Y’all know me, I am a LOVER of video but I have NEVER liked Instagram reels (heck, I don’t like ANY forced vertical short-form content, but we’ll get to that in a minute). Insta’s reels are probably the most performative of all of the short-form vertical mediums and I just haven’t been a fan of creating them OR the results they get me.
Now, that’s being said - I do them. Not only do *I* do them, we have a heavy reel-focused strategy for most of our local agency clients, because they work, and because the man with the glasses (the CEO of Instagram, I can’t ever remember his name) said to do them, and when a man with glasses who runs the company tells you to do something, you probably should listen.
But, just the other day, a friend of mine asked my opinion (or maybe she posted something about it and I shared my opinion, ha) about trial reels and I told her that I was not a fan because the reach for me has been garbage, AND that since the roll-out of trial reels the reach on ALL reels has been down (anecdotally, of course). Like, my reels, when I do them, don’t get NEAR the reach they used to but, honestly, we can chalk that up to the fact that I’m not consistent, but then we started noticing for some local clients that their reels reach was down…hmmm?
THEN - I took note of some of my favorite creators on Instagram and THEIR reels reach was way down.
So, something HAD to be up.
Then, I saw SEVERAL people that are smarter at Instagram strategy than me say that carousel reach was up; now, we’ve known that carousels do better than single photos for a while, but was carousel reach OUTPERFORMING reel reach?!?
YES!
On one of the local accounts we manage, our reels views were down on average of 1,000 views and we compared reach and LIKES on carousels vs reels, it was UNMISTAKEABLE.
A carousel we posted on March 26th got 261 likes and a reel 3 days later got 139 - and that pattern has repeated for almost a month.
BUT, I think it’s a VERY SPECIFIC type of carousel - like, one with a point, with a payoff.
Let me explain:
Hey, are you loving this? Give it a little share to spread the 💛.
There’s essentially two types of carousel posts - a “photo dump” style and a more “storytelling” style.
The storytelling style of carousel looks more like this:
You see how there’s a point, a payoff, a story?
THAT is what we see working on the ‘gram.
And, what’s cool to me is that this seems to be working BETTER across the board than reels right now.
Will that change? Will the guy with the glasses come up on our feed and be like “oh, we noticed trial reels were crashing our reels algorithm and we fixed it” and then, all of a sudden, reels will be the “it girl” again? Maybe.
But, for now, I’m considering this a win because this type of content is so much easier to put together AND it can take those of us who find photos easier (or better) than short-form video to the level of engagement on that content that we want!
I’m not saying NOT to do reels, but I AM saying that we’ve switched out strategy to be carousel heavy vs reel heavy and I’m excited about it.
I’ve always been a “let each platform be it’s own thing” kind of girl, these CEOs don’t agree with me, but that’s where I stand, ha.
So, here’s to trying carousels more AND *NEW* weekly creator tips comin’ in hot from me here on Creator Field Notes.
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