Our Reel Went Viral On Instagram Reels by Cracking Instagram’s Latest Algorithm
Promoting your business, work-culture, and giving insights on Instagram is not new! We at Intricare Technologies, also promote our clients’ products, services and our work-culture on the platform. Well, here is a short story about how our reel went viral on Instagram Reels and we cracked an algorithm that should help your brand, too.
A little background about our Instagram profile. We are active on Instagram with the username @intricaretech and we share content that shares business insights, marketing advice, SaaS insights, our company culture, new team members, and so much! Oh Gosh, that’s a lot of things we create and share it seems! 🤔
Anyways, we went viral on Instagram reels with a couple of content in the past. But, recently, our reel gave us more than 2M views! Yes, staggering 2M impressions on a business account! 😮
Here is how we achieved that!
Playing With Instagram’s algorithm
It’s not a secret that social media platforms like engagements on their posts and thus the more engagement a user or a post generates, the more visibility they tend to get. Content following the niche of your interest with a good amount of engagements (including likes, comments, shares, and mentions) will be found on social media’s explore or trending pages. Well, at our IntricareParivar took the matter in the hands and we started exploring how we can get more engagement and impressions on reels to gain more followers and showcase our culture to a wider audience from our social media platforms. When you list down the content ideas that might go viral on Instagram reels, you will find out the content that includes:- Comedy
- Local language content
- Insights and data
- Cars
- Lifestyle
- Relatable content
The content strategy to draw attention
Well, we started targeting the ‘relatable content’ and ‘insightful’ content first. Where our target was to emphasize on providing value to the followers. Now, whoever uses Instagram, knows that a lot of ‘non-followers’ also engage with your content. So, we knew who our audience is going to be and thus we entered the platform with a content strategy that will bring more audience and eyeballs.
So, the social media team began working on content that will be a mix of insightful content, funny/relatable content, and hiring content at the same time. This brings us to the table to design engaging posts, capturing images that get happy faces, use good music on our reels, using right hashtags that bring more people to our accounts, and writing good captions.
Now, initial posts where we shifted our office, hiring posts, fun-activities, and memes got us ample engagement, though our followers were not increasing exponentially! Which is always a dream for every social media marketing manager! 😉
Initial traction on our reels was good, though not many of our reels hit the 10k impression mark rapidly! But, we learnt one thing, the performance on reels is never constant. And, that’s how we explored the concept (algorithm) of “Bell Curve”.
Understanding the process of going viral on with Instagram reels
When our recent reel got 50k+ impressions and massive engagements with user likes, we started digging deeper to find out the reasons for going viral suddenly. To our surprise, we noticed that the initial traction on the reels does not matter. The reel where we got about 90k impressions, got a sudden rise in impressions and likes. But then, suddenly everything fell apart and we stopped getting new engagements on that reel. Well, time to update the strategy then?
In a nutshell, we started experimenting with the trends, hashtags, and types of organic engagements.
Uploaded a couple of more reels and tried sharing them with friends from our personal profiles and tried to check the results. Some got good results with ample engagements and some were just doing fine with low impressions.
So, we finally decided to give a go to a reel that had engaging audio. We planned how two characters from our team will play the role in it and went ahead with a funky caption for posting. Now, we found out that the concept of ‘bell curve’ is playing its role here.
The miracle happened with the Bell Curve Algorithm
Now that we mentioned the bell curve in our blog a couple of times, let’s first understand what is the bell curve!
A bell curve is a normal distribution curve that is spread across a specified group that tends to have a central peak and has extreme tapering off on either side. Bell curves is also are visual representations of normal distribution, also called Gaussian distribution.
That simply means, if you toss a coin for n-times, the probability of getting heads will follow the same curve if you measure the results. Well, the same thing happened with our reel and here is how!
We published the reel on our company’s Instagram profile. This led us to figure out that many times, the content recommendation on Instagram is happening based on this algorithm only. For starters, the reel did not get initial traction for the first couple of days. Then suddenly, we started getting impressions and likes from my (personal account) followers on the reel. There we understood that Instagram is typing to show the reel to the accounts that are connected as the second connections (followers of followers).
From the same day, we started gaining more views and engagements on that particular reel. So, the bell curve phenomenon was taking place, just the way we flip the coin and get heads or tails, Instagram was testing our reel by sending it to some random and some known users to check the potential of the reel.
The content was on point, the expressions from the users were at par, and the reel was relatable for everyone working in the office environment. That made the users engage with the reel more plus start sending comments with smiles and good words about how they can relate to the content. In no time, we hit the first bell curve and got maximum engagements and impressions, then the second curve gave us another push, then everything went flat and again the third (clearly visible in the above analytics picture) helped us grow new engagements and impressions.
Other interesting things we encountered
On top of that, Intricare became the first brand I manage with an almost similar number of male-to-female follow ratio. Every other brand I’ve worked with previously and the accounts I’ve used in the part either had significantly more male followers or female followers.
While one of our reels was outperforming every other content on our page, we tried to publish a couple of other content pieces including normal posts and another insightful reel to check if we can get similar results for those content or not? To our surprise, we did not receive a good response on both of those contents. Yet, the performance on the same reel kept on growing.
Conclusions?
Well, this was the insight that how generally Instagram algorithm works for reels content. It is more like creating content regularly, then it runs the random bell curve test on various accounts including followers and non-followers; and then the miracle happens.
So, how would we continue growing our brands and their Instagram accounts while people are planning to ditch the platform to promote their brands? Well, we will keep exploring how we can grow organically on the platform and try doing such experiments to crack more engagements.
You can connect with us on Twitter or me personally on LinkedIn!
Peace.