Instagram just revealed what it actually takes to blow up and get more followers with their new best practises tab. And while there's some things you guys probably already knew, because if you subscribe here, you're usually way ahead of the curve, but they actually did clarify some strategies, for example, stuff about hashtags, engagement, and original content that will actually help you grow organically without any of these weird hacks that some other people talk about still, which is coincidentally one thing they actually mentioned. Don't use those weird hacks, aka, apparently, weird hacks are many chat automations, but more on that in a minute.
So every account should basically have under their professional dashboard, what's called best practises. And you know, this is essentially, if you click there, this is how it looks. And they really go all in to tell us what's actually important in different categories, guidelines, reach, engagement, creation.
Now I've actually had the privilege of working directly with some of the biggest accounts creators across different niches across the world, helping them build and also refine their strategies. And while all of this advice in there is actually actually pretty useful, it's not the complete full picture. What actually matters is written between the lines right here, which is what we're going to analyse right here, because there's some interesting things also for me.
So let's start with the first tab right here, creation, create content that clicks with people. First of all, by the way, everywhere they tell you how you are doing right now. So for example, well, you're leading the way with 13 reels created last month.
They always tell you what's going on in your account and whether you're okay or not. But the actual first important thing, once we open this best practises tab is how many reels you should be creating. And again, we've talked about this here for a while now on this channel, but now they also officially state that accounts that create more than 10 reels per month usually have the best reach mind you 10 or more reels per month.
And they actually specifically say reels, not posts. That's just how it is. But they also mentioned down there, photos and carousels can also help you get more reach.
So again, the focus is clearly on reels. We knew that already, just to show you they actually write that between the lines right in there. The next really important thing here is where I was pretty sure I can be like, ha got you Instagram.
You're spouting misinformation. It's wrong. But I actually went back to check all the stats for my clients and accounts and turns out they are right.
Instagram is right. And what they say, what they say is reels that are 30 to 90 seconds, get better engagement and are shown to more people. Reels over 90 seconds won't be recommended to new audiences, which is kind of interesting because I thought we actually had creators that had two minute reels that blew up and it's true, but that was months ago.
And over the past three, four or five months, none of them actually. And here's just one example from one of the best performing reels from one of our clients, one minute, 30, 90 seconds to the point. Exactly.
4. 2 million views actually has 5. 7 million views because you know, there's also the Facebook views that are not being counted in there, but there's that.
It's also clearly something where I think they go against this five, six second trending real approach where people just hammer out these five second videos that don't really have anything to add. This actually brings me to the next point that a lot of people are asking constantly in my programmes here in the comments. And we've actually, I've been talking about this and telling you guys this for probably a year or more, but now they finally have confirmed it.
Officially. Um, we're talking about hashtags. They say only use relevant hashtags.
Obviously that's what we know. But when you dig a little deeper and scroll all the way to the right, there is a video called how to use hashtags from Carly Lynn, who's part of the Instagram team. And she basically says you shouldn't use more than five hashtags, which essentially what we're talking about been talking about for more than a year.
Again, if you subscribe here, you're always ahead of the curve, but also, and this is the actual great, interesting news here is officially finally officially been confirmed yet another win for team. Hey, Dominic to predict correctly way in advance. All of these things that brought hashtags such as hashtag reels or hashtag explore can actually hurt your reach.
And by using them and slash or the wrong ones, you will actually get less views. You guys just didn't want to believe me. I've actually had fights with some corporations, big corporations.
If you probably know them, I can't mention them, but yeah. Who use these hashtags and they tried to force me to use them for some of the clients. No, we got it now in Technicolour black on white.
No, but you know what I mean? We got it now officially confirmed Instagram. Don't use these broad hashtags.
Be very deliberate with hashtags. We have actually a video about hashtags, how to use them. Some interesting Intel that I figured out from, from our clients linked down below there or after this video, last thing about this creation tab.
Just, you know, we should know that you should keep it high resolution. People tend to engage more with high quality content and the creative mentorship cohort. We've just gone through this whole thing.
Your content needs to have a minimum viable content quality, production quality below that. It's not going to get recommended below that people are just not going to engage with that. And sometimes if your content quality is actually too high, meaning it has like a gigabyte or something for a 30 second reel, it will get compressed.
And then it actually looks worse than before. And then it doesn't hit the minimum viable threshold of content production quality. So be careful with that.
Just one other small thing, because I'm a nerd again, and I have to just mention that have ADHD or whatever. They say they should have a minimum frame rate. Reels should have a minimum frame rate of 30 frames per second.
Just one inside. Well, I believe them, but this video that I showed you from before with more than 5 million views and all the other ones from this account that has consistently blow up, they have 25 frames and not 30. So it's below that minimum 30 frames.
Now the engagement tab, basically, we know that focus on deeper engagement, how to do that, creating cool, interesting videos with a purpose and with some substance. We all always talk about this. They also talk about sharing.
We all know this. But one thing that's kind of interesting is that they encourage you to reply to comments within a couple of days. So don't reply to them after two, three weeks.
Seems like replying to your comments after a few days will keep pushing, will help keep pushing the reels out a little longer than usual. Now engagement tab, nothing really new, but here's where it gets interesting. If we go to the reach tab, it's actually a very interesting point that comes up all the time.
And I was actually coincidentally just talking about this in one of my creative mentorship mastermind sessions the other day, because people always have this question. If you're one of your posts or reels underperforms, will subsequent reels get less views because of that reel underperforming, if you know what I mean? The answer is strictly no.
I personally actually have tonnes of data on this. For example, we've had a client who've had hundreds of thousands of views on each reel consistently. And one time, instead of 700,000 views, they got 20,000 views, right?
And people just, clients went crazy. Obviously, everybody would go crazy. It was like, what's going on right there?
We went back to check. And usually when we go back to check stuff like that, it's the content. People are just get lazy.
People don't put as much effort into the content anymore. And most likely it is the hook. In this case, it was the hook.
So point being, next time this client posted with effort again, with putting a lot of effort in again, they went back right up to their usual numbers, 700, 800, 900,000 views. So there's that, there's no penalty. And we actually have a tonne of, or a lot of clients where the reach really fluctuates a lot from low, super low numbers to super high numbers after one another.
And in my opinion, that's actually a good thing. Because first of all, we need that for our data driven content framework. Because we need to know, we need to understand what works and why it works.
And then maybe we can find some stuff out. But also, sometimes just the maximum views metric is not the one you actually want to focus on at all times, because it might push you into a different direction if it doesn't align with your goal. Or sometimes you were going to figure out, and that's actually a thing that happens a lot, is that the low views content might help you sell the most of your products, for example, or get you the most revenue, which is the case for me here on this channel, for example.
So there you go. And if we scroll down again, Shiru actually confirmed this. She said that posting bad performing content won't mess up your algorithm stats.
Instagram takes a look, the algorithm takes a look at each post on their own. And it depends whether this post is actually good or not. And cool thing for you, because this means you can actually experiment way more.
And you can try out a lot of more things. Now we go ahead next taps the monetization tab, we're not even gonna talk about it, because it's bull, you're not gonna get rich with that unless you have mill 10s of millions of followers doesn't matter, we're not gonna focus it. But lastly, in this guidelines, general guidelines thing, there's two super interesting insights that we actually got right here.
First of all, you know, to tell you if you follow the guidelines, which is good, again, doesn't always mean that you're not going to get your reach cut, even if it's all green, sometimes doesn't matter for now. But first of all, the watermarks, I feel like I shouldn't have to say this anymore. But don't post anything with a watermark, especially not with a tick tock watermark in there.
But also any watermark is bad. Also your own watermark. Some people do that.
But we have lots of data, they will suppress your reach. But there's one thing that answers one of the most asked questions that I got recently. And again, you know, what a surprise.
I have figured this out, obviously months ago, already, because of all the data that we have coming from all of our clients, but you probably know that you're not supposed to post unoriginal content, meaning content that somebody else has already uploaded before. And if they find a match, right, if you post exactly the same piece of content again, the repost will get taken down. And Instagram will just not like that they will also flag your account if that happens a lot.
Obviously, this is only true if you don't alter the content in any way. And if we again, scroll down there, Andrew from Instagram, specifically mentioned that, for example, memes, if you alter it in the form of creating a meme of something, it should be fine. Not saying you should post memes, by the way, don't.
Ideally, you don't post memes. Crap. But you get the idea.
But here's where it actually gets really, really interesting, because he also answered one of the most asked questions, which is whether you can repost your own content, you know, from your own account, and whether this will actually get flagged. And the answer is the clear no, it will not get flagged. You can repost your own content as many times as you want without running into any problems.
In fact, we're actually doing this a lot with some of our clients, if they have already good content back and post consistently. After two to three months, it's a very valid strategy to simply repost old, high performing reels, sometimes even not super high performing reels again, sometimes I'll alter it sometimes just really take the same post and repost again. And sometimes these reposts on the on the same account perform even better than the first time around.
So again, we've been talking about this for a while. But finally, Instagram has officially confirmed that which is very cool. Now the last big thing, it's kind of complicated.
And I'm still doing research on that as we speak, basically engagement bait, he said that you shouldn't tell people or bait people to comment with a specific word. Now where have we heard this before? Most likely in the sense of many chat automation posts, which used to blow up like crazy?
Well, not so much anymore. And we can clearly also see that in our data, if you kind of bait people to say, well, comment the word x down there, and you'll get my new PDF guide or something like that. A lot of times content like this will not get recommended as much anymore, usually only to your followers right now, and actually a small portion of your followers only, which is kind of a bad thing for many chats.
You know, because usually five months ago, you you had to have a five second Instagram reel. And with some common x and I'll send you this with some cool hook. And then it blew up almost all the time.
Yeah, these times are over kind of sad for many chat, I was actually considering doing some sort of brand deal with them recently. And as you know, I'll only do it if it were really beneficial for you guys. However, coincidentally, really, sometimes it's just funny, I was just on a call with one of my clients right before this video.
And still some of her reels blow up with many chat automation attached to them. So, you know, we kind of have conflicting data. And this is what I said, I'm still doing research on it.
But I believe it has something to do with how the video actually is, if the video has some sort of substance, if you go back, if the videos video focusses on deeper engagement a bit, if it's just a simple engagement bait, five second video, where you again, say, well, it will most likely get suppressed, if it's a valuable video that sort of gets the conversation going, and that has a DM automation attached to it as an extra, it's fine, it will most likely blow up again, I'm still doing my research, I still stand by my word in many chat is very, very powerful. It's actually been responsible for literally hundreds of 1000s of dollars over the past few months of revenue, just through Instagram, through many chat, for some of my companies, as well as some of my clients. So there's that, by the way, this video right there talks about some interesting findings about how to really use hashtags to get views.
It's a few months old, but it's still very, very relevant. I strongly urge you to watch this. And I'll see you later.
