Instagram has announced the following new updates:

Retention metrics for Reels:

Introducing retention 

• An interactive chart that shows the percentage of views from people who continued to watch a Reel at each moment.
• With retention, there will always be a downward slope, but the flatter the line, the more engaged an audience is.
• Retention shows the moments in a reel that keeps or loses viewers' interest.

Replacing view rate with skip rate

• With the addition of retention, Instagram is also replacing the view rate metric with skip rate in the coming weeks.
• While view rate shows what percentage watched past the first 3 seconds of a Reel, skip rate is the percentage of views from people who decided to skip the Reel during those first 3 seconds.
• A high skip rate indicates that people didn't find the beginning of a Reel engaging, whereas a low skip rate means the first 3 seconds of a Reel, resonated and kept people watching.

For more information, visit instagram.com. 

Tips on how to grow an audience:

• Creating engaging reels is the best way to reach new audiences. Reels show up in the reels and explore tabs, where people spend a lot of time discovering new content. 
• Consistently sharing feed posts or carousels helps you engage with your audience, which can boost the distribution of your content.
• Carousels may get multiple opportunities to be seen and engaged with if a follower doesn't scroll through all the cards in the post. Videos or images that weren't seen are treated as 'new' content and may result in the carousel being shown again (starting with the media that has not been seen).
• Engagements such as likes and comments are used as signals when determining how your content will be distributed to people who don't follow you. Creating engaging content and interacting with your followers in the comments can help you get more reach overall.
• Make your content relatable and humorous, which will result in people sharing it.
• Make sure you add a hook in the first 5 seconds of reels to keep people watching.
• Posting 10 or more Reels per month can impact your growth positively. 

For more information, visit instagram.com. 

In addition, Adam Moserri, Instagram’s CEO, has said that longer captions do not affect the reach of posts.