Should I be focusing my energy into Reels, or static content?

It’s probably the biggest struggle for people beginning their social media journey- do you spend your time working on professionally curated static posts, or should you be constantly recording in the hopes of generating reels en masse? The answer might disappoint you. This year Instagram announced that it would now be a video first sharing platform. This means that content generated in their REELS division will be rewarded by the algorithm and pushed out to an increasingly large number of followers and even non followers. Your chances of hitting the explore page rises dramatically when posting to reels. And this isn’t all bad news; since from a marketing standpoint research shows that people of the Millenial, Gen Z and Gen X generations all respond better to visually engaging video content. But this doesn’t mean you can skimp out on generating those static posts, or carousel posts. The bottom line is that you need all of it. You need to appeal to everyone, all the time, because while video is currently center stage for the algorithm so is engagement. You need to get to a place where your followers are spending a significant amount of time reading your posts. There’s all kinds of ways to do this for a business, and none of them look the same. It depends on who you are, what you’re selling, and what your audience wants. Are you in the knowledge or service sector? An agent could come up with some impressive graphics and informative captions that are lengthy but valuable enough to your consumer wherein engagement might spike. I’ll share my secret tip my friends in the industry do and that I’m trying right now for clients. I call it the work smarter, not harder plan. Burnout is SO easy in Social Media, for real. You can easily get sucked into that black hole of needing validation from the algorithm and working around the clock. I’ve been taking a ton of videos and photos for clients. I then create static posts and carousels that are informative and provide a good amount of value to our followers and consumers. Part one of the algorithm, CHECK. Next up- I use Canva to recycle these static images and videos and re-emphasize whatever point I was trying to make in my previous post. Now, this is some tea, because Instagram refuses to tell us if posting reels to our pages works or not. But I recently had a conversation with an influencer friend who can absolutely say that when she posts reels to her grid, she sees a decrease in exposure and will not hit the explore page. By posting to her reels page only and using the suggested Instagram cover she has SKYROCKETED her viewership and engagement (we love to see female founders killing it, and she is killing it!). We’re talking 2k views to 20k views. Very impressive. So do with that what you will. To recap: I create static, informative posts that engage our users. I then repurpose this material for Reels ad Reels ONLY to boost our rankings in IG indexing. Need help planning and creating content? I work with clients across North Carolina and have options for remote work. If you’re ready to level up email me and let’s chat :) theoriginsagency@gmail.com