Here’s Our Instagram Reels Trend Report for July 2023!

Now that Meta has been focusing on Threads, the Instagram changes have stalled, allowing us to really focus on fine tuning our strategies instead of flying by the seat of our pants. As with any marketing, Instagram marketing requires time before determining whether something is working. However, the constant changes have made it difficult to truly gage the results of long-term strategy. 

Today, Raewyn wants to dig into what parts of your strategy to pay attention to when evaluating before making changes to your strategy. We recommend you have a Key Performance Indicator spreadsheet or document. This is a place where you identify what you are quantifying in your strategy – typically people choose some vanity metrics like likes or followers and pair it with some deeper metrics like your engagement rate.

Raewyn’s a firm believer that “seeing green” in your professional dashboard means your strategy is working – but let’s define that a little deeper.

Step 1: Record your metrics. 

Within Instagram you can actually change the time period that you’re looking at, so even if you haven’t been tracking since the beginning, you can break things down. We recommend looking at the past 90 days and see how it compared to the 90 days before that.

Step 2: Identify your best content

Look at what type of content Instagram has labeled your “best content.” You can find that right there on the Engagement page, but if you want to get more specific with your variables, you can change that as well. We like to look at INTERACTIONS and SAVES and SHARES.

Step 3: Determine WHY they’re the best

Based off of your engagement, you can determine what it was about each top post made it have high engagement and re-create similar content to continue engagement.

For example, THIS post gets a lot of engagement for us because people love to share their book launch dates & connect in the comments. Because we’ve identified that, we make sure to include a post like this each month.

THIS post gets frequent saves and shares because it is an event style post, so we make sure to also share one of these once a month.

THIS post surprised us on engagement, so we make sure to share this post again at least every 6 months.

If you’re posting reels, some of your popular posts may come because of audios, trends or gifs, which can help boost your overall performance but do not mean you need to be a slave to them. We typically will make sure to hit a trend in the week before we plan on announcing something big and then we follow that trend post with some informative posts about who we are to prime new followers.

Step 4: Decide where you need to tweak and tweak!

Now that you’ve been able to identify some things that are working in your favor, check how it weighs against the rest of your account and tweak your strategy slightly. Whenever changing your strategy, you don’t want to do a full overhaul – instead you want to focus on a strategy that you can Lather, Rinse and Repeat.

Reels & Trends to Try This Month:

The Bill Hader GIF that’s rocking Bookstagram. We used this template.

Create your own Barbie Avatar with AI (shout out to Louise for showing us this during our IG/TikTok office hours).

Taylor Swift July or August audio – because everyone’s on that Era’s Tour hype this summer!

 

Here are a few examples of trending audio ‌we’ve enjoyed:

Use this audio to share your book.

Use this audio to share your book aesthetic.

A fun Barbie audio that can be paired with sharing a behind the scenes look at being an author.

Want to uplevel your IG reels game? Grab an IG Reels planner, designed by our IG manager, Raewyn!