Question about instagram Reels

Hi,
I am trying to understand Reels (as if it is possible)
I have an account with 6K followers. Today I posted a Reels and select to share on my feed and after 4 hours I have 400 views and 200 likes. When I post Reels and don’t share on my feed after 30min I get more than 1500 views (a few likes) than it stops. Everywhere I read says to share on the feed you get more views, what are yours experience with this?

in this case it seems that IG is pushing the account to more viewers when you don’t share it to your feed, just keep doing that and see how it goes

Thanks! My next one I won’t share in to my feed

I have an account with 4k followers and Ive posted almost 40 Reels so far. I’ve found that the ones I post to my Feed usually do much better right away, usually hitting 1k views within 10-30 minutes. These are also my highest quality Reels, usually GoPro videos with cool 360 effects. Several of them reached 5k views.

Most of my Reels I don’t post to my Feed though, and the results have varied greatly. Sometimes I get an immediate 1k views just like if I posted it to my Feed. Other times they get 100-200 views total.

I have found that what matters most is the actual content - spectacular content that WOWS people will get a lot of likes right away and get a ton of views. That can be stunning scenery or animals or cool cinematography like 360 video. I have reached 2-3k views with content I did not post to my Feed! The quick start comes from the content, in my opinion.

But there is a randomness to it as well that I’m not sure we will ever understand. I’ve posted similar spectacular sunsets in Iceland, for example, and one Reel gets 2k views, the other gets 200 views. Maybe it’s about the timing, or just whether the first people to see it in the first ten minutes are randomly in a good mood and decide to like it or not. Hard to say.

But in general, I’ve found the Reels posted to my Feed do better – but they are also my highest quality videos that I want to be seen on my gallery, and I attribute the success to that.

I post all of them to my Story FYI. That doesnt affect whether you get that 1000k view bump in the first 30 minutes but it helps sustain the likes throughout the day.

To sum up, I think your success has more to do with the actual content and less with whether you posted it to your Feed.

You can keep switching between the two if you are getting low results on the process you use. But it all boils down to the quality of your content.

I will post a very similar Reels soon but without sharing on my feed just to see how it will perform…

Most of my Reels are the same kind of content, but my next one will be a very similar to the last one but I won’t share on my feed just to check how it goes

Post it at the same time of day. That has an effect as well. But like I said, there is still some randomness to it. You’re better off posting 20 and drawing conclusions from a larger sample size

Quick update: Today I posted another Reels, very similar to the last one (and all others)
This time I choose not to share on my feed… In the first 30min I got more than 1800 views and it stopped. I don’t know why, but for me it is worst if I share on my feed.

My Exp with reels,
post every 2-5 days depends on performance, because 1 reel can burn up for up to 14 days
my new acc is only 6k followers got allready a reel 95k+ views 7.5k likes+
i do mention @ every reel 1 account (diff every reel) basicly a credit for the content.

just to check, you repost other users’ reels, is that correct?

yes, videos&tiktok videos (without tiktok watermark)

agreed 2-5 is ideal these days, were you able to gain a constant number of followers when using reels and this strategy?

1 Like

I share all my reels on the Feed as well.

I just follow my own content guidelines and my followers give it a nice engagement boost at the beginning. Something like 80% of my followers watch reels, so I might as well put it out on the feed for them :woman_shrugging:

Reels are their own sort of content, with their own rules, and own algorithm, so it’s worth playing around with a lot of trial and error. For instance, I have one that just hit 1.3M views on a 22k account. Sure, it was good, but it would never have done that on my 22k feed alone!

Mos definitely, I’ll also recommend to upload guides, I believe they add bonus reach to your recent posts/reels

1 Like