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Hey everybody. Katie Lance here, founder and CEO of Katie Lance Consulting, the Get Social Smart Academy and author of the book. Get Social Smart. It’s episode 253 of the Get Social Smart Show. And today we are going 101 when it comes to Instagram Reels. Now I know when it comes to Instagram Reels, I have heard from a lot of you who’ve told me, Katie I’m really intimidated. Katie. I really need training. Katie, I don’t know what I’m doing. So hopefully this video is going to give you a little bit of advice. Here’s the thing with Instagram Reels, there are a lot of things that you can do. So I’m going to share with you five really simple things that I hope you can do right away. If you’ve been nervous to create your first Reel, if maybe you’ve done a Reel, but you’re like, I don’t really know what I’m doing. This is for you. So let’s get on with it.
Tip number one, start by watching other people’s reels. If you have no ideas, you’re like, I don’t know what the heck I would create for Instagram reels, open up Instagram. And there is a feed of just Instagram reels. So click that start swiping through, start just watching other people’s Instagram reels. And the reason for this is you’ll get a sense of like what other people are doing. What do you like? What do you not like? You’ll start hearing music. You’ll see trends, and just spend five minutes swiping through. Okay. That’s easy enough, right? We’re just swiping.
Tip number two, save audio that you like. Okay. So you’re going to swipe there. You can take three or four or five minutes, swipe through, watch a bunch of reels. Then what you’re going to do is I want you to listen.
So as you’re watching reels, you might hear music. You might hear some funny lip sync things that just kind of make you giggle that resonate with you. When you’re looking at your reels, you’re going to look at the, you see the reel and you see the person on the reel, or you see whatever the reel is at the very bottom scrolling across the bottom is the audio file, right? So it’ll say like ABC or whatever the audio file is. When you click on that audio file, it’s going to take you to a separate screen. And the very top, you’ll see a button that says save audio. Okay. So as you’re scrolling through your feed, you’re watching it, you’re getting inspired. You’re laughing. Maybe you’re going, that’s ridiculous. Right? I want you to find a few audios that you like that resonate with you. So they’re either things that are, maybe people are lip singing that are funny, that you think, okay, that’s funny.
I could do that. Or maybe they’re just some fun music, right? Either one. So you’re going to save, I want you to save a few of those and the reason why I’m having you save audio is sometimes the audio is going to give you the inspiration for the content you’re going to create. Right? Sometimes that’s the hardest part is figuring out what is the audio and what’s the text and all that. So we’re going to start with the audio and then we’re going to go from there. Okay. Okay. Tip number three. So we scrolled through number two, we found an audio that we like number three. It’s time to create something. Okay. So from here you can create right within reels, but I will be honest with you. I find that it is way easier to record video a ahead of time and then uploaded into reels.
So let me tell you what I mean, if you’re going to do a quick 15 second video where you are maybe showcasing a listing, or you want to give a quick tip about real estate or the top three reasons why someone should move to your town. Right? I find it a lot easier personally, to record that on your phone, in your camera, and then upload that right into reels. Now for reals, you’re allowed up to 30 seconds. Now, some of you might have the ability to record up to one minute, but that’s not available to everyone as of the recording of this video. So I also think shorter is better. So we want to kind of aim for that 15 to 32nd mark. So if you have saved some audio that is upbeat, maybe it’s fun. Maybe it’s trending music. You can pair that with a video that you have on your phone.
For example, let’s say you did a listing video, right? Maybe you’re at your latest listing and you took out your phone and you took a 32nd video walking around the house. Well, that video by itself with you in the background saying, here’s the kitchen, this is the living room. That’s probably okay. But now take that video, upload it to reels. It’ll take out your audio and now you can choose the audio that you’ve saved. Maybe it’s a fun, upbeat trending song and how you’ve got something really fun and engaging right now. I will say, if you are going to do some sort of reels where you’re lip-syncing, right, because those are really fun. Those I typically do create right within reels because it’s kind of hard to lip sync something. If you’re not listening to the audio. So this tip number three, there’s kind of two options either.
You’ve already recorded something ahead of time, 20, 30 seconds on your phone, maybe it’s one video. Maybe it’s a couple of little clips, right? In fact, we talked about this in one of our recent videos where we talked about Instagram, um, Instagram for listings. And I’ll actually link to that video below because you know, for listing video, it doesn’t just have to be 30 seconds. It could be two seconds of the backyard. And two seconds of the kitchen and two seconds in the front door put into a real with some music. It’s one of the easiest reels that you can create. Plus, guess what? You’re not on camera. The other kind of real, as we said earlier, are the fun kind of lip sinking ones on these. You can actually create pretty quickly. I’ve done a number of these. I did like three of these in a row where I batch craved them all in one shot.
Uh, I was having a good hair day that day. So I said, okay, I’m just going to greet them all in one shot. And those you can create right within real. So you can, you, again, you’re going to open up reels. You’re going to pull up that audio and then you’re going to practice your lip sinking. Now, by the way, if you’re doing any kind of lip sinking or like the, you know, whatever, it might be, sort of the voiceover, it takes a few times to practice. Uh, so, you know, practice does make perfect. The other part of that is adding text. Now, adding text is a whole other conversation and we’ll get to that in a minute. I promise. Okay, now tip number four. So now we’re going to take it to the next level by adding multiple clips and text. So again, you might just have like a one 20 or 32nd video on your phone that you upload into reels.
That’s a great place to start, but it’s also really nice to have a number of short little clips. So for example, let’s say you want to do a real about your community. You know, again, it could be a 32nd video of like, you know, the community, or it could be two seconds of the park, two seconds of a school, two seconds of a restaurant, two seconds of your favorite coffee shop. Again, you don’t have to be on camera. You can upload each of those little clips, add that music. Uh, in fact, when you’re uploading to reels, you’ll see a little musical icon. So you click that little music icon and you can search for music, or you can search your saved music, right. Which is awesome. And you can also add text. Now, I will say it’s a little tricky to have the text appear and disappear.
That’s something, to be honest with you, you got to play around with, because it does take time, but just know that you don’t always have to have texts over the real. In fact, some of the highest performing reels don’t even have text over their real, it’s just the videos or the video plus music. So if you’re a little overwhelmed with texts, it’s all good. If you want to just put text on the first opening scene of your video, you can do that too. And there’s a little textbook button, right? Within a reels where you can do that. So again, play around with it. You know, the real is where you see people pointing and adding texts. Uh, it takes time to figure that out. There’s sort of, sort of a whole timing thing involved. My hope with this video is that you’re going to learn how to do something quickly and easily.
And I really think when it comes to reels, there’s really two different types of real story quickly and easily. It’s either number one, lip-syncing something funny, uh, right. Cause that’s, that’s one of the nice things about Instagram that allows you to kind of showcase your personality or to showcase something quick and easy, like a lifting, like something in your community, like your favorite coffee shop, or a couple of quick tips where you don’t always necessarily need to be on camera and getting you’ve got that content on your phone and you can upload it, add that music, add text, and you’re good to go. All right, tip number five. As I said before, you don’t always have to be on camera. Now of course, being on camera is helpful, right? People connect with other people. So at some point, yes, you want to get on camera at some point, uh, you know, we have to kind of get over how we look and how we sound and that’s, that’s who we are, right?
You are who you are. You are how you look, you are how you sound. But, um, getting on camera of course is, is great. Just know you don’t always have to be. So look at your life as content, look for opportunities to showcase things, um, at listings around your community. That’s a great way to get started with Instagram. So like I said, this is just a quick Instagram reels. One-on-one, there’s so much that you guys can do as you know, there’s transitions and texts and all that good stuff, but don’t let that intimidate you. Right. Right now, Instagram reels is kind of the new shiny object over on Instagram. And just by leveraging that platform and getting started, you’re already going to start to see more interaction, more engagement, more eyeballs, more followers, and all kinds of good stuff happening over on Instagram. All right.
I would love to hear from you. Are you active over on Instagram? Let me know in the comments below, in fact, I would love to know if you’ve created your first reel yet. So let me know in the comments below a yes or no. If you’ve created your first reel, you can even share a link to your reel. If you’d like, when you’re on reels, there’s a little button that says share, and you can share a link to that in the comments. If you’d like, I would love to check it out and check out what you’re doing over on reels. If you’re looking for some additional training on Instagram, we have an entire guide. If you go to KatieLance.com/instaguide you can check that out and that’ll give you training on all things Instagram. If you’re watching this video on YouTube, we would love if you’d hit the subscribe button and the bell button, because we have new videos that come out each and every week. And until next time, we’ll see you soon. Bye for now.
