If you’re publishing Reels on Instagram, you’re on the right track. After all, Reels are the best-performing post type on the platform for boosting engagement. And when your audience is engaged, you know you’re doing something right.
But then again, if your Reels aren’t getting enough views, you won’t get the engagement you need to grow a profitable business.
Want to learn how to get more eyes on your Reels? This guide tells you all you need to know.
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- Manage & reply to comments and DMs in one place.
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- Keep track of your competition.
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Why are my Reels not getting views?
Where do we even start?
There are many potential reasons why your Reels aren’t getting enough views on Instagram, but here’s a breakdown:
- Your Reels are not grabbing attention.
- You’re targeting the wrong audience.
- You’re posting at the wrong time.
- Your content has poor quality.
- You’re ignoring analytics.
- You’re not jumping on trends.
- You’re not interacting enough.
It’s tricky to pinpoint why your Reels are tanking, so it’s necessary to approach it from a high-level standpoint. After all, if your social media marketing strategy is lacking, all the hacks, tricks, and tactics in the world wouldn’t make a difference.
As with every strategy, the best approach is to ask three important questions: Why, who, and how.
To answer these questions, let’s break down your social media strategy into three components: your purpose (why), your target audience (who), and your plan (how).
Define a clear purpose
If you create Instagram Reels without a purpose in mind, your content won’t have the firm direction and clear intention it needs to make an impact.
You need a big ‘Why’ to inform your content creation. That way, you can create Reels with enough focus to make them appealing, helpful, and entertaining to a target audience.
Besides, customers prefer to support brands with a clear purpose in mind. So, why not get on their good side?
Ask yourself: What problem do you want to solve? Do you want to raise awareness about mental health? Maybe promote sustainable living practices or educate young adults about finance?
The goal is to come up with a purpose that speaks to you and motivates you to make a meaningful impact on society.
Define a target audience
If you try to create Reels that appeal to everyone, they will likely not appeal to anyone. So pick a specific audience and create Reels with them in mind. Find out what makes them tick so you can create Reels that will inspire, help, and entertain them.
Design a content strategy
Defining a clear purpose and picking a target audience will not help if you don’t design a social media content strategy that guides your efforts. To capture and hold the attention of your target audience, set a goal and devise a specific plan to achieve it.
Here are 8 ways to get more views on Instagram Reels
As mentioned, finding out why you’re not getting enough views can be tricky. Having a social media strategy is a great start, but that doesn’t guarantee you’ll rack up views in no time. An Instagram content strategy has many moving parts, and you must take specific steps to make things happen.
Here are eight things you can do to get more views on Instagram Reels:
1. Grab their attention
To stop users in their tracks while they’re scrolling, reel (yes, pun intended) them in with a hook.
Let’s face it: Instagram users scroll their feeds as if they’re picking from a candy store. If your Reel doesn’t grab them from the start, they aren’t watching.
So, how do you create Reels that will grab and hold people’s attention enough to view them?
The golden rule is to make obvious what your video is about and why they should watch it.
Adding a hook is a great way to pull that off.
If there’s someone you should take advice from in delivering great hooks, it’s Daniela Schrittenlocher (@elasmarketingservices). Here are 15 best performing Reels hooks according to her:
You can write your hook in your on-screen text or use the caption (yes, users do read them).
Also, a word of caution: Ensure your hook reflects your Reel’s content. If your hook promises something, make sure to deliver on that promise.
Remember, views are not the end goal. The goal is to earn the trust of your target audience. If your hook deceives or tricks viewers, you might gain a view, but it will make you look untrustworthy. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain a view, and lose his own followers?
2. Encourage your audience to engage with your Reel
Users interacting with your Reels via likes, comments, and shares signals that your content has made an impact.
These forms of engagement can also indirectly bring more eyeballs to your Reels. Considering how the Instagram Reels algorithm works, the platform tracks these forms of engagement and sends signals that your content is worth watching by a specific audience. So, if a user engages with your Reel, the algorithm recommends content similar to theirs.
To drive more engagement to your Reels and bring more eyeballs to them, do the following when you create your Reels content:
- Ask questions (e.g., “What do you think of this outfit?”)
- Ask viewers to comment, like, or share.
- Including a call to action (CTA) (e.g., “Share this with a friend who needs to see it!”)
- Create a poll (polls spark conversations)
- Create relatable videos (users like to share their own experiences)
3. Give the audience what they want
People are more likely to consume content that educates, inspires, and entertains them. Before you can build an audience and create the content they want, define that specific audience and take the time to understand them.
What are their pain points? What are their goals? What makes them tick?
Refrain from assuming you know and understand your audience. You’d do well to take @donyetaylor‘s advice. In a collaboration post with @creators, she gave this surprisingly practical advice: Find out the common questions your audience is asking via DMs and then respond with a Reel.
You can also use Instagram Analytics to inform your content. The actions users take while viewing (or “unviewing”) your Instagram Reels can provide insights into what types of content they like or don’t like.
By accessing Instagram Insights, you can identify popular content, track growth trends, and refine your marketing strategy based on audience preferences and engagement patterns.
4. Try new things
The “give your audience what they want” tactic works only up to a point. If all you’re giving them is fan service, your brand becomes predictable and boring. It also makes you sound insincere.
Audiences like to be surprised occasionally, so be bold and try new things. You’ll be pleasantly surprised how open they are to new ideas or new types of content if they’re tangentially related to their interests.
For example, if your audience loves cooking tutorials, try mixing in a segment on the history of a popular dish or a fun cooking challenge with unexpected ingredients. By continually introducing fresh and unpredictable content, you can make your audiences eager to discover what you have up your sleeve in every Reel you publish.
If you find yourself stumped for original content ideas, heed this advice from Stephen King:
“Good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find the ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
5. Use hashtags
Don’t listen to armchair social media managers with an edge-lord inclination to dismiss the utility of hashtags.
Yes, Instagram users still use hashtags to find content. Want to get your Reels discovered by your target users? Hashtag it up.
But don’t just use random hashtags. Use relevant hashtags your target audience is likely to search. If you have a coffee shop in the Bay Area and you want to promote it, it makes more sense to use hashtags like #coffeelovers and #BayAreaEats than, say, #fitnessmotivation or #travelgoals.
Instagram allows you to add up to 30 hashtags, but the popular advice is to add three to five. There’s also a small experiment concluding that 30 hashtags can give you the best results. However, some users on Reddit suspect that using too many hashtags can cause content to be marked as spam.
My advice? Use as many highly relevant and targeted hashtags as possible. If you think your Reels have contextual relevance that warrants 30 hashtags, knock yourself out.
Avoid generic hashtags, as they likely won’t help your content reach the right audience. Lastly, keep track of which hashtags are most effective and adjust accordingly.
6. Capitalize on trends
People are naturally drawn to trends, so following them is a great way to make your brand relevant and get discovered.
If you want your trendjacking efforts to generate views, strike while a trend is hot. Post a Reel within 24 — 48 hours from when the trend gained traction. If the trend has cooled down, you can drum up interest by putting a unique spin on it.
Before you jump on a trend, make sure it makes sense for your brand and target audience. Otherwise, it makes you appear like you’re trying too hard. And nothing turns an audience off than a brand that tries too hard.
It also helps to keep tabs on trending audio. Audio is a big part of the Reels experience. Some users actively search for Reels with specific music. If your content strikes the right chord with the right users, you might find a user who will view your Reel and build a more engaged following.
Want to stay on top of trending Reels every month? Check out our updated Instagram Reels trends guide.
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7. Collaborate with other creators/brands
No creator is an island. To boost your reach and engagement, collaborate with other creators and brands.
Collabs have always been a powerful marketing tool for increasing brand reach and engagement. If you doubt that for a second, just ask Charli D’Amelio, whose partnerships with brands like Hollister, Dunkin Donuts, Garnier, and Pura Vida helped her become a social media superstar.
When you co-create content with another brand with a similar audience and co-publish that content, you give yourself the opportunity to use that brand’s platform to increase your reach. Since your target audience is somewhat similar, the brand you collaborate with also gets the same benefit. It’s a win-win situation!
There are many ways to collaborate on Instagram:
- Paid partnerships: These are formal agreements where you pay another creator to promote your brand or co-create content. These often involve influencers or well-known figures in your industry to maximize reach and credibility.
- Instagram Collabs: This is an Instagram feature that allows you to co-author posts or Reels with another creator, sharing the content on both your profiles for mutual exposure. By doing a Collab post or Reel on Instagram, you can reach new audiences and increase engagement without payment or freebies involved.
8. Consistently publish Reels
This might sound cliché, but if you want your Reels to get more views, publish them consistently.
Why? Because getting a ton of views is partly a numbers game. That’s not to say quantity is more important than quality. Yes, it’s important to publish Reels your audience will find entertaining and valuable, but if your publishing schedule is erratic, you’re not giving your Reels enough opportunities to be discovered.
Your Reels might be the funniest, the most useful, and the most inspiring, but if you’re not publishing enough, you’re not establishing a strong enough presence to become top of mind.
But how many Reels should you publish in, say, a week? According to @creators, publishing 2-3 Reels per week is ideal.
If that sounds overwhelming, relax. You don’t have to publish that amount per week from the get-go. Create a content strategy, and once you’ve established the why, who, and how of your content strategy, coming up with content ideas and creating Reels out of them will come more naturally (at least eventually).
Pro-tip: Batch your content creation
Content batching is a productivity strategy where you group similar tasks together and complete them in dedicated blocks of time. Instead of creating content one piece at a time, organize your workflow to focus on specific types of content or stages of production in batches.
You can, for example, plan one day for research, the second day for drafting a content plan, the third day for recording, and the fourth for editing and scheduling. By focusing on a single task for long stretches, you can achieve a level of concentration you never thought possible, which in turn, helps you produce higher-quality work more efficiently.
Also, Reels are made for content batching. Since they’re short-form content, you can record and edit video material for multiple Reels at once. Then, you can publish your posts regularly without recording them all the time.
Plan and schedule Reels in advance
By scheduling your content in advance and plotting each piece in a content calendar, you get a bird’s eye view of your content strategy. This lets you see what works and make adjustments to generate more views and conversions.
It also helps to use external tools for scheduling Instagram Reels, such as NapoleonCat’s Instagram management tools for businesses.
NapoleonCat can help you:
- Plan your content weeks or months in advance using a content calendar.
- Assign different posts and Reels to your team members.
- Manage comments from Reels across multiple accounts – in one view
- Monitor the performance of your hashtags.
- Get in-depth insights on which types of content work best for your audience (and create custom Instagram Analytics reports within minutes).
- Track your competitors’ profiles and compare them to yours to master your social media strategy.
- & more.
By being strategic in your content creation and using the tools necessary to streamline your workflows, you can focus on creating Reels that will resonate with your target audience.
We highly recommend you test NapoleonCat for free – no credit card required 😉
Simplify Instagram Business
Management with One Tool
- Manage & reply to comments and DMs in one place.
- Monitor ad comments from multiple accounts.
- Automate answers to repetitive questions.
- Schedule posts to multiple accounts, on desktop.
- Analyze performance and monitor hashtags.
- Keep track of your competition.
- Create or schedule in-depth reports in seconds.
Final thoughts: Get more views for your Instagram Reels
There are no shortcuts to getting more views on Instagram Reels. To pull it off, you must publish Reels founded on a solid content strategy. You must also create Reels with a specific audience in mind.
Some creativity and derring-do can also help give your Reels something special that makes audiences want to keep watching. Most importantly, have fun creating and publishing. After all, nothing keeps you going better than pure enjoyment.
You may also like:
- How to Make Reels on Instagram: An Easy Guide For Beginners
- Here’s the Best Time to Post Reels on Instagram
- The Best Instagram Reels Editing Apps
- How to Go Viral on Instagram – 8 Pro Tips
- Instagram Trends To Keep An Eye On For
- How to Get Followers on Instagram – Fair and Square
- Here’s How to Get More Instagram Story Views
- What are Instagram Gifts? (and are they worth the hype?)
