Our life is growing exponentially with social media ruling a major part of it. There is no denying that social media has become a very integral part of our routine. And we seek attention there as much as in our real life. We all desire to attract viewers, increase our follower count, and become ‘viral’. Don’t we?
Don’t you worry, we have all of this covered. Ever since reels was released as an exclusive Instagram feature, we all have been trying to play with it – music, slow-mo, alignment, filters. Right? But do you know that most of you have been doing it wrong? Yes, the fun-filled, short, quirky videos that you have been making in the hope to attract people but aren’t able to do so, are because of a lack of some specifications.
What dimensions to use while uploading a video? What should be the video length? What kind of music goes trendy? How to increase views? Let’s see some tricks and tips that will answer all of these questions.
9 Ways to Grow Your Brand on Instagram Through Reels
1. Use Native Reels Tools to Create Content
The best way to use reels to your maximum benefit using native tools and features to create reels. For example, always record reels in portrait/vertical format in full screen, instead of encasing the video in a frame or borders. This disturbs the orientation, and often the quality.
If you are wanting to repurpose a pre-recorded video for some other purpose on Instagram, it is going to be quite time-consuming to do so since Instagram is not typically a photo editing app. You can understand how a Facebook post won’t work for Twitter. Every social media platform has its own specifications when it comes to posting, and we have adhered to it if we want to be easily discoverable.
Recent Instagram surveys have also shown that the repurposed videos and videos created from a third-party app when uploaded on Instagram have reduced quality, and visibility glitches, making it less enjoyable experiences for viewers.
Instagram has also recently announced that it won’t push out the reels with watermarks to explore, that is it would make it less discoverable. So, this is your biggest clue to be native with your reels, as much as possible.
2. Intrigue Your Viewers
With Instagram becoming a photo and video app, reels are a major part of it. And even though it is super easy to create videos, it is not so easy to attract viewers.
The first two to three seconds of your video are crucial because they will decide whether the viewers will stay long enough to view the entire video or not. If you wish to draw the attention of the viewers, you can use a flashing piece of text or a quirky sticker along the top edge.
It can be anything – caption credits highlighted words of your video, or anything else. It should just be creative enough to attract viewers.
If you’re not sure how to do this and are looking for a wider reach,MegaFamous is your place to go. Visit the link, choose a plan, and get access to tips and tricks that would gain you viewers in a nick of time!
3. Be Creative With Whatever You Do
We might think that 10-15 seconds videos are short enough for people to stop by, and watch. Sorry to disappoint you, friends but you need elements of creativity to attract people even for 15 seconds. It is important to add some interesting edits and innovative translations to keep your viewers glued to the screen.
Now, edits can be as basic as creating different cuts and merging them. You can reposition these cute and create a video with music in the background. Or you can spice things up using different angles, many filters, zoom in and out, time-lapse, and slow-mo. And so much more.
It is for you to find out what type of edits and transitions are more welcomed by your users.
4. Blend Q&As With Your Reels
Instagram has led us to curate new and unique content creating ideas for our page. One of the most efficient techniques that can leave people yearning to return to your space is answering Q&As using Instagram reels.
You can end one of your reels with a Call to Action so that people can leave more questions for you, which in return would supply a lot of content ideas.
Choose one of the comments that people have left for you, and transform it into a reel content idea. This process gives us two benefits :
- First, we get a hoarded supply of the ideas for our ‘gram.
- We are creating content that our targeted audience relates to. This would lead to more people belonging to the same audience getting attracted to us.
5. Deliver CTAs to Drive Taps
Today, Instagram is not only used as a source of entertainment, it’s also a rich source of knowledge and information. Reels offer a great way to provide valuable tips, and tricks on almost any advice: career, education, medicine, art, culture, heritage, law, politics, etc.
Using CTA in your Instagram reel can help you garner more attention, and engagement on your content, and help in becoming a discoverable creator.
6. Be a Good Storyteller
15 seconds don’t seem to be a lot of time to deliver quality content? But trust me, it is. Provided that you know how to deliver your idea to the viewers, fifteen seconds are more than enough.
Storytelling is one of the most important aspects of social media marketing. To help you with this, Instagram has extended the time of reels to 30 seconds, and 60 seconds which equate to one minute.
Get your clock tick-tocking!
7. Highlight Your Supportive Community
Depending on what kind of content we create, we all belong to different communities – art community, clay modeling, small business, sports, entertainment, etc. People define our existence on Instagram, as creators.
So, it becomes necessary and only right to drive the spotlight towards the community that has supported us through our journey.
- You can be generous enough to either give shout-outs to your fellow creators or followers.
- You can create a hashtag, and share posts of people using the unique hashtags.
- If you’re a big brand or an influencer, make sure to go through your community and give your attention to people who belong to it. This would make them feel seen and honored and they would be willing to come back again and again.
8. The Power of a Thumbnail
People often underestimate the power of a thumbnail while uploading their reels. Thumbnail is still shot that can be a part of the video itself or any other image that summarizes your video for people to understand. It is one of the best marketing techniques on digital platforms since thumbnail helps the video to attract the targeted audience.
Thumbnails aren’t visible on the explore section of the Instagram interface. But if someone scrolls through your profile, it is most likely to be visible. Custom thumbnails are particularly useful when you’ve created a series, including text like “part-01”, “part-02″… and so on is helpful in following up with it.
Thumbnails are also beneficial if you want to maintain a certain type of aesthetic feed or a specific theme. You can create a thumbnail that goes with the aesthetic or the theme.
9. Respond to Your Audience
Instagram works on the interaction and responsiveness of creators with their audience. The replies to the comments, tags, stories are all recorded by Instagram to define how actively you’re participating in the community.
Replying to DMs, supporting co-creators, reposting stories, and tagging people occasionally, is a good way to attract people towards your space.
This would lead to more people belonging to your niche of content interacting with you, and discovering you.
Conclusion
In this article we saw about how to use reels to your maximum benefit – become discoverable, increase your views, get more engagement. You can play with music, filters, time-lapse, slow motion, voiceovers, etc, and become digitally a well-known figure.