There’s TikTok, there’s YouTube Shorts and there’s Instagram Reels - short form social video has quickly become the staple of organic social strategies and getting your content up to scratch is more important than ever.
We’ll take you through our top 3 tips for Instagram Reels so you can achieve maximum cut-through and build the strongest relationship you can with your ideal audience.
1. Inform your audience
Educational content has been consistently having a big moment on social video platforms, with short and sharp tutorials and how-to guides being great ways to intrigue and capture the curiosity of viewers and urge them to ‘Save’ to refer back to later - and we know the Instagram algorithm loves it when a post has been saved a lot - it makes sense that these types of Instagram Reels are seeing such high engagement.
The power of educational content is in the way it positions your brand as an authority in its space, and demonstrates to audiences that you bring valuable insight and information to the table. Providing this value to viewers gives them a reason to return to your page and check back in for more social video content, strengthening your trustworthiness in the space.
If your business sells products, you may want to use this format to give an explainer of the item itself and use it as an opportunity to demo your product. Spruce up your content by recording a voice-over and adding captions, use helpful text overlays with extra titbits of info and keep language simple and direct.
Of course, the virality of these types of posts is in their handiness and how easily digestible they can make useful information - if your tutorial ends up being on the longer-form side, consider saving it for YouTube.
2. Lift the curtain
Take your audience behind the scenes and give them a way to connect with your brand on a more personal and authentic level. Authenticity is a quickly growing trend in the social video space and these candid moments captured on film can help establish a stronger rapport with your audience.
There are an endless amount of ways to create behind-the-scenes content; you may want to spotlight some of your staff and have them share their story about how they ended up working with your brand or what drove them to work in your industry. It could be a peek at manufacturing processes, the way your staff work on a day-to-day basis, sharing how decision-making within the team works and so on. It’s ultimately a genre of content that is customisable to your unique business and the way you operate.
Behind-the-scenes Instagram Reels provide a way for you to humanise your brand and remind viewers that there are passionate people behind the curtain.
3. Collaborate
Since the dawn of social media, collaborating and networking with other users has been a tried-and-true method for gaining exposure to new audiences and growing both your impressions and follower count. So what would this look like with Instagram Reels? There’s two methods we champion here at avails;
a. working with influencers
b. sharing UGC
The former is pretty self-explanatory, but if you haven’t heard of the acronym ‘UGC’, it refers to user-generated content. You can think of user generated content as the content posted by your supporters and customers about your brand; whether it’s a photo of their newly arrived package from your small jewellery label, a selfie after their haircut appointment with you or even just a review and tag of your business, this all counts as user-generated content that you can re-share or post from your own account (while tagging the original poster to shout them out, of course!).
Not only does this lift the burden of content creation from you, but it shows your audience real interactions that others just like them have had with your brand. It goes a long way in establishing your brand’s trustworthiness and credibility and helps prospective customers picture themselves as being a patron of your business too.
UGC lends a certain air of legitimacy to a business and with so many ill-equipped or even scam businesses popping up on social media everyday, users have become more conscious of whether to put their trust - aka their dollar - into a brand they find on social media.
Ready to uplift your Instagram Reels with high-quality social video content creation? Browse our affordable content creation packages today and leave it to us.
