Trial Reels: The Secret Growth Hack You’re Probably Ignoring

If you're sitting on a few successful Instagram reels, don’t let them collect digital dust. One of the most underrated tricks I’ve discovered for growing fast on Instagram is something Meta calls “Trial Reels”, it works like magic.

Sadly, Meta is still A/B testing this function, so you'll find out that its not available to every one of your accounts. In my experience as a manager of 10 Instagram accounts, 4 of them has it.

Trial Reels

Here’s how it works: Very simple, while posting a reel, you'll scroll down a bit and find Trial Reel option and tap it. Now Instagram will test the reel with a brand-new audience. Your followers won't see this reel.

Well, at least that's what Instagram promises but when I check the insights of one of my viral Trial reel, I saw a very small part of the users are also my followers. So proceed with caution.

How to Use It as a Growth Hack

Instagram will recommend and give you the option to share it to everyone if your Trial Reel takes off. You can choose not to and it'll still bring followers.

Once again, very simple! Take a reel that performed well in the past. Take your best reel. Repost it, but this time, choose it as a trial reel and don’t show it to your followers. You don't even need to delete the original post. Instagram will treat it as brand-new content, exposing it to a fresh audience without overwhelming your current followers.

I’ve used this strategy several times. The result? Reels that already had good performance ended up going viral again, reaching tens of thousands of new people and bringing in a consistent wave of new followers, all without creating anything new which might not align with the creative soul within you but good for the business objectives.

Trial reels are a no-brainer if:

• You’ve got high-performing content sitting in your archive.

• You want to grow faster without posting daily or don't have time to create new content.

• You believe in letting the algorithm do some of the heavy lifting.

Don’t be afraid to experiment. Test a few of your top-performing reels this week as a trial reel. You might be surprised at what happens when you give your old hits a second life.