Instagram Says Trial Reels Have Helped Creators Significantly Increase Their Reach

Instagram’s trial Reels have been available for just on six months now, and IG is keen to get more creators trying out its audience sampling feature, in order to help boost content performance.

As you can see in this example sequence, trial Reels are shown to a selection of users who don’t follow your profile, which can give you early insight into the likely performance of your Reel.

To be clear, trial Reels are not displayed to your followers, either in the main Feed or via the Reels tab. The idea is that this gives you an unbiased assessment of content quality, while also helping you potentially reach a broader audience.

Which some have also used as a growth hack of sorts, in that you can get your content in front of a broader audience in the app by only showing your Reels to people who don’t follow you. Within that, you can also re-post older posts as trial Reels as well, and some creators have found this to be an effective way to build their audience.

Another element to consider.

“Approximately 24 hours after sharing a trial reel, you can view engagement data, such as views, likes, comments and shares. The more trial reels you create, the more insights you’ll have to compare against other trial reels and the more understanding you’ll have on what might perform best.”

You’re limited to 20 trial Reels per day, but outside of that, you can test and measure your initial Reels’ response, which can then help to inform your content strategy.

And for those who are using trial Reels, they have proven effective:

“After trying trial reels, 40% of creators started posting reels more often and of those who did, 80% saw an increase in reels reach from non-followers.”

So it can help to guide your thinking on what to post, while you can also easily convert trial Reels into regular posts, which will then be shared with your followers.

It could be a valuable tool in your IG strategy, and as Instagram notes, many creators are finding this a valuable tool for audience sampling.

And IG clearly wants more creators to try it out.

If you are thinking about adopting trial Reels, you need to have a professional account (though IG also says that some creators without a professional account may have access to trial reels as part of ongoing testing).

You can activate a trial Reel in the publish element of the Reels upload process.