Here’s Our Instagram Quarter 4 Reels Trend Report!

Instagram and Meta have spent most of quarter 3 introducing Threads and rolling out updates to that app. Have you joined Threads yet? The WIP School group have been talking about how great it is for connecting with fellow authors. However, they haven’t left Instagram in the dust. It’s still one of the best platforms for authors to connect with their readership – which means it’s great for MARKETING. Here’s how to use Instagram in Quarter 4.

Updates we saw in quarter 3 that you should have access to now:

• Broadcast Channels – with or without collaborators
• Shared / Collaborative Collections (this is for SAVING) posts
• Adding story mentions (after you’ve posted)
• Reel Scrubbers (this is so that you can rewind or fast-forward)

If you haven’t seen some of these, check to make sure your app is up to date!

We’re looking forward to an introduction of GenAI, which Adam Mosseri announced in his IG Updates Broadcast channel this month.

As Mark announced at Connect today, we’re starting to introduce generative AI experiences across our family of apps. On Instagram, we’ve started rolling out customizable AI stickers for DMs and Stories to select English language users, and AI image editing tools are coming soon in the US.We’re also introducing in beta our Meta AI assistant and 28 AIs with unique personalities and interests that you can interact with and DM on Instagram.It’s still early days, but we think GenAI is going to unlock more creativity for everyone on Instagram – and future tools will help creators run their business better so they can focus on what they care about most: creating.

As of September 2023, the following are the most effective ways to use the app and see great, consistent results:

ChatGPT Is Great for Social Media Captions

ChatGPT is easily the biggest advancement to tech for the everyday person jumping into marketing we’ve seen this year. Although there is a learning curve to the program, using it for social media is relatively simple. Remember, ChatGPT is a conversational-style AI and using prompts make it easier.

Here are some examples of terms we’ve used to help write social media captions:

• Write a paragraph encouraging people to sign up for our newsletter to receive free copies of children’s books that promote kindness and social emotional learning.
• Add appropriate emojis to this for our social media channels.
• Rewrite this into a social media promo caption.
• Add emojis to this information to make this an appealing social media post. If you’re writing your book in Word and need some training on the functions, join us for this workshop! How to clean up a document How to use Track Changes and Comments to communicate with collaborators Basic MS Word functions to make your document presentable.

Set Up an Instagram Shop for Holiday Shopping

If you do not already have an Instagram Shop, now is a great time to add the capability to sell your book directly on Instagram. There are a few ways to set up an Instagram Shop. We don’t currently include it in our Instagram for Authors course, but this is a how-to directly from Instagram. While it may feel like a lot of work to get set up, you can see success, like on @FoylesforBooks (go to this account within the Instagram app, to view the shop.)

Spend October & Early November Building Engagement

Engagement, engagement, engagement! We’re always talking about how much engagement will grow your account both in reach, views and the algorithm store. So how can you build engagement for your account and why should you do it during this specific period? The more engagement you have before the holidays, the more visibility your account will have when people are shopping for the holidays. Our favorite ways to build engagement on our own profiles are to create posts with questions and tagging a friend. Increased comments, saves, and shares will improve your algorithm score. Here is the same post we’ve posted two different times that has driven tons of engagement to our account. Results we saw both times include: new followers, increased profile views, increased website clicks, and increased reach/views for the posts that followed.

Take Advantage of User-Generated Content

User-Generated Content is any photo or image created by someone else that you have permission to post on your social media accounts. From Hootsuite, “User-generated content (also known as UGC or consumer-generated content) is original, brand-specific content created by customers and published on social media or other channels.” Your ARC team, close friends and family, and influencers are all people you can reach out to for user generated content. It gives your content more weight and credibility. In addition to posting a photo of your book with a review, reels like this are great UGC. (Do you want to buckle down on Reels? Check out our Reels subscription where you’ll get 4 Reels ideas with step-by-step instructions specifically for authors!)

 

Reels & Trends to Try for Instagram Quarter 4:

Use this template to show a lot of different pictures – can be used for your book in different locations, pics that inspired your book, and more!

I’m in Your Feed Because…introduce what your book is about!

If you have a spooky book or you love spooky things, this is a great trend.

 

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

Trending Fall / Smashing Pumpkins mash up audio.

Perfect for children’s authors or a more children-inspired Halloween posts.

If you’re a fall girlie, this is a great PSL style song to put over a reel where you’re writing.

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