With TikTok under international scrutiny, Meta seized the opportunity to go all in on Reels with its recently announced basket of updates. 

Starting with Reels Trends, these can be accessed by navigating to your account’s Professional Dashboard. Selecting “Check today’s Reels Trends” will display two sections, one for viral audios and the other for top hashtags and trending topics.

Creating Reels is now a breeze, thanks to the second update that brings together all editing tools into one single screen. You no longer need to switch back and forth between screens to add stickers or text overlays!

Third in line, we’ve got two important metrics that get updated in real-time as users watch your Reels: Total watch time – which includes time spent replaying the Reel – as well as average watch time that is calculated by dividing the total watch time with the total number of plays.

As explained by Instagram’s official blog post, this feature will help you better understand which parts of your Reels people are most engaging with. It can also indicate where you may need to create a stronger hook to have viewers stay longer.

The fourth and biggest update is being anticipated by users worldwide, as Instagram expands its Gifts monetization feature to more markets.

Gifts, whether on Facebook or Instagram, are virtual tokens of loyalty and appreciation that users send to their favorite creators. These can be purchased using Stars, whereby every received Star adds $0.01 USD to your favorite creator’s balance.

Learn more here!