Instagram Reels: Tips for Photographers

Instagram reels can significantly advance your account as a photographer. Because if you take part in the Instagram Reels, you will also receive a tailwind from Instagram for your account. After the initial excitement, enthusiasm and rejection have subsided, it is time to take stock. Do you really get into the reels, do you just ignore them or do you try to muddle through first to avoid the effort of video production in portrait format? With these five tips from SocialWick, the reels will be a big plus for your photographer account on Instagram. 

First of all, it should be said that, like many photographers, I was rather skeptical about Instagram reels. This was not only due to the glut of reels in very different quality. Soon the question arose whether the reels could be completely banned from your feed in some way.

The other point is that even short videos are always more work than photos. We all have our workflow for Instagram photos and after a while you become quite productive with it. In other words: A photo tour gives you a good selection of edited photos in the right format very quickly. The few video clips for a good reel take a lot longer to begin with.

The effort with the mini video clips is worthwhile for your Instagram account.

Use feed, reels and stories

You can only publish Instagram reels as reels. Just as you have the grid for the feed and the symbol for IGTV in your profile, you now have a symbol for the reels (after your first reel). The only stupid thing is that no one looks for or finds the short video clips that you had to go through a lot with.

So make use of the opportunity to publish the reels in your feed. This increases the reach suddenly and also brings you new visitors to your account.

While you can publish the clips in reels and the feed posts at the same time, you have to take an extra step to publish them in stories. You click on the paper plane when you publish the reel and can then share the reel in your stories. So the short video is optimally used. You should make sure to then enlarge (pinch) the video with two fingers so that it fills the entire screen. And of course you can also publish the same video in stories as you would any other portrait photo.

So you benefit greatly when your reels appear normally in the feed and thus also on the Explore page. The disadvantage is that many reel previews can destroy the feed with your exquisite photos because of the format and the sometimes less attractive cover picture.

You can also use the landscape format videos from your iPhone or a camera for photos and videos in all three areas – feed, reels and stories – if you record in 4K. The portrait format can be cut out of this without any loss of quality.

Select cover photos

Similar to the story videos, it is worth the effort to choose an attractive cover photo for your reel. You can select this from the clip with the slider when it is published. Sometimes, however, the most attractive photo view is not included in the 15-second clip. Here it helps to choose a suitable image from the photos that you have already taken with the clip.

Use hashtags

As with posts in the feed, you can use a maximum of 30 hashtags. And you should do that too. And of course they should be selected individually for the video and – as already reported here, ideally have a hit rate of a few thousand to a maximum of 500,000.

You can write the hashtags with a little space below the image description / caption, this is easier and faster than putting them in the first comment. My image descriptions for the reels are very short, I assume that the videos will be swiped on more quickly and hardly anyone reads any texts.

If you share / publish your reel video in the stories, you can use the trick to hide the maximum possible 10 hashtags: insert all hashtags as text and reduce them with two fingers until only a small point is visible. In a story photo, you can hide this little point by adjusting the color. In the case of videos, this background does not remain the same color over the 15 seconds. So you have to zoom out very much.