A few years ago, Instagram was a marketer's paradise. They knew that if they opened an account, they would quickly gain followers, engagement and reach. You only have to talk to a community manager about the subject to have them reminisce about that moment with nostalgia. Things have changed and it's been a few years since people began to calculate when it would come. zero day on InstagramWhat is clear right now is that, on that social network, everything is not rosy. Not even close.
But what should marketers take into account? Perhaps it all comes down to the fact that the strategy should have Reels and more Reels, although certain nuances must be added. In general terms, Instagram is facing a reach crisis and a commitment to one format over all others.
The sources we have used to understand what matters right now in social media marketing on Instagram are the Instagram Study 2022, elaborated by Metricool, and the study about Reels and their reach developed by quintly.
Has Instagram's reach dropped? This is a question that community managers and social media strategists are asking themselves, seeing how their accounts and those of their competitors are doing. Metricool's study agrees, in part, with them, although it begins by pointing out that "there is no universal answer to this question." According to their calculations, for those profiles that publish posts and stories, the reach will have dropped between 20 and 25%. If, on the other hand, they also publish Reels, things will have been very different.
The key is in the type of content and how the Instagram algorithm sees it. “Reels get between two and twelve times more reach compared to feed posts,” reads Metricool’s conclusions. In contrast, the average retrieval rate for stories is 7.49% and for posts 22.35%.
Instagram is betting everything on Reels, even though the numbers show that the strategy is not entirely correctIt is therefore not surprising that Reels have the greatest reach and interactions, followed (at a great distance) by carousels, single images and videos.
If a brand wants to grow quickly on Instagram and reach those who don't know the brand, the Metricool study recommends investing in them; even recognizing that carousels give more interactions or stories keep the brand active continuously.
In fact, according to Quintly's accounts, brands are already putting all their effort into Reels and are publishing more of this type of content than others. On Netflix's Instagram account, 60% of content is already Reels, they exemplify. There has been an overtaking. Between July 2021 and July 2022, carousels were the brands' favourite content (because they gave them the best results). From June of this year, however, Reels have begun to overtake. This is no small date, since it coincides with the changes made by the social network and its decision to give them priority.
Beyond its success in general, the quintly study has also identified that the highest number of Reels are shared on Fridays, with Monday curiously being the second most popular day, and that Reels have more likes on average than the rest of the posts. 39.7% of all likes go to Reels, with 27% to carousels and another 27% to images and only 6.5% to videos. They also win in comments, with 36.8% of all those that users leave on brands' updates.
Despite the good comparative data for Reels, there is another important number to take into account. According to Quintly, the interaction rate is falling across all types of updates. This is not just happening with photos, but across all formats.
Are users starting to get tired of Instagram? Is Meta killing the goose that lays the golden eggs by forcing it to be like TikTok? The study's accounts say that this downward trend was actually already seen in the study they did in 2021, although what effects it will have in the long or medium term is something that remains to be seen.
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