HOW TO GET REALLY GOOD AT REELS

A couple of weeks ago, a few members of the Fleet Street team attended a social media session hosted by Propel, Supersonic and Avocado Social.

The ‘Social Media for Profit Conference’ was a great chance to brush up on our skills, learn more about the current social landscape and remind ourselves about best practice across the board on social media.

We thought we’d pick one area of focus from the event and share our learnings. So, here’s a few handy tips on creating Instagram Reels. With Reels tending to get around 22% more engagement than a standard post, they’re a great place to focus time and effort when it comes to planning your content.

Here’s some of the most useful tips we picked up:

1. Firstly, what story are you going to tell with your Reel? The most engaging ones are eye catching, tell a good story or offer a unique perspective. And all in a few seconds. Plan out the story and what you want to say with you Reel before getting started on a shoot.
2. Choose between 15, 30, 60 or 90 seconds for your Reel. With longer Reels being used for challenges or to tell a very compelling story only.
3. When it comes to sounds, it pays to use trending ones as this will bump you up in the algorithm.
4. Text on Reels can really help to drive completion rate but remember to keep it minimal as it can otherwisebe overwhelming.
5. Keep your content relevant by keeping on top of Reels trends. A great place to have a look for these is via the professional dashboard on Instagram or the Later Blog.
6. You can use Reels templates to edit your content, or alternatively you can also explore editing with online tools from CapCut or the Mojo App.
7. Remember, Reels is where people expect to find polished content. Always shoot your content in high res, in daylight (if possible) and vertical ONLY.

Finally, our favourite bit of advice from the day: make sure you really think about what content is important to your audience. Something we think rings true of all content, not just Reels.