1. Reels Provide More Real Estate
Instagram seems to have made the decision to provide more screen real estate on Reels than any other app. The text and hashtags are collapsed and the button sidebar has been moved to the bottom of the screen. This identical video from the Green Bay Packers shows just how much room you have to work with on Reels.
More screen space means more room to be creative and worry less about important parts of your videos being hidden.
2. Reels Deliver More Involvement than Their Predecessors
According to some tips that analyzed all the teams in NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB and compared their average engagement per Reel to their average engagement per video on Instagram and the results are stunning. Across all leagues, the average engagement per Reel is higher than the average engagement per video on Instagram. The NFL is the most active league on Reel and reaps the benefits. The average NFL team reel generates 67% more engagement than their average Instagram video.
3. Posting to Your Feed Increases Your Reel Engagement
Almost all of the top performing reels we saw as part of our analysis were also posted to the team's Instagram feed. Reel share engagement when a video is posted to your Instagram grid. This allows the post to triple the engagement as the video is served on two different feeds.
In our analysis, we found examples of the best performing Reels that weren't posted to the Instagram feed, but, more often than not, they were underperforming compared to the average engagement metrics for Instagram videos.
Below are two Reels posted by the Memphis Grizzlies illustrating the difference between a video posted to the Instagram feed versus one shared only to the Reels tab. Despite having over 1 million followers on Instagram, this particular Reel (on the left) only received a total of 22 engagements.
4. Real Ways to Be Discovered
The addition of Reels to Instagram has added four new ways to get your content and account discovered.
Explore Tab – Go to the Explore tab on Instagram and the top of the content is Reels. The Instagram hand selected the “Featured” Scroll to place in this spot. Given that the Explore tab is visited by over 200 million people daily, getting your content featured can be a huge boost to your account.
Hashtag Search – Search for any hashtag and you will immediately be presented with one or more Reels that use that hashtag.
Reels – Video reels have a special feed featuring content from both accounts you follow and videos you think you'll like. And while it currently doesn't rival TikTok®'s insane ability to determine our most unique content preferences, it does place a “Follow” button right next to the username for accounts you don't follow.
Audio Search – Click on any music and you will be presented with all the top content using that audio. This can be a great way to get new ideas or find new accounts to follow.
Have you used Instagram Reels on your smartphone? This is very interesting and can entertain in your spare time.
