I Did A 30 Day Instagram Reels Challenge And Here Is What You Need To Know
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Have you noticed a drop in your Instagram stats lately?
You are not alone. I think everyone is in the same boat. However there's been a few updates that might be affecting your reach. Among those new features :
Focus on reels and video in the feed since early 2022
You will see more recommended accounts in your feed and therefore less of the content of people you follow
The workaround for the latter is a new feature that allows you to get the chronological feed back. Tap on the instagram logo and you will be able to select between 2 feed types: account you follow and favourites
So unless your followers are engaged with your content or select the follower feed, it's less likely that they might see your content in their feed.
So, how can we remain relevant as creators and business owners when the priority is made on short form videos formats such as Reels, Tiktok or Youtube Shorts?
I decided to run a 30 day reel challenge to see for myself and take out some best practices so that you don’t have to.
Prior to this test, I did not publish any content on my Instagram account for months. This has reset all my stats to zero to make this challenge more relevant if you are starting from scratch.
Preparation
Before starting to publish, I needed to immerse myself into the Instagram Reels world. What are other creators doing? What type of content are they sharing in my niche? What works? What makes a reel go viral? What type of music to use? What do I need to create Reels? What audio should I use? etc…
In my case, I mostly share content related to travel, photography and Ireland, the country where I live.
I then decided on the Reel format to use. Mostly educational and inspirational.
As I have a ton of videos taken from past trips, it was an easy one to recycle the content. But I also created new content to match with my activities as a blogger and photographer in the present day.
I used Final Cut Pro on desktop and VN or Capcut app on iOS to edit most of my Reels. I did not create any directly from the Instagram application.
Once I had a good set of Reels ready to go. It was time to publish them. Once a day for 30 days.
Week 1 Results
After only 7 days posting on all placements, Reels, Stories and Feed posts. Here are the results:
13,630 impressions over 7 days mostly using reels.
9,189 accounts reached
123 profile visits
10 website taps
7,816 impressions from Reels
1,657 impressions from posts
460 impressions from stories
That’s insane!
This confirms that Instagram is prioritising videos in your feed and the best placement for that remains Reels by far.
If you are still thinking twice about using reels to promote your business on Instagram, this is the sign that you need to jump on the trend ASAP.
Those insights were already very insightful. Let’s see if this trend remains moving forward.
Week 2 Results
9,850 accounts reached
13,798 impressions
103 profile visits
1 website taps
7,577 impressions from Reels
2,374 impressions from posts
178 impressions from stories
a slight increase in terms of reach. Most of the reach came from Reels with the majority of accounts engaging with my content who were non followers.
This confirms that Reels are pushed as recommendations into users feed. Which is a great opportunity for new creators to get noticed and grow their online brands.
Week 3 Results
14,377 accounts reached
33,931 impressions
195 profile visits
6 website taps
11.6K impressions from Reels
7,175 impressions from posts
207 impressions from stories
All the indicators are in the green. And thanks to Reels my account reached more than 50% more accounts that were not following me compared to the previous week. It shows again that Reels remain the placement to get your account discovered on Instagram.
Week 4 Results
14,836 accounts reached
39,606 impressions
172 profile visits
3 website taps
6,168 impressions from Reels
14K impressions from posts
329 impressions from stories
Another week with all indicators in the green in terms of reach and impressions. Surprisingly feed posts performed better than reels. But the majority of accounts reached were by far non followers.
Past 30 day results
Here are the results from this 30 day Reels challenge.
Nearly 100,000 impressions gained on my account organically
A total of 33,028 new account reached among which 31,800 accounts reached were non followers and 1,397 accounts reached were followers
23,400 accounts reached via Reels
22,400 accounts reached via feed posts
625 accounts reached via stories.
I am honestly quite surprised by the results. I’d have expected Reels to dominate the reach results.
But as you can see feed posts are still relevant nowadays contrary to what everyone says online.
Overall, my account has been seen more than 100,000 times over a 30 day period by leveraging all placements, which is not a bad result.
But the results confirm the way everyone should use Instagram nowadays as creators.
Use Reels to get discovered by a brand new audience (brand awareness stage of your customer life journey)
Use feed posts to educate/help/show your work to your existing audience (consideration stage of your customer life journey)
Use stories to interact with your audience and provide CTAs to convert users into leads for your business ( lead and sales stage of your customer life journey)
Best Performing Posts
My best performing posts all have one thing in common: Ireland.
Despite touching the travel and photography niche, the most popular content were the one related to the sub-niche Ireland which is the country where I live.
That highlights how important it is to target a specific sub-niche to reach a more engaged audience.
The vlog/behind the scenes type of reels seem to be the one with the most success. And for the feed posts, Dublin seen through my photographer lens kind of content seems to have the most success too.
Those are great key performance indicators that allows me to tailor my content for my audience as a creator and focus on that more, rather than shooting in the dark and pray for the Instagram gods to boost my reach.
How Many New Followers Did I Gain?
What about new followers you may wonder? Well, I actually lost followers throughout the whole experiment. Many follows and unfollows over the last 30 days.
But that is not the end of the world. It is actually a great thing. I’d rather have followers that engage with my content than ghost followers.
And what I learned so far as a content creator and marketer are valuable insights that will allow me to create more content that will engage more users in the future.
Lessons learned from posting Reels for 30 days
I have ran an experiment for 30 days to post reels on Instagram. I wanted to see which medium worked the best for my account to improve my reach.
To do that I stopped posting on my Instagram account for a couple of months to set all the counters to 0.
I then started to publish again.
My strategy was to publish 1 post, 1 reel and at least 1 story per day for 30 days.
There is no denying that Instagram is now pushing videos more and more and prioritising the reach on reels on their platform.
I don’t know about you, but at one point my feed was only a series of reels. No more photos.
It has come back to normal lately having more of a mix and using Instagram new features that allow you to use a chronological feed again and snooze the recommended accounts for a period of 30 days.
I believe also that the product is now a bit more mature and the Instagram algorithm is now filtering the content according to your preferences better.
Here are the lessons I learned:
Surfing on the latest trends does not guarantee success.
I tried surfing on the trend wave and it turns out that this does not guarantee you success in terms of reach or going viral like many gurus would tell you online. Instead focus on you, on your content that you provide to your audience and remix it your way. It is good from time to time to create one trendy video but not all the time. I suppose the keyword here is Authenticity. Be yourself and just show your work.There are 3 pillars in terms of content that you can do
Educational
Inspirational
Entertaining
Pick the one you feel the most comfortable with in terms of content creation and stick to it.
You could recycle some blog posts and put them as a reel.
You could recycle past travel photos and put them as a reel
You could recycle past posts you publish and put them as a reel
It is up to you to find what works and see what your audience engage with the most.
3. Some resources I’d recommend you to follow to keep up to date with the latest Instagram Reels updates
Later.com blog
4. Hashtags do not necessarily works for reels.
As of today, there is no way to know how much reach your content has gotten thanks to hashtags. It is a great way to categorise your content and potentially get discovered though.
Think of it like SEO. For instance I use the hashtag #dublinphotographer every time I post my content on Instagram. So, if someone follows this hashtag, there is potential for them to see my content.
But other than that, they do not matter. (yet)
5. For a video to go viral or get a broader reach, the algorithm will check
the number of time the video has been played
The number of comments you received
The number of likes that you received
The number of save
The number of shares
This will determined if your video will potentially get a broader reach.
Also be consistent. Daily posting is recommended if you want to see results in the beginning. The algorithm needs to understand the type of content you publish and the type of audience that it attracts to better serve you and the users.
PRO TIP: use the collaboration feature to increase your reach. I have been partnering with a local instagram account here in Ireland that feature most of my photos and reels. Thanks to them, I have had 2 reels that have gone “viral” and brought more eye balls to my account
6. It is ok to copy what others do…
…in the beginning. The thing about Reels is that you need to test which format will work with your audience. And for this there is no secret formula, you will only know via trials and errors.
So, test test test different formats and check your stats to know what type of content your audience enjoys the most.
Once you do, stick to it and start branding your videos to make it more recognisable to your existing audience.
Here is an example of branded content. I included a recognisable color scheme, my handle and final screen to encourage viewers to follow me for more tips.
What needs to be improved
As I mentioned earlier, the keyword is authenticity and having a long term goal rather than a short term one.
Like everything when it comes to marketing, you need to have a strategy that will benefit your business. Whether it is to increase your brand awareness or generate more revenue.
Have a read at these articles for more insights.
So, you need to be posting series of reels that provide value to your audience based on the 3 pillars mentioned earlier.
In my case, I am thinking to start posting mini travel guides for each country I visited, photography tutorials and photography behind the scenes around Ireland.
I have a ton of videos in my archives that need to be recycled. And I believe short form content are more powerful nowadays than long videos when it comes to marketing and increase brand awareness.
This will be another test I will be running in the upcoming months.
So, to sum up
Get familiar with the interface. Spend time browsing content to find inspiration on the type of content you'd feel comfortable sharing and that aligns with your brand
Find the right music. Surf on the trending wave. You can find the music on a website called tokboard or just spend some time on the app checking reels and saving the audio of the ones you like.
Check the audio popularity. Tap on the audio to check how many shares and how popular it is. If its not too saturated (thousands of shares rather than Millions). This is the opportunity.
Create your videos. Either in app or using a third party video maker like inshot, VN, capcut etc... I usually screen record the type of videos I'm interested in and use them as templates
Use Hashtags. Sure there is no reach insights from hashtags with reels but they still serve for SEO purposes.
Find the right balance and schedule your content. I won’t deny that this can be time consuming. And creating reels should NOT be your priority as a business owner. Creating content in batch is usually what I do and I save them as drafts to publish later.
Partner with other accounts to boost your reach. Collaborations are always the best ways to grow. Reach out to accounts that offer features, use their hashtags regularly and offer them to collaborate to boost each other reach. Win-win.
Consistency might get some of your videos to go viral. Do not give up and keep pushing content.
Bonus
If you don't want to spend time creating reels and publishing content every day and have the budget and knowledge necessary, you can just create one video that sums up who you are and what you do and use ads to promote your offer using reels as a new ad placement.
This is what I am planning to do now that I ended this experiment.
My advice would be to retarget users who already engaged with your account. A budget of 3-5$ a day should be more than enough to get started. And once you start getting some ROI, you can increase your budget and your target audience by using Lookalike audiences.
If you need any advertising advice, you can read these blog articles
Facebook ads: A Facebook Ultimate Advertising Guide For New Marketers
Marketing The Money Machine Behind Every Successful Business
that explains everything in details or schedule a call with me in my calendar and I’d be happy to advise you on the best way to reach your ideal audience.
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