Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur the collaborators are his.
If you want to grow your followers organically on Instagram, it’s no secret that rollers should be your new best friend.
After TikTok exploded, Instagram quickly struggled in mid-2020 to catch up with the new love of the market for short format video content. It’s been a couple of years since Instagram launched the reel feature to try to compete with TikTok, and while many brands have stepped up to the wheelbarrow, others have been left out of it by missing out on great free exposure and opportunities.
But it’s not necessarily your fault. When you see other brands using rollers in a way that doesn’t feel authentic or aligned with your brand, it’s easy to dismiss the idea and go back to your previous content strategies.
The problem with that? Finally you get lost in the algorithm. Notice a drop in engagement. Your growth slows down. You may have the best content in the app, but since you don’t share it in your favorite reel format, Instagram makes it much harder to grow.
Unfortunately, my mission is to help you avoid this scenario altogether! After breaking the code in the reels and growing my own platforms and customers in different industries around the world, I’ve come to realize a big reason why business owners skimp on adopting the reels is due to five great myths:
1. Your rollers must be of high production
You’ve been on Instagram and seen them: professionally lit and meticulously edited videos that look like they’re produced on a Hollywood movie set. Think for yourself: “There’s no way to do it every day, let alone once. I already have too much on the plate as it is.”
Good news! While good lighting doesn’t hurt, platform users are looking for something key in your content: authenticity.
If you want to attract real followers, you have to show them that you and your brand are real people. This means grabbing your iPhone, clicking save, adding a caption and posting. If you want to try some post-production editing, have it anyway, but know that you don’t need to create rolls that go viral. If you still don’t believe it, consider the last rolls sent to you by a friend or the last rolls you found so good that you had to watch them repeatedly. It is likely that one of them was not studio quality, but was shot with a good old-fashioned iPhone.
Related: 6 Tips on Using Instagram Rollers to Grow Your Brand
2. You have to dance
While this makes me laugh every time a customer asks, I understand why it is a serious hurdle for many entrepreneurs.
If you didn’t grow up acting on stage, or damn it, if you just don’t want to feel like a dancing monkey to get attention, you don’t have to. The dance works for some personal and business brands because they ENJOYED it. The key to making rollers work for you and your brand is to choose a format that feels aligned.
There are countless options apart from dancing. You can sit in the style of an interview by talking directly to the camera, telling a story with purely photos, or talking about a video (also known as a voice-over). You don’t have to dance with rollers to grow your audience.
3. They should be short
Nothing will kill your creative flow (and the chance to go viral) other than being focused on making your reels a specific length. When it comes to getting more followers with rollers, you don’t have to put yourself in a box and adjust the rollers to make them as short as possible.
While it is true that people’s attention is shortened every year, the market will always consume good content, regardless of its duration. The key is to do it right. Instead of focusing on length, focus on the message.
When creating your next reel, give yourself permission not to think about the duration, but think about how well your message will resonate with your ideal audience. Doing this is a surefire way to get attention and keep your attention, no matter how long your reel lasts. People don’t care how long a roller is if it’s stuck all the way.
Related: 7 Instagram Roller Ideas to better connect with your audience
4. If your reel does not go viral overnight, you have no chance
The next time you post a roll and don’t accumulate millions of views in its first 24 hours, don’t mark it as a failure. Thanks to Instagram’s algorithm, rollers can be launched on the crawl page days, weeks, and even months after they’re posted.
So instead of going viral for the first 24 hours, focus on making your content as green as possible, knowing that it could go viral days later. published.
5. You need to post several times a day to get any traction
This is definitely my favorite part of the rollers. You can go viral or at least get tens of thousands of views with your first reel. I’ve seen it happen and it’s not uncommon. You don’t have to post five reels a day for it to work, but you need to be consistent.
Being consistent seems different to everyone, so your job is to choose a frequency that seems really feasible, so that you can keep up. For some, this happens once a day. For others, it could be three times a week. The key is to decide and follow your consistency version so that your audience can learn to trust you and trust you to appear in their feed.
Rolling, much less ANY kind of content just for the sake of publishing is always a safe way to make your content fall. Every time you appear online you need to be intentional and supported by a strategy.
You have a business to run and the time you spend on social media should make your life easier, not harder. Reels can help you do this when you implement a strategy that feels aligned with your unique brand.
Related: 3 Simple Things Businesses Need for Instagram Growth