Instagram Trial Reels: How Brands Can Test Content and Reach New Audiences

Having your brand on social media comes with a little bit of a gamble. It’s a constant question of: Will people care? Is the hook strong enough? Am I making the right post? Is this even the best format? A thousand questions and sometimes very few answers, right? Well, Instagram added a new feature that gives brands another way to test content and reach new people: Trial Reels. Organic social media can already reach people outside of your followers, but Trial Reels are designed to show your Reel to non-followers first. So, what if you want to test something new without fully committing to posting it to your existing audience? What if you don’t have the budget to boost every piece of content? This new feature could be the answer, or at least help take some of the guesswork out of posting.

Trial Reels let you share a Reel with non-followers first instead of immediately publishing something you’re not completely sure about. Instagram gives the Reel a chance to perform with people who don’t already follow your brand, which can help you see how a new audience responds before deciding whether you want to share it with everyone. This can not only help you determine whether the content is worth pushing further, but also introduce your brand to people who may have never seen it before. Cool, right?

That doesn’t mean brands should suddenly start posting anything and everything, but it does give you a little more flexibility to experiment. It can help you figure out if your content is becoming too predictable, too repetitive, too boring, or simply not giving people a reason to pay attention. In the end, one of the goals of being on social media is to grow your audience and connect with more people. If your Trial Reel catches the attention of someone who doesn’t follow you, they may click on your profile, learn more about your brand, and eventually decide to stick around.

What can you experiment with? Different hooks, shorter versus longer videos, polished content versus more casual content, educational versus entertaining, different editing styles, new series, or different ways of delivering the same message. The options are endless, but make sure you know what you’re actually testing. If every part of the Reel changes at once, it becomes harder to identify what worked, what didn’t, and what you should do differently next time. Keeping one clear goal in mind will make the results a lot more useful.

What should you look at once you see the results? EVERYTHING. Not only views, but also comments, shares, saves, likes, and overall engagement. All of these have something to say about your content. If your intention was to get comments and you got none, maybe your CTA wasn’t clear or strong enough. If you don’t have many shares, people may not have found the content useful, interesting, surprising, or share-worthy. If people are watching but not showing any deeper interest in the brand, that may tell you something about the message itself. The point is not only to see whether the Reel performed well, but to understand why it performed the way it did and what you can learn from it.

Trial Reels can give brands more room to test, learn, and try something different, but the feature alone isn’t the strategy. Knowing what to test, what the results mean, and what to do next is where the real work comes in. At Tribu, we help brands build social strategies with intention, from the idea and content creation to testing, learning, and improving what comes next. You can see some of the work we create for our partners and learn more about how we approach social media on our Social & Creative Content Service Page. If your brand is ready to do more than just post, let’s build a social strategy that actually gives every scroll a purpose.

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