- What do you think would happen,
if you posted an Instagram reel every day for a whole month,
would your account explode with new followers and engagement
or would your soul be sucked out at your body
and sacrificed to the social media Demogorgon?
Maybe a bit of both.
For me in that 10 times more new followers
than I got the previous month 4000% more reach
and 3000% more engagement.
But let's hold on a second and go back
because context is important to understand those results.
(box thudding)
My Instagram account has always been
where I shared my photography,
but as you probably know
the world's most popular photo sharing app
is no longer a photo sharing app.
So a lot of us photographers are asking,
where does that leave me?
And the answer is Twitter.
But if you want to stay on Instagram and have any success?
The way to do it right now is with reels.
Yap, it's short form, vertical video content.
That's mostly known for people, lips syncing
to other people's sounds, dancing,
and a lot of people jumping to change their outfits.
But here's the thing I don't (beep) wanna do that.
I just want somewhere where I can showcase my photography
and my videography.
So the question that I had is can I use reels,
to showcase my photography in videography?
And once I caved and finally decided to give in for a month,
I had a couple of guidelines.
(soft music)
Rule number one, like I said, was
that the reels needed to showcase my photography
or videography no surprises there,
but it did mean that I was shooting everything
on my fancy cameras editing all of it on my fancy computer.
And I did absolutely nothing on my phone
aside from posting the reels themselves,
because that's the way that I roll.
Rule number two, is that I wanted to try my best
to use the sounds from Instagram.
Because people can stumble across you accidentally,
if they're looking through sounds.
Rule number three was to make every single reel
of fun and creative challenge for myself.
And I think this added to the experience,
not only for me but also for the audience.
So following those self-imposed guidelines,
I proceeded to make a real, every single day.
And what I found was actually a lot different
than what I was expecting.
(upbeat music)
First off, it wasn't the slow
and steady growth that I thought it was going to be.
I've done little bursts of being more active
and posting more on Instagram in the past.
And generally just little by little
I would get a little bit more engagement.
I would get a little bit more reach.
But this time the reach was all over the place
and it seemed to have very little to do with my account,
as a whole and more to just do with each individual video.
If the video was a hit, it was a hit.
If it was a flop, it flopped.
And a lot of them were just kind of somewhere in the middle.
As of filming this video,
I've got one video that crossed a million views,
one video that's over 120,000 views.
Then I've got 15 between 10
and 20,000 and the other 13 are below 10,000.
So as you can see, that's a pretty massive spread
and that brings me to the next thing that I learned.
Reels are way more unpredictable than I expected them to be.
I have combed over these videos,
so many times try and find something,
some kind of pattern to tell me
why some of them were successful and some of them weren't.
And I can speculate on a couple of things
but it is really hard to get a clear answer.
For example, that video that has over a million views
on it right now, it's about color grading.
It's got a fun little song in it.
I did this cool split screen thing.
I thought it was a pretty good reel.
I'm glad that it performed well, but a week or two later
I did the exact same thing, same formula, same song.
And I used all the same effects and everything.
And it got under 10,000 views.
So the question is, why did the first one get so many views,
And the second one Flopped so hard?
So then I thought, okay, maybe the videos where
I show gear in them, those ones will do well.
Cause the one that got over 120,000 views
I showed the lens right at the start of it.
So I started looking for the other ones
that have gear in them and they are all over the place.
So what the (beep) how are we supposed to cheat the system
and get immediate results,
if there's no clear formula to follow?
Well, there are a couple of little things
that I think helped certain videos do better than others.
Definitely not a cheat code for a viral video.
Anyone who's selling you that is lying to you straight up
but I think these will be a leg up,
if you're trying to get started with reels.
- [Speaker] Hello? How are you today?
Hello? How are you today?
Hello. How are you today?
- First, don't make your audience think too hard.
If any part of the video is confusing, whether it's visually
or conceptually, they're gonna swipe away.
In longer form media like on YouTube, people might be
more likely to stick around for the payoff,
but in this they just want to be entertained right now.
Second, those first two or three seconds are so vital
in hooking the audience in.
Maybe a fun song or exciting visual
or some text on the screen with a simple question.
There are a million ways that you can hook them
but if you don't, they be swiping.
Thirdly, repeat plays means more views.
If you can make a video that needs one more watch
to know what happened, or it's just so entertaining
that they have to watch it multiple times.
To Instagram that's gold.
One thing that I also try to do in a similar vein
is make as many of my reels into perfect loops as I could.
This way when they get to the end and the video starts over,
they don't necessarily realize that it started over
and before they know it they're watching it again.
The bottom line here is just be endlessly entertaining.
It's easy, right?
And the rest of it just happens
with the magic of the algorithm.
But regardless of whether I was Meta enough or not.
I did get a few things out of this experiment
that might make it worth trying for you.
(Gentle instrumental music)
The most obvious one is followers
and likes and engagement.
But seriously it's no surprise
that when I started posting more
on the part of the app that they're focusing on right now,
my account started to do better.
So if you're looking for a dopamine hit.
This might be one way to get it.
The other thing that this did for me
is it forced me to be creative every single day.
I go in and out of these phases of whether it's easy
or hard to be creative and putting some boundaries
or a challenge on it
makes it way easier to get there for me.
It's also a great place to test out your creativity
or any ideas that you might have because if a reel flops
you kinda just move on.
It's not as big a deal as a big long form YouTube video.
So am I gonna keep posting a reel every single day?
Hell no!
Those things took me about two hours
every single day to make, and it started to eat
into the other important things in my life.
So I'm definitely gonna be dialing it back a little bit
but I do want to keep going with what I've already started.
My goal going forward is to create
some more efficient processes for making reels
and probably posting about three times a week,
while also getting back to posting some photos
over on Instagram,
since that's what it was originally designed to do.
But as always, I wanna hear from you
is it time for you to take your own 30 day real challenge
or was Twitter the answer all along?
Leave a comment down below
and on your way down there, make sure to hit
that like and subscribe button, hit the bell notification
so you don't miss out on future videos.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
(Upbeat music)