If your Instagram insights look like this, and it seems like the algorithm is just not on your side, I actually got some great news, because today I'll show you an actionable system you can follow to go from no growth to basically yes growth. For example, this creator was stuck in the algorithm jail not being able to hit more than 2,000 views or something like this, felt like this invisible ceiling and nothing seemed to work, to actually using this exact strategy that I'm about to show you to create a few breakout videos and get the algorithm back on their side, now consistently hitting a few hundred thousand views all the time. Or this creator who had pretty great content, but the algorithm just didn't want to open up, right?
Felt like this shadow ban, but as you can see right here, things are finally starting to happen. All thanks to this new framework, basically we got our clients through. I'll walk you through here step-by-step today.
And we're going to do all of this, obviously using data-driven decisions, taking a look at hard facts basically and reacting accordingly. The first thing we need to understand is why don't you get any reach, right? What is the actual reason behind that?
And you can actually figure that out pretty easily. Usually among my clients, or actually all the time, we do what we call a bottleneck analysis, similar to what we do in hopefully from now on in our monthly live sessions here on YouTube. Also, we had a video recently where I walked you through some of this process.
But for now, let's actually just focus on the algorithm part, because that is actually a big one for a lot of you guys, because a lot of the times the algorithm is simply confused and doesn't know what to do with your content, which to be honest is kind of an issue. And I think Instagram is aware of this, but that's what we're going to fix right here. So first of all, you have to understand the algorithm basically works in a way that it takes a look at how people in your audience react to your content.
It's not just this though, because I'm pretty sure the algorithm also categorizes you, whether you are an actual creator who creates with a purpose, or somebody who's just doing this whole thing for fun and using Instagram mainly as a, not even as a platform, but as something to share fun content and to connect with people and your friends. I've been kind of predicting this for a while, but finally, we can actually see this firsthand in some of the accounts. If you go to your followers, some people can see a tab called creators among their followers.
Basically people who the algorithm considers being a creator. Now, the problem is with this, the algorithm needs to categorize you as a creator, because otherwise it wouldn't make any sense for the algorithm to even push out your content. And this is where most people run into issues.
And this is what we're going to fix right here. A lot of times the algorithm has people categorized wrong, either as being not a creator at all, or as being a creator, but for the wrong audience. For example, if you've pivoted your content at some point, or if you've had, took a break for months or years, and now you're back.
And usually that happens if people that follow you just don't really react to your content. One of the big issues that I see working with lots of people is if mainly the creators, friends or family are commenting and sharing and basically engage with the content in a forced way, because they want to support and want to help. This actually messes up way more than you think.
And if you think you were part of this whole thing, this is where the strategy comes into play. And this is where the strategy really shines. Now, at this point, you've probably heard about trial reels, right?
This new feature, basically to test your reel before posting it to your audience. It was kind of a hype thing at first. It seems like a lot of people use this whole feature the wrong way, because if you know how to use it, it's actually pretty powerful and it can make a whole lot of difference.
Because using this and the way I'll show you right now, will get you laser targeted followers and help the algorithm finally understand who your target audience actually is. Here's the basic gist of what you should be doing. First of all, go to your analytics.
We're going to need to identify the content that actually gives us followers that align with your content. So go to your insights and find reels in the past, mostly, let's say in the past year that not only gave you the most views, obviously that helps, but actually try to find the reels that gave you the most followers. Then once you have this, simply take these exact videos that you figured out and just repost them with the same exact caption as a trial reel.
And again, with the intention of never actually posting it to your main grid, because it's already there. That alone will force the algorithm to find an audience that resonates with your content, because it's proven already, because you've gotten some followers in the past with the same reel. It's going to find some people who are actually interested in your content.
Now, here's the thing that most people kind of misunderstand. As of right now, and this is a powerful thing, there doesn't seem to be any type of restriction on how often you can actually repost the same reel in the trial reels. By the way, the same reel in your feed as well, it's a whole nother can of worms.
You can literally repost your content a month later without changing it. The algorithm's not suppressing it or anything. People think that.
It's actually wrong. I have bulletproof data on that. But basically, you can literally, as a trial reel, repost the same content every week, the exact same content every week, and help the algorithm basically find a new audience.
This especially helps if you're somewhat of a newer account or you don't have a lot of traction, and you can force the algorithm to find new people without having to basically create new pieces of content that kind of get burned out that nobody sees anyway. You can basically use your hard work and push this out for weeks, for months, maybe for years. Probably not, but you get the idea.
What's really important is that you don't forget to post your regular stuff on your main feed as well. That's very, very important. If you don't do that, this whole strategy is not going to work because these new people that will come through the trial reels to your profile, if they don't see you're active, then people are not going to follow you, right?
But people need to see that you're actually active, that you post content, and then you also have ideally the exact same content they found you through the trial reels somewhere on the feed because otherwise they'll get confused. And we don't want confused people because confused people just leave the app and find something else. If you have this whole thing going on for yourself, people are going to follow you, and you're going to see that in the stats.
And just this thing itself will push the algorithm one step at a time closer towards understanding who your audience really is and basically getting the algorithm on your side again, because the people who follow you recently are the ones that the algorithm really takes a look at. Now, one thing that a lot of people don't really understand is they expect to blow up with the trial reels. It doesn't matter, actually.
You don't need to blow up with trial reels. We just need to have this mindset of one step at a time, slowly pushing your way into the right direction, basically. Every once in a while, it will blow up.
We've had some clients in the past week where some reels got them literally four or 5K followers. Obviously cool, but don't expect this. Now, obviously that's not all because you wouldn't be here, obviously, if we weren't to go a lot deeper in this whole thing.
So let me show you something even more powerful. Once you have your trial reels running, the first thing you want to do is go to your analytics of these trial reels. You're going to be able to really check out how your content is performing, especially in terms of the hooks.
And as a first step, I want you to kind of get a feeling for how your hooks perform to a cold audience. If they're below 30% or 25%, very bad. If they're above 30, 35, 40%, 50%, perfect, right?
So that's the first thing you kind of need to fix if you really don't get there. Now, the next thing I really want you to do, and this kind of helps you with this whole thing already, from now on, whenever you create content, before recording, you know, when you write the script, think of at least three hooks, maybe even more, for each reel that you create different hooks. This whole thing could be either a simple text hook change where nothing is different from your basically spoken hook, or it could be a totally different scene altogether.
So a totally different hook angle altogether. And then you basically have a bunch of different yet same videos that you can all post as trial reels one after another and simply compare the metrics, but not just the heart metrics, obviously the heart metrics, like the three second views to kind of understand what type of hook performs better with your audience. But these things can be skewed, obviously, if the algorithm hasn't really found out your audience yet.
So also kind of see, okay, generally, what is the reach with a hook like this? How many people follow me because of this hook, if you get what I mean. And also as another thing to really kind of go deep into understanding your audience, because here's the thing, you don't just want the algorithm to understand your audience.
Ideally, you understand your audience yourself, or at least the content that you create and what type of audience it attracts. And these trial reels can really, really help you a lot with that, especially if you don't reach a lot of non-followers. What you want to do is you can literally click yourself through the people who engage with you, who follow you through a trial reel or who like you, and basically go on a stalking spree, right?
In your notifications feed, for example, if you see XYZ started following you from a reel, you can actually just click on this text thing and you'll see the reel they actually came from, even if it's a trial reel. So you're going to see, but it doesn't matter if it's a trial reel or not, or the likes or the comments. And basically what you want to do is check them out.
Who are they following? Who are those people? Are they actually part of, potentially part of your target audience?
Are these people really aligned with your goals and with your content that you want to do? If not, you might want to rethink your strategy, right? Your messaging, your hooks, your content.
So before I put the system I just talked about into somewhat of an order, if you're truly serious about creating, scaling, building your content strategy to be, to truly become the number one creator in your industry, we actually have a few spots available again for our hands-on and recently refined creative mentorship program, where we basically do all of the heavy lifting for you, right? The whole research phase, the initial research, the strategy, we'll actually install our data-driven content framework into your unique situation, right? Because obviously it's different for everybody.
And we actually just had some awesome breakthroughs among our clients last week. For example, somebody grew, I think about 400 ,000 followers in about two weeks after we basically only started to implement our initial strategy based off of our data-driven research. So if you want to mentor my whole team, me, multiple live sessions, feedback, whole bunch of stuff.
And if you want us to do the heavy lifting for you, go to the link in the description, hop on a call with my community manager, Florian. He doesn't bite. Don't worry about it.
We're not going to force you to work with us or make this whole thing uncomfortable. We just basically want to see where you're at, if we can help you even, and actually how we can help you if we can. With that being said, these are your action steps to crush this whole thing, get the algorithm back on your site within the next few weeks.
First of all, you're going to want to identify your personal top performing content of the past year. If you don't really have top performing content, by the way, trust your guts, look at a content piece. And even if it doesn't have a lot of views or didn't give you a lot of followers, if you really think it has the potential to attract that perfect target audience for you, use that, right?
And then you want to take all of these content pieces and repost them exactly without changing anything as a trial reel. You can literally post trial reels daily. Once you have this, change up the hook, sometimes the text hook, sometimes record maybe a different hook, basically repost this existing content again.
There's literally no limits. The algorithm doesn't limit it. And also don't forget to post regularly on your feed because otherwise your conversion rate of these people coming over to follow you will drop quite a bit.
You don't want that to happen, obviously, because the algorithm really takes a look at the new people on your profile. Are they going to follow or not? And how did they react?
Finally, to make this whole thing even more powerful, like really, that's like the cheat code. You want to attach a many chat automation to some of your trial reels, but doing so can really help the algorithm understand more about your audience and push you into the creator category quicker because these people, there's actually people in your target audience that interact with you where a whole DM conversation starts, a comment train starts. And this really does a lot to help the algorithm figure this out.
I actually made a walkthrough just a few weeks ago, guiding you through this exact process. So combine this whole thing that we just talked about today with this video right there, execute this whole thing, and finally get out of this Instagram jail.
