Simple Tweaks to Increase Reels Views [Episode 116]

Molly: Hello my lovelies. Welcome back to the Holistic Marketing Simplified podcast. I just want you to know every time you send me a DM to let me know that you're listening. It makes me so happy. 'cause I want you to just like envision me right now. I'm sitting here, I'm always filming in different places throughout my house 'cause that's just how I roll.

I'm never a, like, I sometimes will go a whole week without actually sitting at my desk, even though my office is so cute and my like setup is so ergonomic. I just, I'm like, uh, does anybody else do that? Like, I just kinda have to move around. So I'm, I'm filming this. I'm sitting in the recliner that's in my bedroom because it's like bright and sunny and it's like the cleanest room in my house right now.

You know, sometimes you just like need to not be surrounded by all your crap. We've got to do a spring clean purge. I told my husband, I was like, even though we have someone who comes like four or five hours a week and helps with like laundry and cleaning. We only have one kid. I still feel like we just have too much stuff and that's why everything feels like cluttered and messy all the time.

So anyway, I digress. I'm gonna keep this episode super short and it's gonna be very practical. It was one of those episodes that I was worried would not translate to audio only like podcast audio only. So I will say some of this stuff, you're just gonna have to like, I would listen to it first. And then maybe go back and listen to this again when you can be, have your phone open and actually like pushing the buttons that I'm talking about because on this super short episode, I'm just gonna be talking about some basic reels, editing mistakes that can make or break your views.

Um, they're gonna be super simple tips that you can literally like keep all things, if you were to keep all things the same, like say you were keeping all of the content the exact same, even if you were like, well, I am gonna talk about hooks some. So I guess not if you're keeping the hook the same. But anyway, these are just like simple tweaks that you can make to help you get more views on your reels.

So, like I said, some of it you. You might need to just like open your phone, like listen to it first if you're just like driving or whatever. And then maybe come back to it again and listen to it again and like open your phone and actually start like messing around with it and you'll see what I'm talking about.

And if you're a holistic marketing hub student, then obviously all of this stuff is already in your portal and the reels classroom and the basic reels tutorial. Yeah. Okay. Here we go.

Hey, welcome to Holistic Marketing Simplified. This podcast boils down to the fact that we wholeheartedly believe that more humans need to know about holistic health solutions, and you didn't go to school to learn how to be a full-time content creator and show up on Instagram and do all of this marketing stuff all day, every day.

So let's come hanging out while we chat. All things ease in your marketing and my goal is that you shift your mindset around your marketing from a quote should to a I get to more dream patients and clients. Yes, please.

Dr. Carly: Hi, I'm Dr. Carly. I. And I am a mentor for other chiropractors from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I listen to holistic marketing, simplified podcasts.

Molly: Okay. So when I am watching y'all's reels, sometimes I'm like, wow, this is great information. But you tend to do what they call in journalism, which is burying the lead. And that just means that in lead is spelled LED, different kind of lead. That just means that you have taken the most, you know, I, I don't wanna say exciting the most Yeah, like, exciting or important or like the gist of the real, and you have put it, you've buried it towards the end.

When, when we're talking about hooks, if you're like, well, what's a hook? It's literally, it's like the thing that hooks your attention immediately. And so one of the, like for a perfect example. I had a client who sent me this incredible video about how every time she had this one patient who was getting mastitis and every time she got adjusted, her mastitis actually went away and then didn't come back for a long time.

And so this client is like absolutely amazing and it helps. She is gorgeous as well, and she's just really, she really is great on video. But the video didn't even get to the part about mastitis until about 15, 20 seconds into the video. So it started like, Hey, this is Dr. Jen. I just think the body is so amazing and I wanted to get on here today to tell you some really cool things about this patient I had.

So by that point, and that's just a natural way that you have conversations with people, right? So it's not saying that the video was bad. It's just saying, I'm just saying that there are things you can do in editing to capture someone's attention faster. So you know what I'll do? Actually, maybe I'll put, I don't think, Dr.

Jen, if you're listening, I don't think she'll mind. Maybe I'll put a link in the show notes. Yeah, let's do that. I'll, I'll put a link in the show notes of what the video looked like as the raw video, and then I'll do like an after, like a before and after. What the video looked like with editing. Yeah, we'll do that.

So anyway, so that was how she started off the video. And then finally about, you know, 20 seconds in, she was like, and what she noticed was every time she got adjusted her adjusted, her mastitis went away. And I'm like, that, that is what you wanna start the video with. Right. So I know I'm just kinda like giving you the example here verbally, but you can hopefully hear the difference of like, imagine someone mindlessly thumb scrolling through Instagram.

One video starts with like a little pause. Hi, I am Dr. Jen. I just wanted to tell you about this patient, like and the body. So amazing versus, and after she got adjusted, she noticed her mastitis went away. Like that's like so much more catchy, right? That like really catches your attention. That's actually one of the things that I taught all of my retreat attendees.

This, I'm recording this the week after my content creation retreat. It was amazing. Make sure to DM me if you want to be included in any future retreat plans. But yeah, I showed them the different, I showed them how to edit it. I, I like to use N InShot if I find, if I just use the native reels editor, I get so frustrated, like makes me wanna throw my phone.

So I use the InShot app. What you're gonna do, how to do that is, it's actually not that hard. You're gonna be like, Molly, I don't know how to edit. Not hard. Pull the video into InShot. There's a little, um, split, there's like a little button that says split and you can like split the clip right. Wherever the, like, like I said, where for her, I split it right before she said, and what she noticed was whenever she got adjusted, her mastitis went away.

And then I split the clip again right after she said the word away. And then you just hold your finger down on that segment of the video and bring it back to the beginning. And like that was the beginning of the video. Again, if you're a hub student, there's a full InShot tutorial inside of your reels classroom.

Um, if you're not, I'm sure you can probably YouTube some type of InShot tutorial. It's really not that hard. Just look up like split clip. So that's one. Like I said, that's one little thing that I'm seeing that really can hurt your reels views. If you don't start the video with something like, yes, it's one thing if it's one of your patients who like, or clients who like loves you and knows you, it's one thing for them to maybe continue watching because like they're like, oh, well I wanna hear what you know, Dr.

So-and-So has to say because I always like what they have to say. Versus someone who has no clue who you are and they're just scrolling through, they're not gonna wait long enough to see what the payoff is of watching the video. And I know it's sad. I know that's sad that we have like these really short attention spans, but just start paying attention to the way that you watch videos and what reels stop your scroll.

That's the best homework that y'all can do if you take nothing else from the rest of the tips I give you in this episode. It's just, I want you to be more mindful and start paying more attention to what reels make you stop and like how did they open the video? Okay. So using that same exact video as an example, let me show you, or let me tell you another thing that I did to hopefully increase the views on that one.

At the time I'm recording this. I don't think we've actually posted the video for this client yet, but you want to have, make sure that you cut out any pauses in the beginning. So if your video starts with your mouth closed, that is already too much of a pause. So again, I use the InShot feature to split the clip as your mouth is opening.

So you don't want it to be like start the real pause. And what she noticed is like, that's already enough. You literally have the snap of a finger split second to catch someone's attention. You want to start the video as your mouth is opening. They call it the millennial Pause. Google it. If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's what it is.

So if you're just like standing there and it's like, mm, yeah, that's boring. No one's watching next. Um, so that's another thing you can do, like I said in editing, is just to trim out just even if it's like a half of a second that you trim out at the beginning, that's what it's called, trimming the video.

Okay. And you can do that, right? Like I said, you could do that right in the reels editor. But, um, I find editing is easier in the InShot app. The next tip is some type of visual hook. Okay? So again, if you're just standing there like face to camera and you're just standing there, like even if what you have to say is super interesting, it will increase the likelihood that the video is watched even more if you have some type of visual hook.

So this is best to imagine, like, imagine someone's watching the video with no sound. For visual hooks. Sometimes we'll do like a little slow zoom effect in InShot, you could do that where it kind of like zooms in on you, like kind of slowly. That can be visually interesting if you don't wanna get fancy with editing, you can hold something obscure in your hands that you wouldn't normally like be holding in your hand.

Like I remember one time I did a video and I had like. A pipe cleaner. This, because I, I didn't do this on purpose, but I was actually in the middle of like, tidying up my house when a video idea struck me. And so the first clip of the video I was holding like a bag of pipe cleaners. And the second clip of the video I was holding some scissors.

And then the third, I think I was holding like a can opener or something. So that's another thing you can do to just kind of catch people's attention to where they're like, what, what are you holding? What are you doing? Um, another thing you can do is like, if you've got your phone propped up on the counter, you can kind of walk up to the phone as you're talking and then maybe like take a sip of your drink or put on some lip gloss or, you know, maybe put your hair up in a bun.

Like, is it anything that's like, somebody's gonna wanna see the finished product. So like if let's say you're putting your hair up, it's like, well, I'm gonna watch to see what her hair looks like now after she puts it up again. I know some of this stuff sounds so silly. But it just breaks up that visual monotony that can be like just someone standing there and make you want to watch.

You'll even notice like some content creators taking their phone and as they start recording, they're holding the phone and then they're like putting the phone down as they finish recording. Like, like I said, like anything that just kind of is like a little pattern interrupt. I like to record videos as I'm getting in and out of the car or out for a walk or outside walk or walking around my house because then people are kind of really nosy and they're like, oh, what does her house look like?

Or where, where is she going? She's getting outta the car. Um, you'll see that in my reels a lot, like I said, where I'm like, face to camera instead of just like standing there in one spot trying to do all my talking in one pass, I'm usually moving around in the frame. I actually wasn't going to include this next tip, but now I feel like I kind of have to after what I just said.

One thing I taught my attendees this past weekend that they all loved is that I find it easier to not film face to camera reels all in one take. Now some people I know like to script and like actually read off his script. I find that a, to be not only like less visually interesting. But b, just a lot more pressure.

So I film all of my reels and I've done, um, go. If you wanna go back to the episode, um, tips for filming face to camera reels. It's actually one of my most downloaded episodes, and it's actually one of my highest ranking pages on Google. So tips for filming face to camera reels. I film all of my face to camera reels because I'm vain and stopped getting Botox inside of Instagram stories.

'cause then I can use my like filter. I don't know if you know this, but right in Instagram stories, you can download the videos to your camera roll if you want to. So if you're someone who's a little more beginner and you're like, I don't know what the hell you're talking about, Molly, I don't want any of this to stress you out.

Just pick one thing that you do know how to do and do that. Okay. So anyway, but for people who are a little more, I don't even wanna say advanced, but like intermediate, I like to film any reels like that in like one to two sentence segments for like I said, the two reasons. One, I find it makes the end result video more interesting 'cause especially like, okay, say sentence one, I'm filming as I'm getting my car.

Sentence two, I'm filming as I'm walking into my house. Sentence three, I film as I'm walking. Like through my living room and then I'll take like all three clips and put it together. And that's my face to camera reel. And like I said, that just is also a lot more or a lot less pressure because you're not like, okay, I've got this 45 seconds worth of stuff I'm gonna talk about and I wanna nail it and go Like, to me that's like so much pressure.

Right. Okay, so let's now get into some other, really, this is like the really easy stuff you can do to make sure you get more views on your reels. That is a text hook and text readability. Let me talk about the text hook first. So I talked about a visual hook, right, about like things you can do to make the video more visually interesting.

Assuming someone has the sound off, assuming they have the sound on. I already talked about ways you can take. The most interesting part of the video, even if it's not just like face to camera and you talking to, to the camera, just maybe there's like a more interesting part of, of the B roll or something like that.

I talked about putting that at the very beginning. And the other way is a text, a good text hook. So let's assume that this is, 'cause y'all hear me talk about hooks all the time. When it comes to B roll reels, when it comes to face to camera, talking to the camera reels. Even though you definitely, so for one thing, make sure you have the rolling closed captions on.

And if you don't know how to do that, there's literally in your Instagram reels at the very bottom of the screen, there's gonna be like, for some people it'll be at the bottom and it'll say like CC or like captions. For some people there's still like a little square, smiley face looking icon, and you tap that and you'll see like CC or captions or something like that.

And that should automatically make the captions roll. You wanna do that? Like do not post a video without closed captions because 80% of people watch without sound. So it's gonna kill your views if you don't. But even if you do have the closed captions rolling, you want to have an additional text box on there with a text hook, because remember how I said we have a snap, a snap of a finger to catch someone's attention.

The way that they can read a little text box is like 10 bajillion times faster than waiting for the closed captions to roll. Right? So you want to hook them in immediately with some type of text hook. So for example, on that mastitis video, instead of waiting to let the closed captions roll to learn what the video is about, I put an additional text box on the video just at the beginning that says, uh, said something like.

Natural, natural help for mastitis or something like that. Or like natural holistic help solutions for mastitis or natural help for mastitis. Heal your mastitis ni naturally. I can't remember. You just wanna think about like, what would this ideal person who's going to be watching this real, what would they need to know to hook them in?

And that's that. So you're gonna add that text box over the over it. And then the last thing is text readability. I see so many reels that I'm like, there's no way that when you posted this, like even you could have read that text. Like, so why would anyone else stop their scroll to try to like squint their eyes and read this?

I don't necessarily mean squint by, like the text is too small. I mean, I have seen it where the text is tiny. But either there's not enough contrast on the text, and so I can't actually read what any of the words say. There are too many words. One of the hardest parts of marketing is being concise, right?

So like rereading it and being like, okay, what words can we remove to make this shorter? Like I said, contrast is a huge one where I'm like, I can't see this. Um, so there's a couple tricks for contrast. I know I jumped ahead to saying too many words, but let me go back to contrast. There's a couple tips.

One, you could just, you know, have the text box where the color is behind it so you can actually see the words. There's another trick you can do when you tap the effects button on reels, which is like the little stars if you tap the effects button with the stars. There's a, you can search like low exposure filter and that will make the video darker, which makes any lighter text pop more.

So that's another thing you can do. So again, just, just look at it and be like, is this, is this easy to read? Like when you, one cool exercise you can do is to go to your explore page on Instagram, just like the, where the little search bar is. And just check like what graphics, what reels pop out at you that you can easily read.

Okay. Okay. So I talked about contrast, and then I talked about actually cutting down the amount of words. And then just like time on the screen, like if you only have, you know, a three sentence text block popped up for 0.2 seconds. Nobody has the time to read that. And yes. Some people will argue that it'll loop and continue to play, but not everybody.

For some people that just frustrates them. And then for some people they don't know that you can hold your finger down on the screen to stop the reels. You can actually read it. A lot of people don't know that, so I'll just make sure there's time for it to be read. And then the last thing is to pay attention to where, if this is on a reel, pay attention to where the text is on your reel when you're posting a reel.

You try to put a text box way too high, way too low, or way to the side, it will show you a guard line. Don't go past the guard line because if you put your text box all the way at the tippy top of your reel, people aren't gonna see. It's gonna get cut off by like, you'll, you'll just have to see. You'll just have to do it and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.

If you do the text too far over to the right, it's gonna get cut off. Like where the little like. Like and comment section is, and if you go too far to the bottom, the text box is gonna get caught off by the caption. So, like I said, just pay attention. Like we try to keep the text right in the middle of, um, the screen, but without covering up.

I was checking some of my team's work from some of my clients. This was about a year ago, and I was noticing a trend of they were trying to keep all the text inside the safe zones, but in doing that, they were covering up like the best part of the video. So if it was like. A really cute baby adjustment.

They were like putting the text like over the baby. I'm like, oh, don't put the text over the baby. So you just kind of kind of be mindful of making sure the text is in the safe zone while also not blocking the most interesting parts of the video. And last little tip for face to camera videos, you actually want your head in the top one third of the camera screen so that you can put any text or rolling closed captions.

Underneath your head, you typically don't want your face like down lower in the frame of the video and then the text box rolling above your head because then people are looking at the text and not connecting with your eyes. And one of the whole reasons like videos are so great at converting is because people feel that connection with your eyes.

So that's just like a fun little psychology, fun fact. I know, like I said, I gave you a lot of information for anybody who's like more beginner and you're like, what the hell did, were you just talking about? Like I said, just pick one thing that you do like easily understand, which is like, okay, text readability and contrast, like that's definitely something that you can even on your graphics, even if it's not a real.

Like stop using script fonts for headlines. Nobody can read the script font, just look at it and think, wow, is this easy to read? I know a lot of you have these really beautiful, like soft colors in your brand palette. So if you've got like a really light green over like a white background, there's not enough contrast.

So like I said, think about the, the readability. That's one little small thing that you could do super easily. The other thing, like I said, is, is to think about having a really strong text hook, visual hook, and not varying the lead to make sure you're not saying the most interesting thing at the very end.

So I would love to hear your feedback and where your sticky points were with this episode where you're like, Hmm, not quite sure what you're talking about. You can send me a DM and I'll be happy to send you an example. Like I said, I'll just try to have like a, a more meaty carousel up by the time this episode goes live so that you can kind of see all of these things in action.

Alright. I hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day and happy reels filming. Thank you for listening to Holistic Marketing Simplified, and hey, you know how every podcaster at the very end of their episode asks you to rate and review their podcast? Well that's because it's super important. These podcasts take a lot of time and heart and effort to produce, to bring you free information.

So in order for me to be able to continue doing that, we need more people to find out about the show. So if you could please just take like two minutes out of your very busy day to leave me a rating and share this on your Instagram Stories and tag at Molly a Cahill, that's C-A-H-I-L-L. I would greatly, greatly appreciate your support.

I know your time is valuable and I can't wait to see you in the next episode.