Our newsletterVendor reportMetricool, 2026
Instagram Stories navigation moved in mixed directions in 2026: people skipped forward less (-26%) and left less often (-26%), but also went back to re-watch less (-22%)
Engagement
| Account size | Change in Stories taps forward 2026 vs 2025 (%) |
|---|---|
| Tiny | -14% |
| Small | -9% |
| Medium | -8% |
| Big | -3% |
| Huge | -26% |
Instagram Stories by account size: taps forward change — 2026 vs 2025 (%)
Instagram Stories by account size: taps forward change — 2026 vs 2025 (%)- Reader Note:
- The three figures are the largest moves, all recorded on huge accounts; the direction holds across account sizes. Fewer taps forward and fewer exits mean viewers skipped and abandoned Stories less often, which is a good sign; fewer taps back means they re-watched less, which is not. The study reports these as separate metrics and does not reconcile them.
- Evidence:
- Observed behaviour
- Vendor interest:
- Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- Sample:
- 24,364,803 Instagram posts from 375,118 accounts worldwide, covering January and February 2025 and January and February 2026 — a two-month window, not a full year. Accounts with zero publications were excluded, as were posts with zero impressions or zero interactions, so every average in the study is computed over posts that got at least one interaction. Accounts were segmented by follower size into Huge (1M+), Big (100K-1M), Medium (10K-100K), Small (2K-10K) and Tiny (0-2K). Outliers were not removed. Growth has a non-obvious definition: an account counts as having grown only if it crossed into a higher follower tier, so an account that went from 3K to 9K followers is not counted as having grown, and the study's own methodology notes that crossing Tiny to Small takes far fewer new followers than crossing Medium to Big — growth rates are therefore not comparable across tiers.
Reader Note:
Evidence:
Vendor interest:
Sample:Good for
Comparing yourself against a similar segment, and choosing what to test next.
Not for
- Saying that one thing caused another, or predicting what you would get.
- This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
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