Recently I created ten Reel templates that are syncing with the music. You have probably seen the type of Reels I’m talking about, where the transitions between the slides have the same timing as the beat in the music?
When creating them, I also needed to create example Reels to show what kind of Reels that can be created with the templates.
This forced me to post 10 Reels during a 4 day period. This is what I learned by doing so, and what I found is the number one factor that can help your Reel to become successful.

 

Why I posted 4 reels in 10 days

Before we start I want to say that posting so many Reels during such a short period of time is not optional. The only reason I did it was because I needed the example reels done quickly, in order to show what kind of Reels that can be created with my new templates of mine. 

The only positive thing about posting them with such frequency is that it was easier to see the pattern of results. But I want to add, that if you really want to investigate how the Reels are working you need to do a test for a longer period of time.

But since I had to post these 10 reels and I saw these insights I want to share them with you as my conclusion is resulting in one single fact. Something that is crucial for everything you post on social media.

This is what I learnt

• The reels that I didn’t share to my grid had significant lower performance.
   
• Reels that included a majority of very popular hashtags, like #travelgram (used in over 15 million posts), had a lower performance. While the one with smaller hashtags like #workfromwherever (used in around 32 000 posts)had a higher performance. 
   
• The time when I posted the Reels varied. And I couldn’t see that any time really performed better than the other.
  However, as I know since before, that my audience is most active in the late afternoon, I saw engagement increasing at this time even if the Reel was posted in the morning. 
   
• Something else that I saw, was that 2-3 days after that I had posted a Reel, when the engagement had dropped out, engagement increased again. I believe it’s Instagram that is testing the reel again, to see if it’s still something that interests people. And if this second boost went well, they continue to favour it. 
   
• The first Reel of the day mostly performed well, the second, or third had lower performance.  
   
• The Reels that performed the best within my own audience was the one that had a topic that is relevant for them. The reel with traveling pictures didn’t get much engagement because traveling is not what my followers follow me for. But the once with pretty fonts in Canva, had a really high engagement within my own audience. 
   
• Another interesting aspect of that, is that the Reels that got high engagement by my own audience, didn’t get a lot of views in general. And engagement wins over views any day of the week.
   
• Followers! This is interesting, as I got more new followers during those 4 days than usual. Sadly you can’t see in the insights how many followers a specific Reel has generated (as you can in an ordinary post) but in many cases I saw that the new follower also had liked one of my reels, so I made the assumption that the followers are coming from the reels. Also here, I saw the connection with a topic close to my audience.
  

  

My conclusion

So the conclusion of this little mini-test is:  MAKE IT RELEVANT FOR YOUR FOLLOWERS. 

That is the most important factor of a successful Reel. Accept that, always share your Reel to your grid, use smaller hashtags and post your Reel when you know your audience is most active, that will give your Reel a good chance to be successful.

What is a successful reel?

For some reason, we are measuring the success of a Reel after the number of views. But let’s dig a bit deeper into this.

As some of my Reels got many views I don’t see that single number as successful. Yes, my content got spread and was seen by a lot of people which is good as we want our message out there.

But, it doesn’t matter if you don’t get any engagement from those views. They have seen it and in the next second, they forget about you and your content. IF they haven’t engaged in some way.

For me, I rather have fewer views but higher engagement.

And this is once again taken us back to the conclusion that said that the content should be relevant. If it is relevant, the engagement automatically is coming.

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