Is Instagram sinking posts to force everyone to make Reels?

If you have the power in a social network and you want brands and companies to start publishing a certain type of content more than anything, you just have to get the public to launch en masse to interact with it. Those responsible for the social media marketing strategy live by and for engagement and if one piece of content shows more response than another, they will launch en masse to create it.

The best example to understand it is on Facebook. When Facebook launched video content – ​​and set out to unseat YouTube as the upload destination – Pages were key to underpinning its strategy. Suddenly, everything was videos in the feed and, if you wanted to be successful, you had to launch that content no matter what. The algorithm seemed to reward them, putting them in prominent positions, so much so that a good video could have a very high return (there are all those media pages that went from their content and launched to create videos for Facebook because that was the Gold). The brands, if they wanted to remain visible and have engagement, had to create videos and they all ended up doing it.

Now, Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, is promoting Reels, the videos that function as the alternative of the second social network to TikTok videos and its commitment to remain relevant in the face of its attractive – and popular – competitor. And, perhaps for this reason, it is not surprising that studies show that Instagram content achieves less engagement than Reels.

The Later accounts, to which has been lit Insider, show that the average engagement data of Instagram posts has plummeted. On average, and compared to what happened in 2019, the engagement of publications on the social network has fallen by 44%. This statistic includes all the content that is published in post format designed for the feed, that is, photos, galleries and even videos, as long as they are not Reels. Against this, the one achieved by the Reels has skyrocketed, rising by 500% since Instagram began using the format.

This data could be explained taking into account that the content already existed – and Instagram was experiencing a golden moment in those years – and that the Reels are a comparison that comes from nowhere. In other words, it is comparing how they reacted to them when they were something new and with which users were not familiar with how they do it now that they are popular content.

However, the reality is more complex than that simple explanation. The posts have gone from having an average engagement of 5.6% in January 2019 to closing 2021 with an average of 2.9%. The Reels have jumped from the 2% with which they were released in 2020 to stand with an average engagement of 9%.

part of the strategy

And, as they recall in the conclusions of the study, the trend has been parallel to Instagram’s own policy, which is giving Reels more visibility – so much so that it has changed their design to make them more visible and findable – and has positioned them as a key piece. In its meetings with investors, the social media giant insists on the power of Reels and their potential as a path to growth.

It is also incentivizing creators to generate more and more Reels. In fact, the influencers themselves feel the pressure to make the leap to this content, since engagement is the basic piece of their business and achieving it is mandatory to survive.

In fact, the latest Instagram move already points out that escaping the Reels is going to be impossible. All the videos that attitude to the social network and that last less than 15 minutes will already be published as Reels, whether or not that was the intention of their creators (in short: they will have no other option than that). The videos published up to now will remain on the social network as they are, but those that are uploaded from now on will do so as Reels.

This has implications for brand accounts, but also for people’s accounts. as they remember in TechCrunch, unless posted privately, anyone will be able to find that Reel and use the original audio to create a Reel of their own or their own remix. Likewise, it will make publishing videos horizontally especially complicated.

–