generated content is becoming easier to identify.
Meta already labels certain AI-generated or significantly AI-altered content and continues to invest in identifying where synthetic content has come from.

But the biggest change isn't a new feature

While Instagram has been busy changing the platform, the way people use it has been changing too.

We're interacting with content differently, in a feed that's considerably more crowded than it was a few years ago. For businesses, being there isn't enough. You have to earn attention once you're there.

Because the audience is still there. Ofcom's latest figures show UK adults who visit Instagram were spending an average of 19 minutes a day on the platform in 2025, up from 12 minutes in 2023. But businesses are producing far more for them to look at.

Metricool's 2026 study found brands published 24% more Instagram content than the year before, while other industry studies have recorded falling engagement rates.

More content. More competition. The same pair of thumbs deciding what deserves their attention. For an estate agent, posting more isn't necessarily the answer. Posting something worth noticing is.

Don't judge a post by its likes

There's another shift that's much harder to measure. We're becoming more passive on social media.

Ofcom found that UK adults are increasingly consuming social content without actively posting or interacting with it. Instagram has also said that private sends are particularly important when deciding which content to recommend beyond someone's existing followers.

Think about your own Instagram use and this probably isn't surprising.

You see something interesting. You send it to your partner. You mention it later. You might save it. You probably don't leave a comment saying, “Great post, Steve.”

For an estate agent, that's an important distinction.

Someone can watch three of your videos, read a post about the local market and see that you've sold a house around the corner without liking a single thing.

Six months later, they contact you for a valuation.

Social media has still done its job.
There just isn't an Instagram metric for “remembered your name when we decided to move.”

Reels haven't won Instagram

For the last few years, the message has been clear: make more videos.

Reels became the format to prioritise, particularly if you wanted your content to reach people who didn't already follow you.

That hasn't suddenly stopped being true. What has changed is the idea that Reels automatically mean better performance. Recent studies have found carousels matching or outperforming Reels for engagement, with some research showing considerably higher save rates too.

But even that only tells us what's happening across Instagram as a whole. The more useful question is what performs best for you.

Looking past the formats, algorithms and content pillars, ask yourself, ‘what are people following you for?’

Some agents have built an audience around beautiful property. Others are known for talking about their local market. Some have made community content their thing. There are agents who can sit in their car eating lunch while talking about valuations and pull in thousands of views because that's become recognisably theirs.

And sometimes a beautiful photograph of a beautiful house will outperform an educational video you've spent an hour making, because people still like looking at houses.

The mistake is assuming a good Instagram account needs to be all of those things at once.

Experiment, certainly. But pay attention to what people repeatedly respond to, what feels natural for you to produce and what you want to become known for.

There isn't one winning Instagram format because there isn't one winning version of an estate agent on Instagram. Find the bit that's yours, then give it enough consistency to become recognisable.

So, has Instagram changed?

Yes. Quite a lot.

But keeping up doesn't mean reacting to every new feature, changing your strategy every time the algorithm moves or turning everything into a Reel because somebody told you video performs better.

People are still spending time on Instagram. They're just consuming content differently, in a much more crowded feed. Some will watch without liking, follow without commenting and remember you without ever giving you much evidence that they're paying attention.

For estate agents, that makes knowing what people follow you for far more useful than knowing what Instagram supposedly wants this week.

You don't need to do everything. You need to give the right people enough reasons to keep watching, and enough consistency that, when they eventually need an estate agent, they remember who you are.