Instagram and Facebook now allow you to post longer Reels—but you might not want to.

Social Media Today recently shared insights from an event hosted by Instagram for Creators that detailed specific things that can hurt the distribution of Reels on Meta’s platforms.

Here are the tips, with some explanation:

• Engagement bait – Meta considers spammy posts that explicitly request engagement (votes, shares, comments, tags, likes) for “purposes other than a specific call to action “ (like raising money or signing a peitition) to be engagement bait and seeks to suppress these posts’ reach.

• Reels over 90 seconds – Any video over 90 seconds won’t be eligible to be recommended in Explore or Reels Tab. Keep in mind that Instagram and Facebook will now allow you to post longer Reels that are over 90 seconds in length—and is also reportedly testing videos up to 3 minutes or even 10 minutes—but these videos will likely experience less reach.

• Videos with third party watermarks – For example, it’s been reported that TikTok videos shared as Reels will not perform as well as unique videos.

• Low quality videos – Follow best practices for video quality includding keeping it vertical, using captioning, use a minimum frame rate of 30 frames per second and a minimum resolution of 720 pixels.

• Posting content you didn’t make – When the algorithm discovers identical content, only the original post will be recommended.

Post by @mattnavarra View on Threads

Why it Matters

Put these tips into practice right away to help improve the ROI of your Reels content!