Dive Brief:

• Branded video content on Instagram Reels outperforms the same on other platforms, including TikTok and Facebook, according to new research from customer engagement company Emplifi.
• The research, which analyzed thousands of brand-owned social media accounts, also found that longer Reels (those over 90 seconds) had double the median number of video views than those on TikTok.
• Instagram Reels also outperform the platform’s own Stories feature, delivering six times the reach of Stories. Still, advertisers posted five times as many Stories as they did Reels in 2023.

Dive Insight:

Move over TikTok, there’s an old player in town: Emplifi’s research suggests there’s still some life in Meta’s Instagram platform for advertisers. Capitalizing on that promise, however, will require some shift in advertiser behavior.

Instagram’s Reels, which are designed to mirror TikTok videos of longer length that remain in creators’ feeds, are much more time-consuming to create than Stories, which are shorter-form videos (15 seconds or less) that disappear from feeds in 24 hours. As brands create their social marketing plans for 2024, it may be worthwhile to include more Reels and longer-form videos, according to Emplifi’s CMO Zarnaz Arlia.

“The underlying theme here is that there are untapped opportunities for the brands that are willing to lean further into their Instagram video strategy and make Reels part of their social media campaigns,” Arlia said in a release. “The data shows that audiences are responding positively to longer videos — the key is producing entertaining and valuable content that keeps them watching.”

According to Insider Intelligence, consumers spend more time watching social videos than any other social media content format. On average, more than half the time (56%) U.S. adults spent on social media channels was devoted to watching social videos. That’s a 15% increase over the past three years.

While the length of the videos matters on Instagram, it is less important on TikTok. According to Emplifi’s research, Instagram Reels that were longer in length had 8,372 median views compared to 3,379 views on TikTok. Similarly, Reels with shorter lengths (less than 30 seconds) garnered 6.145 median views and medium-length Reels (30 to 60 seconds) had a median of 7,830 views. Emplifi attributed the substantial difference in views to Instagram’s push to prioritize Reels on its platform.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the performance of Facebook Reels mirrors that of its sister company, attracting more than three times the number of median views than the other video content on the platform.