Instagram Reels show your videos to more strangers than anything else on Facebook or Instagram. But Instagram lets you put no tappable link in a Reel, its caption or its comments. If your goal is brand awareness, Instagram Reels still work well. If your goal is clicks to a website or an app store, Instagram Reels are the weakest of the video platforms. The full comparison table puts nine social media channels side by side.
Instagram Reels find strangers but throttle your outbound links
- Instagram Reels reach strangers, and the other Instagram formats do not. About 55% of Instagram Reel views come from people who do not follow the account.
- The share of followers who see a typical Instagram post is falling. A typical Instagram post now reaches only 3 to 4% of the account's followers.
- Growing on Instagram Reels takes 3 to 5 Reels a week, and a polished Reel takes 1 to 3 hours to make. An account that posts Reels consistently typically gains its first 1,000 followers in 3 to 6 months.
- Instagram Reels keep gaining views for longer than posts on the other feed-based platforms. A strong Instagram Reel takes about 75 days to get 95% of all the views it will ever get, against 48 hours for a feed post.
- An Instagram caption link is plain text nobody can tap. Instagram only makes links clickable in the bio, Story stickers, DMs and paid ads, so every click has to go through the one link in your bio.
- Under 1% of the people who saw an Instagram post saying "link in bio" clicked that bio link. In a 2019 test by Agorapulse, a social media software company, 30 such posts averaged 2.07 clicks each from an average of 293 people reached.
Use Camera to Clipboard to move phone photos to a desktop editor
A polished Instagram Reel takes one to three hours to make. Part of those hours goes on moving pictures from the phone that shot them to the computer that edits them. Camera to Clipboard, one of my own apps, puts a photo taken on the phone on the computer clipboard straight away, ready to paste.
- A photo taken inside Camera to Clipboard is on the computer clipboard the moment you take it. Camera to Clipboard needs no emailing the photo to yourself, no cable and no upload in between.
- Pasting a Camera to Clipboard photo into Photoshop or GIMP adds it as a new layer or a new document, ready for building an Instagram Reel cover image.
- Camera to Clipboard can send several photos from the phone’s photo library at once, which helps when you post three to five Instagram Reels a week.
Conclusion: Instagram Reels win attention, not clicks
- Instagram Reels are the only Instagram format that reaches people who do not already follow you, with about 55% of Reel views coming from non-followers.
- A URL in an Instagram caption or comment is plain text nobody can tap, so every reader has to go through the single link in your bio, and under 1% of the people who see a "link in bio" post click that link.
- Grow Instagram Reels for brand awareness, and put the link you actually want clicked on a platform that allows a tappable one.