How to get your Instagram Reels viral?
Instagram is a social media platform that was released in the year 2010 by the founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Although it was initially released just for iOS, eventually it was released for various operating systems including a web version and a desktop application form. Since its release, it has rapidly grown and has become the social media of the generation and proved itself to be one of the best among its competitors with the varied amount of features it provides. From texting to sharing and consuming various types of media, the options and content are endless.
The newest form of content that Instagram has added to its platform is “Instagram Reels” which is a direct competition to the social media site “TikTok” having short videos to be posted on the platform. It was introduced just before the pandemic and was in beta testing for a while. Initially, reels were supposedly just 15 seconds long but were later prolonged until a minute long. While it’s a form of posting short videos of people doing various activities it was popularised very quickly thanks to the pre-existing concept of TikTok and the recent bans of it in many countries.
If you have been trying to get more views and engagement on your reels and have been trying to reach a larger audience and showcase either your talent or something that you are fond of, in this article we would be discussing some ways how to get your reels viral with just a few simple easy steps. Let’s step up the game, shall we?
Follow the Trend
Following the trend can be divided into further three categories, it can be a trending song, a trending video format, or something evergreen.
Trending Song
Oftentimes, music artists release new music which ends up trending on various platforms including reels. People either create a montage, a dance challenge, or any sort of art video which because of the trending audio gets to the top of the grid. It doesn’t necessarily require you to have the music on blast, you can either use it as a piece of background music or can completely mute it out if you have any sort of voice-over or audio already in the video itself.
A cheeky little trick would be to completely mute out the trending audio if you don’t like it and have your audio over it. The algorithm will still be picking it up as it still does use the trending audio.
Trending Video Format
This goes hand in hand with the trending song sometimes. If you want to boost your account’s engagement rate, you can probably do some challenges that are recently trending and are seemingly everywhere. This can be a certain montage video, a certain type of dance, or some sort of cooking, gaming, or fun challenge. These are fun and easy to make especially if you have people to make reels with.
Also Read: Augmented Reality in Classrooms
Relevant Hashtags
Instagram like Twitter, is also dependent on hashtags to be able to catch on to the algorithm. By using relevant hashtags, the algorithm can sort out content depending on the hashtags that are being used in the video. Hashtags filter out and help the algorithm to catch the video and suggest it on other’s feeds hence, improving the rate of engagement on your profile. It is however necessary to not abuse hashtags and spam them as some posts do, as it can trouble the algorithm to sort out your content and would be merged with a lot of categories.
Use relevant hashtags and only about 10-15 of them which are interrelated so that they can be categorized under one section.
Promote it
The more engagement it gets in the initial stages of the reel being posted, the more it gets easier for the algorithm to catch on to it. Try to post it on your story, and hopefully make your friends post them too. As the insights increase and the interaction to the post increases it automatically helps the reel to do better.
Conclusion
Using these tactics on your reels can help you gain followers and views pretty quickly, however, it is also important for you to focus that you don’t need these numbers necessarily to validate yourself, these are merely numbers and don’t define you. While making any such type of content, try to have fun and do it as a side hobby rather than making it your main motive (there is nothing wrong if you want to make it your main source, however, social media is a very risky option as nothing is guaranteed and no sort of contract is being signed). Hopefully, this article helps and gets your reels a great boost.
