So yesterday I posted 4 Reels to my insta. All were videos of the outdoorsy nature stuff like sunsets and mountain views. Very similar content.
The first two immediately shot to 1.5k views within 20 minutes. The last two barely got 30 views in a day.
The content was very similar, I posted NONE of them to my feed and they were all original, high quality video.
I only have 1.8k followers so Im certain the first two hit the Explore page and the last two did not.
Do you think Insta limited me to two Explore posts and then put me on ice?
I posted another mountain sunset video today and it is only at 30 views as well.
Again, this is all similar high quality nature video, so I dont think the CONTENT is the issue, like some people here have suggested.
FYI I had posted two cool outdoorsy Reels a few weeks ago that had received 3k views each. They were shared to my Feed.
Love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks
D
First of all, I want to mention that reels have a bad affect for the engagement on your normal posts. You’ll grow fast with posting reels, but the eg. rate is more important for me.
Reels are crazy af. To get the most out of it, I’d recommend using hashtags/post it in your story/get as much engagement as possible in the first hour.
A reel from my page was stuck on 15-20k views and after a week it blew up to 324k Views with 36,5k Likes in january. It’ll lower the reach of your normal posts and after some time it is going up again, but if you post a lot of reels on long-term, your engagement will get very bad, as already mentioned. I dont think anyone can explain it to you.
That’s wild your Reel blew up after a week!
I actually care more about growth than engagement. Hoping to get to 5k followers
I do use around 10 hashtags per Reel and occasionally post it in my Story, although several I have not posted in my Story or Feed and they still immediately got 1.5k views.
The question is why some get that unaided hit and others nothing. I suppose there is some randomness to it?
Crazy af indeed.
We were thinking to post around 2 reels per day as a part of our IG strategy, but after reading your experience regarding engagement rates dropping, I want to give a second thought to our strategy. 
Sb i know got around 120k-140k Followers in a year (he posted reels after he reached 30k) and his engagement is only about 1-4k likes/post and his top post is only about 7,4k. I have the same with 31k Followers and without posting a lot of reels. He is only growing with reels and he is only getting many likes on his reels. His normal posts don’t get very much engagement, only about 1-4k, as already mentioned.
I have the same problem.
Going viral with every single reel I post ( 500-1m views) and growing like crazy . My normal Posts however, reach only 15-20 percent from home and get around 1500 - 2000 likes with 65k followers. It’s so frustrating.
Don’t know what to do. Any idea?
You can stop posting reels, but then ur likes will probably go down, bec u dont have a big reach anymore without posting the reels. The only thing you can do is maybe publish more normal posts daily and max 1 reel every second or third day, it could work. I recognized, you’ll get a engagement drop after you posted a reel, so maybe you should post it after the normal posts (but idk if you’ll get more likes on ur normal posts then.).
I’d be interested in finding out what makes you think it’s reels? I’m kind of heading in the same direction as I can’t understand why engagement is dropping on my main page of 20K followers - same type of content as usual.
I’m slow to jump to conclusions, but happy to keep an open mind.
u just get bad followers from reels, trust me. I know many people who got bad engagement through this and recognized the eg drop too late, I cant describe it to you.
2 Likes
Fair enough. I get what you mean! Time to give it a go with some experimentation.
EDIT: thinking about it, I remember a FB white paper where they talk about how the algo works. I’m pretty sure they talk about the ‘type’ of content being relevant - so if you post videos, it gets sent to people who view videos etc.
Perhaps people who consume reels don’t really consume any other type of content? Converts from TikTok where they don’t have photos and videos. Whereas video viewers and photo viewers are interchangeable.