38 – Maximising your reach with Instagram reels
With the introduction of the ability to schedule Instagram content directly in the app it has opened up lots of opportunities for maximising your Instagram content and in particular your Instagram Reel content. If you are creating reels that are not date specific then you have the opportunity to use these more than once to increase your reach. Although this may sound like a silly idea there is evidence to suggest that posting duplicate content does not pose any negative effects on your account. In fact, if done the right way it can help you increase your account reach and I am going to explain how below.
Posting Reels to your grid
When you post an Instagram reel to your grid and then look at your insights you will see that the majority of accounts that see your reel are people that already follow you. This makes sense, people scroll their feed and watch content from people they follow but you must have noticed that there is an increase in suggested content popping up in your own feed. So how do you get your reels to appear as suggest content?
Posting Reels to your reels feed only
Not many people will click through to your account and then look through your reels feed. This is where you can utilise the reels you are creating and post your content twice. Obviously you will want to space these out so they are not too close together and the gap for that will depend on your own posting schedule. When you are posting your reel to your grid, save the reel and then upload it and schedule it to appear again in the future yet this time set it to only appear in your reel feed and not appear on your grid. But why would you do that? Well evidence shows that reels posted to this area only are actually shown to more non followers than followers.
How does the insights work?
Below is an breakdown of how these insights work for reels
| Where you post the content | How many people see the content | Who sees the content |
| Grid and reels | High reach | majority followers, small quantity non followers |
| Reels only | Small reach | majority non followers, small quantity followers |
Although the overall reach of content published to your reels only feed is a lot smaller you are actually reaching new people so you can hook them in and hopefully get them to follow your account. With this in mind, don’t do this with every reel. Make sure that this is your best content and the type of content that showcases your channel in a way that will gain new followers.