Study: Instagram Reels outperform TikTok videos in metrics rundown

With consumer attention span dwindling, short form video content has proven its ability to captivate audiences with video hosting platform TikTok becoming a key staple in the brand’s social media marketing plan.

As brands flock to TikTok due to its high median engagement rates, surprisingly, Instagram Reels is still outperforming TikTok content when comparing median reach, median interactions, and median video views.

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These were the results of Emplifi’s Q2 2023 social media behaviour and trends report titled its “Unleashing the Power of Video: Key Trends Driving Social Media Engagement” which aims to give marketers insight to develop social media strategies with measurable impact.

The same study also showed that TikTok has sustained user growth where the average brand saw a five-fold increase in TikTok followers and found that Instagram Reels outperformed all other content types on Instagram, generating 55% more interactions than single-image posts and 29% more interactions than standard video posts.

While Reels shared by brands earned 68.25 median interactions per post in Q2, Carousels (multi-image posts) strongly cements itself as the second-best performing post type on Instagram with 66.5 median post interactions.

Interestingly, Instagram Reels succeeds as a short-form video format despite its downward trend in the last five quarters, dropping 30% year-over-year in Q2 2023, compounded with Meta’s recent deprioritisation of Reels which is a call for brands to embrace more than one channel for their video marketing efforts to diversify their social content.

Brands should also note that short-form videos do not work optimally on all platforms as the Emplifi report reveals that Facebook Reels are not seeing the same levels of traction Instagram Reels do. In fact, Facebook Live Video dominates all other video content on the platform, earning nearly four-times the number of interactions compared to static video posts especially in the APAC.

On the other hand, APAC brands should leverage on Twitter’s GIFs as Emplifi’s data found that that Tweets containing GIFs earned 2.4-times as many interactions as those with links and 1.85-times more than text-based status updates.

“It is time marketers fully embrace their video efforts, and that means everything from Instagram Reels and Facebook Live Video to TikTok content and even GIFs on Twitter. Short-form video is exploding and the brands that lean into this trend will gain a major competitive edge,” said Zarnaz Arlia, chief marketing officer, Emplifi.

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