Instagram Launches ‘Trial Reels’ to Help Creators Experiment
Earlier this week, Instagram launched an interesting new feature for creators. It’s called Trial Reels and it is an option for you to post your Instagram reel to a ‘test audience’ of people who don’t follow you to see how your reels do before posting to your full audience.
What are Trial Reels?
The company shared: ‘Trial reels on Instagram allows creators to experiment with new ideas and get early feedback on whether their content resonates by allowing them to share reels with accounts that don’t follow them. You can later choose to share a trial reel with your followers at any time.
You must have a professional account to use trial reels. Note: Select creators without a professional account may have access to trial reels as part of ongoing testing.‘
Here is what it looks like:
[empty_separator]
How to share trial reels on Instagram
The steps to share a trial reel on Instagram:
- Create a reel. Follow the steps until it’s time to share.
- Before sharing the reel, tap the toggle to turn on Trial.
- Tap Share.
Only you will be able to see that your reel is a trial. After you share your trial reel, your followers won’t see it in Feed or Instagram’s Reels tab. Your trial reel will not appear in your profile’s reels tab or your main grid unless you later decide to Share to everyone. It’s a pretty fun way to test it out with a completely unique audience to see how it performs!
You’ll see insights on your trial reel within 24 hours after sharing so you can understand how it is performing.
Note: Some followers may still see your reel in other places. For example, someone might share your reel with them in a direct message or on a page that shows reels with the same audio, location or filter.
So it is possible for your followers to see this on other parts of Instagram! Keep that in mind.
There are a few other features available such as how to share with everyone and how to automatically turn this setting on in the Instagram help doc here.
How will creators use this new feature?
I could see quite a few different applications for this feature from creators of all sizes and industries. For one, it’s always nice to test your content out with an audience to understand more about how they will react.
It can also be a potential growth hack for some creators if they find their reels getting boosted more because of this.
I am not entirely sure how Instagram creates the audience for the trial, but I am so curious to see how large it is, what type of engagement it gets, etc. I will be testing this out a bit with our @filtergrade Instagram and another smaller food account I run called @glutenbeeblog. More updates to follow in a future article. :)
