Hook Your Audience — Instagram.

Hook Your Audience — Instagram.

carefully curated insights from meta.

Even beginners with simple edits and basic content can get good views and reach. Meanwhile, creators who spend hours planning, editing, and perfecting their content often struggle to get the reach they expect. The reason is simple: Instagram’s algorithm tends to favor easily consumable, engaging content over complex, high-effort edits.

First of all, you have to learn how reels suggestions are created, it is called as reels chaining.

1. Gathering Inventory  — The system collects reels similar to what users have interacted with.
2. Leverage Signals  — It analyzes length, similarity, and engagement to select ~100 reels.
3. Make Predictions  — AI predicts which reels users will find most engaging.
4. Ranking by Score  — Reels are ordered by relevance score.

How To Get High Ranking?

Viewers decide within seconds whether to keep watching or scroll. Simple, easy-to-grasp content tends to grab attention faster.

Hook your audience, at least for the first 3 seconds — “The AI prioritizes reels that users watch for more than 3 seconds.”

• If the content is too niche (முக்கிய இடம்) or slow to grab attention, people might scroll past.
• Instagram’s AI learns from audience behavior , so if fewer people interact early, the reach decreases.
• Use engaging captions and trending audio to boost interaction.
• Post consistently to train the algorithm.
• Encourage engagement (likes, comments, shares).

Encouraging the audience to like, comment, and share might seem a bit shady, but the algorithm tends to favor exactly that.

Full-Screen Views: If users click on your reel to watch it full-screen on explore tab, that’s a good signal. “Tall, full-screen reels perform better.”

Insta aim to show you fewer reels that:

• Are muted, blurry, low resolution.
• Contain borders, logos, watermarks.
• Have the majority of the image covered by text.
• Aren’t own original videos.
• Go against insta Community Standards (e.g. contains hateful conduct or graphic violence) or insta Recommendation Guidelines.

Avoid these mistakes at early stage of your creation journey.

These are basic consideration you should consider while creating, try to hook your audience at least for first 3 seconds(Avoid intro), try to create tall vertical videos.

• If you switch too much between different types of content (e.g., movie edits, vlogs, random memes), the algorithm may not know who to recommend your content to.
• Stick to a theme so the AI can properly recommend your content.

Is Higher Ranking All Matters ?

Even if your ranking is good, low-quality content is like biting into a bitter gourd — unpleasant and forgettable. Focus on creating high-quality, engaging content that truly impresses users, not just random, mindless memes.

Instagram even mentioned about video and audio codec for reels, I prefer you to follow these codecs.

• You can upload a reel with an aspect ratio between 1.91:1 and 9:16.
• Reels should have a minimum frame rate of 30 FPS (frames per second) and a minimum resolution of 720 pixels.

Video codec

• Progressive scan (no interlacing).
• High profile.
• Two consecutive B-frames.
• Closed GOP. GOP of half the frame rate.
• CABAC.
• Chroma subsampling: 4:2:0.

Audio codec

• Channels: Stereo or stereo + 5.1.
• Sample rate 96 kHz or 48 kHz.

Cover photo file format

• png or jpg.

No idea about codecs? Need a guide on how to export your projects with the right settings? Follow this page and stay tuned for upcoming posts!