Social Media

How to Get Views on TikTok and Instagram Reels in 2025

If you are looking to grow your Instagram or TikTok, it can feel like spinning your wheels at times. The algorithms are seemingly all over the place. Some accounts can blow up and thrive, while others may not see much movement at all.

For the longest time, I discounted short-form video primarily because I was in the latter category. It wasn't until friends of mine gave me a private lashing over what I was doing wrong that I started to take a strategic approach to how I create my short-form content.

So in this one, I thought I'd break out what I've been doing to grow my presence on these short-form video apps, and inspire some ideas to try in your own content creation.

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Lessons Learned from Going Viral on Facebook in 2024

In May 2024, I had a set of images go viral on Facebook. Not just my normal level of “viral” which I would define as 10x average performance.

This one went viral, hitting 100% audience reach in just a few hours (132k) and blasting off to just under 1.4 million reach by the time it started to slow down- or about 60% the size of our city's metro area.

So in this one, I thought I'd share this particular post as a case study and dive into what the post was about, share theories as to why and how it went viral, and the aftermath of what came next.

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Quality Content on Social Media Isn’t Actually “Quality”

Camera capturing sunflowers field

If you are a creator that is frustrated about the current state of social media, with networks not showing your content to your audience, we're here to tell you that you're not alone.

At some point in the not-so-distant past, social media functioned like everyone thinks it does. You post content. Your followers see it. Everyone was happy. But at some point, that changed, and the algorithms appear to be completely different than they used to be.

Defenders of the networks all have one saying that they love to repeat again and again, and that is simply this- “Create quality content. If your content isn't being seen it isn't quality!”

While this is a rather poor take often without defining what the term quality means, there is some truth in the matter here because quality content isn't inherently good content, it is content that is seen.

This is an important distinction, and one that we thought we'd break out further in this one!

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How Do Instagram’s Suggested Feeds Work? An Analysis

Have you ever wondered how Instagram decides what Reels to place in the suggested feeds like Discover or Suggested for You? We certainly do!

After working on improving my Reels for my local blog, I started to see a bit of success where some posts would go nuts (being seen predominantly by Non-Followers) and others would perform along our historical average (and is seen mostly by Followers). So we decided to take a look at the data to see if we could find any trends as to why some would explode and others would not.

So in this one, we want to share a bit more of the analysis and some data points that we saw that were interesting.

A word of caution: We will talk about this more in our conclusion, but I suspect that the trends shown below will vary from creator to creator. One account may see a spike in Non-Follower views very quickly. Others may require more than what we saw. I will not be surprised if my own performance, for the very same account analyzed here, will change as it grows. We will discuss this more later on.

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5 Things We Wish Social Media Companies Would Do

Yes, we get it, social media is pretty terrible right now.

From jumping through all the hoops to low quality content always seeming to thrive, there is a lot to hate about social networks as a creator.

For bloggers and creators reading this, odds are good that this will feel like we are preaching to the choir here. As much as we want you to chime in and agree with us, we have to admit, this post is not just for you.

Ideally, this one is for anyone who works for a social media company who may stumble upon us because we have some things you need to read. We would send this one privately, but you also don't make it easy to submit feedback. So a public lashing it is.

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Pin Generator Review – Glitchy But Good at Bulk Pinning

I have a confession to make- I don't like Pinterest.

To make a long story short, I simply never enjoyed how long it took to create pins for the return I got out of the network. This was likely due to my niches not performing best on Pinterest more than anything. But at the end of the day, the manual approach to making and scheduling pins simply was too time-consuming for me for the results (and, even when paying for a VA to do the work for me, I felt the same end effect all the same).

So when I stumbled upon Pin Generator, a service that helps you design and schedule pins in bulk, I was interested. Shortly thereafter, I discovered an AppSumo deal and signed up immediately.

At first, I hated the program. But then I worked through the service's many glitches and found a pattern that worked for me- the tool helped me speed up creating and publishing pins by 95-99x! Although my traffic from the network is still nominal (partly because I am still waiting for the vast majority of pins to publish as scheduled), this improvement in time spent creating pins really helped me get back to using the service outright.

So let's jump into it with this review on why I found this one so buggy at the start and why I eventually came around to liking the program despite its many flaws.

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CapCut Review – Great for Reels and TikToks

For the longest time, I hated making Reels and TikToks. Actually, if I am being honest, I would go as far as saying that I hated making all videos for one simple reason- it is incredibly time-consuming.

Where I could edit a photo in just a few seconds using tools like Lightroom, editing video took tens of minutes to hours or even days pending length.

I almost even gave up on producing Instagram Reels because I simply found the in-app editing features to be buggy, glitchy, and not user-friendly and it really did not help my already unmotivated self get into it.

It wasn't until I downloaded CapCut (particularly, CapCut's desktop application) and started messing around with the program that I really began to enjoy making Reels and TikToks.

CapCut truly makes this one easy!

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How Does the Facebook Performance Bonus Work? A Breakdown

In mid 2023, Meta announced a new bonus program, aptly named the Facebook Performance Bonus, that would reward creators with payments for engagement-related metrics on most all types of posts excluding Reels and Stories.

Unlike past bonus incentives, this one was quite exciting to many creators as it appeared that we would get paid for the content (and subsequent engagement) we were already generating day in, day out.

After getting accepted into this one for my local blog, I decided to look closely at my data to see if I could find any trends in how money is earned and ways to increase our revenue via the program.

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How to Minimize Spam to Your Facebook Group in a Few Steps

Stop the spam

Oh Facebook spam, you are never-ending. This is especially true in popular Facebook groups where spammers and bots like to take advantage of loose entry rules to put their garbage in front of the eyes of thousands of users in just a few clicks.

But if you're suffering from Facebook group spam in your own group, don't worry! We've got some ideas on reducing spam postings significantly in just a few setting changes.

Note: This article describes how I manage spam in my 50k+ member Facebook group for our city blog. Your mileage may vary on whether some of these are necessary and how you may want to approach spam differently depending on your group setup. As such, treat this as a starting point for ideas and not a complete list of spam reduction techniques.

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How Do Instagram Reels Bonuses Work? A CPM Earnings Calculation

In March 2023, Meta announced they will be pausing Reels Bonuses in the USA. We hope this feature will return soon!

In recent editions of This Week in Blogging, we've been reporting about how social media networks are rolling out new programs where content creators can get paid. Yes, cash money from some of the world's biggest tech giants!

Meta's big push into paying out creators is not necessarily altruistic, as their payment setup is purely to promote their Reels function on Instagram and Facebook (which, as we all know, is essentially their own TikTok).

After taking part in the Reels Bonus campaign on Instagram for the last few months, we noticed some things were a bit unusual with the payment structure. We would hit $100 payouts pretty quickly, and then only make pennies per share after that.

So we started tracking the data, and in this one wanted to share a bit more about the Reels Bonus campaign outright and why the earning figures are rather unusual.

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This Week in Blogging
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