This Week in Social Media (TWISM)
This Week in Social Media (TWISM) is the premier daily briefing for social media professionals who need to stay ahead. Delivered 4x weekly to 70,000+ subscribers, we provide competitive intelligence, platform updates, and strategic insights that help marketers navigate the ever-evolving social media landscape. Our content covers algorithm changes, new features across major platforms, trending strategies, and actionable tips that readers can implement immediately.
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🔥 IG just dropped 2 marketer cheat codes
⚡ 2 new Instagram features your competitors are sleeping on
Joshua Parkinson
June 21, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Over 49,000 marketing professionals are reading TWISM today!
🚀 Instagram Just Handed Marketers 2 Cheat Codes — Here's How to Use Them
Welcome back to TWISM!
Instagram rarely ships this much in one month!
Between the new Instagram Plus subscription and a stack of upgrades to Edits and Reels, Meta just quietly handed social marketers two cheat codes.
The catch? They only pay off if you actually change your workflow.
Below is exactly how the sharpest creators are already exploiting them — and how you can copy the playbook this week.
Social media automation gets messy fast.
Your content can come from many places: a SaaS product, an AI agent, a CMS pipeline, a content creation team or whatever internal tool you vibecoded over the weekend.
But getting that content onto real platforms means dealing with different auth flows, media requirements, publish failures, replies, and status updates that your system still needs to understand.
Postproxy gives every workflow one reliable social media API to publish, handle engagement, and return clear platform results back to your product.
🧪 Cheat code #1: Trial Reels are a free A/B testing lab
Trial Reels — which show your Reel to non-followers first before your own audience ever sees it — just got a global rollout plus scheduling.
That second part matters more than it sounds. Per eMarketer, Instagram says 40% of creators who use the feature now post more often, and Trial Reels lifted reach among non-followers by 80%.
The play smart marketers are running: treat it like a hook lab.
Record the same Reel body twice with two different 3-second openers, publish both as trials, and let a cold audience ruthlessly sort which hook stops the scroll — no follower bias muddying the data (Manychat).
The workflow from Later is dead simple: publish two trials Monday, check insights Tuesday night, then promote the winner to your followers and archive the loser.
One creator documented hitting 1M views and 89% non-follower reach in 7 days running this loop (Leslie M. Lyon).
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🎬 Your unfair advantage: the Edits app
Meta's standalone Edits app just got the update that makes it a genuine content engine.
New this round: Reels search inside the Inspiration tab, Project Versions for testing creative directions, 15 new in-and-out animations, 200 more sound effects, and faster font search (Social Media Today).
Here's the exploit: stop doom-scrolling for ideas.
Use the Inspiration tab to surface what's trending in your niche, then attach Stickies — notes on exactly how you'd remix each format — to build a reusable content bank you pull from when batch-creating (The Two Lauras).
Pair that with the new Project Versions to spin up multiple cuts of one idea, then feed your two best into the Trial Reels hook test above.
The rule that keeps you out of the copycat penalty box: analyze why a trend works, then remix it in your own voice — don't clone it (Planoly).
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🔁 The 10-second carousel rescue
Instagram now lets you reorder carousel slides after publishing — long-press, drag, done — and crucially, it does not reset your likes, comments, or saves (Metricool).
Carousels already pull about 12% more engagement than single posts, so the slide order is real estate worth optimizing (ALM Corp).
Why this is a cheat code: the 2026 algorithm ranks on dwell time and swipe-through velocity, and it actively penalizes "dead stops" — people who bail after slide one (Marketing Agent). So when a post underperforms, don't delete it.
Swap in a stronger first slide to fix the dead stop, reorder the middle by what's actually getting saves, and add a "swipe left" prompt — a tactic that nudges engagement from 1.83% to 2% yet appears in only 5% of carousels (PostNitro). You're now editing live posts like landing pages.
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💸 Cheat code #2: Instagram Plus is pay-to-play Stories — for $3.99
Instagram Plus launched at $3.99/month with 11 perks, and while it's pitched at superfans, several of them are quietly built for marketers (ALM Corp).
The ones worth the four bucks:
Story Spotlight — boosts one of your Stories in the tray once a week. Save it for launch day or your highest-intent CTA.
Story Rewatch Insights — shows how many times a frame got rewatched, so you can reverse-engineer which hooks and offers actually land.
Multiple Story Audiences — unlimited custom lists beyond Close Friends, for real segmentation (warm leads vs. cold, by offer, by region).
Story Extend — adds 24 hours to a Story's life, perfect for stretching a promo or social-proof clip.
Story Preview — view others' Stories without triggering the "seen" tag, i.e. anonymous competitor research (Inro).
The strategic read from Colling Media: at $3.99 it's cheap enough that brands will pile in for the extra Stories exposure — which means early adopters get an edge before it becomes table stakes.
⚠️ The flip side is a creeping pay-to-play dynamic on what used to be free reach, so get the upside now while it's still an edge.
(Heads up: it's rolling out by region — currently live in the US, Mexico, Japan, and the Philippines.)
✅ Generate AI images instantly
✅ Unlimited AI captions + hashtags
Post Planner just launched AI that generates scroll-stopping images!
It also writes your captions for you and generates unlimited on-topic hashtags — all without leaving your content calendar.
Go from blank screen to a week of posts in minutes!
📓 The weekly playbook (stack them together)
Individually these are nice. Stacked, they're a system. Here's the loop to run every week:
Mine — open Edits, scroll the Inspiration tab for 10 minutes, and Sticky 3–5 trending formats worth remixing in your niche.
Build — batch-shoot from your Sticky bank, then use Project Versions to cut two versions of your best idea with different 3-second hooks.
Test — publish both as Trial Reels early in the week so non-followers sort the winner with zero risk to your feed.
Promote — push the winning hook to your followers, and turn the same insight into a carousel — fixing slide one and the swipe order live if it stalls.
Amplify — on launch or offer days, burn your weekly Story Spotlight on the highest-intent CTA, then read Rewatch Insights to see which frame to double down on next time. 💎
Run that for a month and you're no longer guessing — every post is informed by what a cold audience already told you works. ⚡
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☝️ The one-sentence version
Use Trial Reels + Edits to A/B test your hooks on strangers for free, use carousel reordering to rescue posts the algorithm stalled, and spend $3.99 on Instagram Plus to spotlight your best Stories and spy on competitors before everyone else catches on. 🎯
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📚 Sources
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…
Go BIG or go home!
~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”
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