Question · Content & SEO
How should a founder use Instagram trial reels to grow their following?
Answered by Nathan Frater ·
The short answer
Treat trial reels as your daily testing engine for reach, and run every short video you make as a trial to new people. Then back it up with simple behind-the-scenes stories every day, so the people who find you land on a profile that feels alive.
Instagram allows you to put up a post that doesn’t go to your followers, it goes to other people, and you can do that every day, one a day. That changes how I think about video. Every short piece we make for a founder gets run as a trial first. Your followers never see the misses, and you get a steady read on which hooks and topics pull in people who’ve never heard of you.
The bit people forget is what happens after someone new taps through to your profile. If your last post was three weeks ago, that reach goes nowhere. They need to see a real person who’s active, or there’s no reason to follow.
That’s the job stories do. We just get you four or five Instagram stories up every day, showing what’s going on behind the scenes. It doesn’t need to be new content. If you’re flat out, have someone go through the footage you already have from conferences and day-to-day work and post from that archive. You look active without filming anything extra, and the trial reels have somewhere to land.