Easy Instagram Reels in Canva: Without Being on Camera

1. Welcome!: If you're someone who has never posted an Instagram reel. Or you're a seasoned creator who is feeling just a bit overwhelmed and wanting to bring back the joy of creating. Then stay tuned because this is the class for you. My name is Megara. I'm a digital marketer and te creator. And one of my biggest passions is making the marketing world more accessible to beginners. And when it comes to Instagram Real specifically, I found that where a lot of us are getting stuck is in the fear of having to get on camera like this, and also in struggling with ideas of what to actually create for our reels. So the beauty of what you'll learn here is that we're going to be focusing solely on creating reels that don't require you to dance, point or even talk to the camera, and we're going to be looking at lots of creative examples throughout for inspiration. By the end of the class, you'll know how to create 15 different styles of reels using camera from simple meme and quote reels to more complex multi clip reels and animated image reels. As well as reels that allow your audience to engage with you on a deeper level inside of the Instagram app. We also know how to set effective marketing goals and how to save time by tapping into proven processes so you can easily create reels on a more consistent basis, which will especially benefit you if you're running a business or creating reels for clients as a social media manager. You will also learn ways to continuously gather new ideas for your reels, how to create captivating captions and covers for your reels, how to use other free apps to add closed captions for your reels and how to use Instagram's other powerful features to get more visibility for your reels and grow an engaged audience. You'll also learn how to make your reels more accessible to all users on the platform and contribute to a better, happier Instagram experience for your community. Finally, you'll learn about easy ways. You can use your camera to take photos or quick clips to showcase more of yourself and your team and take people behind the scenes. But once again, in a way that's really easy even for a complete beginner to master and doesn't require you to talk to the camera. To participate in the class, all you need is a smartphone, an Instagram profile, and a Camva account. I'll be demonstrating some lessons on my computer, but you can use the mobile app versions of these tools if you prefer. And for your class project, you'll have the opportunity to create and confidently publish your beautiful Instagram reel and share it with me in the project gallery for feedback. And as with all my skill share classes, you'll have a handy resource guide, which will help to support you on your learning journey. I hope you're excited. I can't wait to see what you come up with. And now if you're ready, let's start creating. 2. What You'll Create: Within this class, we will focus on the exact steps you need to take in order to create your very first or your next Instagram reel for your class project. But we will also take a look at the steps you need to take in order to then create reels on a more consistent basis with confidence, and that'll become really key if you're maybe looking to do this for clients as a social media manager, or if you're just looking to improve your own process and workflow and avoid the overwhelm along the way. Now, this is a beginner friendly class. So we're largely going to be focusing on creating videos and reels within Cambo that don't require you to jump on camera because I do find that that is where a lot of beginners are getting stuck in creating their first Instagram reel. Each lesson will help to break down one step of the process of creating your reel, like how to gather ideas, how to organize these, how to actually create your reel within Canva and the Instagram app, how to tackle captions, how to add text, how to add music, close captions, a cover photo, and so much more. So that by the end, you'll feel confident in posting and sharing your reel with me for feedback in the projects and resources section of the class. Now just before jumping into the next lesson, make sure to download the class guide in the projects and resources section. A this is where I've included lots of helpful tips and tricks and resources that we'll be looking at throughout the class. If you're having trouble accessing the attachment, I've also included it as a link in the description of the class. So you can download it in either location. And remember that at any point throughout the class, you can jump into the discussion section and ask me to clarify something or just ask a question about how a tip I've shared here might work for your particular brand or situation. Now the next lesson, we're going to take a look at how to effectively set goals for your reels so that you can make sure they're really successful from the get go and you know exactly what you're looking for in order to measure your success. So I'll see you there. 3. Set Effective Goals: Okay. In this lesson, we're going to take a look at how to effectively set goals for what you're hoping to achieve with your Instagram reels. Because if your goal is to just purely provide entertainment with your reels. That is totally totally fine. And I do want to acknowledge at this point that I know not everyone is on social media in order to grow a business or a brand, and that is perfectly fine. But if you're here because you want to learn about strategies to actually use Instagram reels and your social media presence in order to grow an existing or future business for yourself or for your clients, then that's a very different strategy that needs to be followed there. Because as with anything in the marketing space, in order to be successful, you have to start with a great strategy in place. Because otherwise, you just often end up creating a lot of content, possibly even great content, but it's not really getting you anywhere. And that's just because if you didn't really set goals at the beginning of it, you don't really know if you've been successful at the end of the month or the end of the quarter because you don't really know what you're hoping to achieve. For example, Taylor Loren often talks about her viral reel on how to light a candle, which got 1.7 million views on Instagram, at a time when most of her reals were only getting a few thousand views. These are amazing results, but it didn't actually create any sort of significant shift in her audience numbers or her revenue for her business because it was so unrelated to the type of content she was normally posting. But instead, she did get a lot of comments and DMs from people asking about things like, Where did you get that lighter, which awesome if you're selling the lighter, but her core business is teaching people how to grow on Instagram. So because it was there was that disconnect between the real and her core business, she just ended up having to deal with a lot of admin from commenting back to people and engaging with people who were never properly going to follow her and weren't going to move the needle with her business. So, to make sure we're setting ourselves up for success right from the very beginning, at this stage, I just want you to start by identifying the following. What is my industry What am I hoping to achieve by creating reals? What kind of vibe am I going for with my reels? Who is my target audience, and how do reels fit into my larger business goals? I acknowledge that you may not have answers to all these questions straightaway, but I'm going to take you through some examples so that hopefully it makes it easier for you if you're able to answer these straightaway or in the future. Let's break these down starting with the first two questions. What is your industry or the space you're playing in and what are you hoping to achieve? So, for example, if you're an influencer or hoping to become one, then your goal with your reels is likely just to get visibility to basically get as many people to see and engage with your content so that you can get noticed by brands and secure brand partnerships. But if instead, your service based business and your goal is to bring in new clients and maybe engage with your existing clients, Then having a lot of views in your reels is probably not a priority. Instead, your goal might be to get people to save your reels if you're sharing professional advice and maybe increase the number of DMs you get from existing and prospective clients. And the reason for this is because let's say you're running a real estate business. One single DM from a prospective client who wants to sell or buy a house could be worth tens of thousands of dollars of revenue for your business, and that is worth a lot more than having 2 million views on a reel. Or if you run an e commerce business, then your goals will likely be around increasing traffic to your online store and maybe increasing the number of sales within Instagram itself. So hopefully, you're starting to see the point and starting to get a little bit of clarity around some goals that you can attach to your reels based on your own industry and the purpose of your business. And now let's talk about this vibe aspect. So what I mean by that is, do you want to seem funny and relatable or well educated and professional? Or educational and informative. Or perhaps your goal is to showcase your luxury of lifestyle. Determining this right up front will actually really help you to avoid falling into the trap of jumping onto trends that don't really align with the vibe of your Instagram profile and your Instagram reels that you want to go for. Then let's talk about who you're talking to with your reels. So the same exact topic covered by two different accounts that are trying to speak to two different audiences could look completely different in terms of execution. For example, on the topic of investing, girls that invest are talking primarily to millennial and enz women and incorporate a lot of relatable humor and content into their approach. Versus an account like Investopedia has a largely professional male audience and leans much more into informative and educational vibes with statistics and latest news in the finance world. So these two brands actually cover the exact same topic, but in two very different ways based on their audience. And this is how you create a really loyal community on Instagram. This point, I just want you to write down a couple of notes about who you want to be talking to with your reals content in terms of their age, gender, geographic location, language, parental status. Basically, anything you can think of that would really help you to tailor your language in your reals or your content to your audience's needs. Lastly, I'd like you to think about where reals fit into your larger business goals. So if you are doing this for business purposes and you know in the next three months you want to get 1,000 subscribers onto your e mail list, then don't forget to tailor to this with your Instagram real strategy because people often get so caught up in the fun of having reels once you get the hang of it, that you sort of then forget that actually your business probably exists to make money at the end of the day, and you need to be tailoring to that purpose and that need with your water social media strategy, but particularly with your video content because of how much time it actually takes to create these reels. So if you have an obligation free chat or a coaching session or freebie or lead magnet or something like that that helps to build your e mail list or you've got a launch that you want to promote, don't shry away from promoting your business and actually selling through your reels, as well. Now, I know what you might be thinking at this stage. Can you ever just deviate from your core strategy? Absolutely, you can. So this is supposed to be fun, and there will be content that you create that almost doesn't have a strategy behind it, and it maybe just serves for the purpose of getting your audience to know you a little bit better in a different way. So I've definitely done this where I created a reel, where I was just carving a pumpkin, which is something I do every year. It's something that is a hobby of mine. It's a very, very small part of my life because it only happens once a year. But I thought it was a really fun way for my audience to get to know a little bit about me outside of my marketing world. And so you absolutely can do that. But I think the important thing to note is just knowing what your core strategy is, knowing what your overall main goals are, and trying to stick, to that as much as possible with the majority of your reals content. And with that, also, remember that different parts of Instagram serve different purposes and allow you to kind of be a bit more playful in other areas of that. For example, I often use Instagram stories to just show people the hilarious things that my dog is doing that day or traveling or really just anything that maybe wouldn't make sense as part of my content strategy inside of reels or even image posts on Instagram. Don't be afraid to use all of Instagram's wonderful features for the different purposes in your life and your business, and we're going to talk a lot about them throughout. But in the next lesson, we're going to jump into doing a bit of a tour around the Instagram app, so we can get a little bit more comfortable and a little bit more familiar with how to use it for Instagram reels. I'll see you there. 4. Instagram Reels: Grand Tour: In this lesson, we're going to jump into the Instagram app and take a look at some of the features specifically as they pertain to Instagram reels. But before we do, I just wanted to take a second here and point out the obvious, which is that Instagram seemingly changes every 5 minutes, which is very frustrating for marketers, but it is a good thing because the app is designed to evolve with the social media landscape. So it's all under control, but just so you know that potentially depending on when you're watching this, there might be some features that you're seeing on your screen that you're not seeing on mine or vice versa, and that's solely fine. The fundamentals will remain the same, let's jump into the app and take a look around. Go ahead and get started by opening up your Instagram app, heading on over to your profile and up here into settings. Let's start with privacy first. I want to make sure that you have this toggled off to make sure you do not have a private account otherwise. No one will be able to see your beautiful reels except for your followers. Make sure that's toggled off. Then head into reels and remix and toggle on recommend on Facebook. This doesn't mean that every real you create is going to be eligible for this function or that it has to be automatically promoted on Facebook. You can still control this when you post your reel. But having this toggled on means that you'll have the option of promoting your Instagram reels on Facebook, even if you do not necessarily have a Facebook business account. Then within security, just make sure your two factor authentication is turned on. If you're doing this for clients, definitely recommend that they have this turned on as well to prevent any cybersecurity attacks. Of course, it's not a foolproof system, but it gives you a really good chance of preventing that. Then within account, I want you to make sure that you are on a business or creator account, not a personal account because this will give you the best flexibility in terms of the analytics you're able to pull for your account. On a personal account, you're just a little bit limited with what you're able to see about your followers and your activity. Your creator account option will give you the option of leveraging more trending music, more popular track. If that's important to your strategy, I would recommend a creator account, but otherwise, a business account is a really good option. While we're in here, within data usage, just make sure you've toggled on, upload at highest quality because otherwise, this will potentially cause your reels to be a bit glitchy and look a little bit off. Make sure that's toggled on. Now let's talk about your options for actually posting your reels. We've got an option down here which will allow you to create a post, a story, a real or an Instagram live. And then you've got an option up here, which will give you the same options as well. And same thing from within your reels feed if you're ever looking at reels and you're like, cool, I want to create one. You can do that within here with the camera icon. So there's always a few different ways that you can get to the same place within Instagram. And while we're in here, you can also look at other creators who are using effects and audios and use those directly from within the reels feed as well. So, for example, I can see that this creator is using this particular effect. So I could go ahead and just save that effect to my library and we'll take a look at where I can access that. But I could also just go ahead and click on Us effect, and that's going to bring me to the real creation space. And same with the audio track, if I was going to click on that, so I can see it's trending and that is visible to me because of this little arrow that's pointing up. That means it's a trending track. I can click into that and see how many people are actually using this track. If it's less than $5,000, then that gives me a really good option of having my real actually get more visibility. If it's, you know, 200,000 people using this trending audio, it might not actually give me much traction. But if it's under $5,000, that gives you usually a really good opportunity to potentially just boost your real out to a few more people because this audio is currently trending. So I can save that. I've already saved it. I'm going to unsave it. So if I was in any kind of audio tab, I can save that over here, and I can also just go ahead and directly use it same as I would with the effect. And it's already pre loaded that audio in here for me. Now that I'm in the reals creation option, I could if I didn't already have this music, let me just go ahead and delete that. I would have a little music icon and now I can select some tracks here, or I can also actually access my saved music here. Because I previously saved that track, I can now load it from in here and click on done. Then I've got the effects section here. Effects can be a really cool way to just bring a little bit more dynamic options to your camera shot footage. If this is something you want to leverage in your reels creation process. I'm going to go ahead and I'll actually flip my camera here so that you can see what these effects look like because at the moment, I'm filming my table. So I'm going to hit on effects. I've got all these different effects. I can also look at trending effects, or I can hit this little icon and see my saved effects. Because I previously saved that effect, it's in here, but also any previously saved effects are in here as well, and I can just cycle through them and I can see in my preview there, it's going to start changing what my camera is looking like based on the effect that I've chosen. I do also have the option of not using any effects and putting these in almost retrospectively, but it's a lot more limited. Let me show you what I mean. If I was to record a real, I can do that by just clicking and it's going to give me a hands free option, or I can press and hold. And release when I'm ready to release, and now I can head on over to next. I've got the effects section over here as well. But if I was going to click on that and maybe click on the saved section again, you can see I only have seven of all of my different beautiful saved effects. Only seven of them are actually available for me to utilize once the real has already been filmed. This is why you want to make sure if you're playing around with effects that you do it before you've actually filmed it because it's a little bit harder to access them afterwards. So now let's talk about your other options over here. You've got the Ad yours, which you might have seen on either Instagram stories or on reels, where people have these different collections of, you know, show me photos of your pets, et cetera. So that's just a fun way to sort of participate in something that's currently trending. Then you've got the option to speed up or slow down your camera filming. It's probably not something that you'll utilize a whole lot, but in case you ever need to use it, that's where it is. Then you've got the layout option. I find it to be super hard to use and very glitchy. I kind of hate it, so I don't ever use it, and I just use camera. But yeah, it's there. Timer is super super handy because it allows you to use your camera even more hands free. At the moment as a default, it's 3 seconds, but you can click on this and it'll give you a ten second start. I could set that timer and now if I was going to record something, it's going to give me a ten second count down and I can move to the other side of the room, for example, if I was shooting this with my camera. That is really, really handy and then it's going to automatically start recording for me. Again, just a very hands free experience. Then we've got dual which basically just allows me to access my front and back camera at the same time. Then we've got this line option. So a line is something you will only see once you start filming a real, not beforehand. Let me show you what I mean, if I head on over to next, I'm just going to delete my clips by heading on over to edit clips. I'm going to pause them so I can see that they're all here. I'm just going to go ahead and delete them. And now we're essentially dealing with a blank slate, and you can see that that aligned function is not there. Sometimes people freak out and go, where did it go? It's just because you haven't actually filmed anything yet. As soon as you film even a quick clip, it's going to appear there. This basically just allows you to do any of the kind transitions of outfit changes or anything like that that you might have seen a lot of specifically influencers using for doing dynamic shifts in different shots. So it is a bit more of an advanced function, but we're going to take a look at how you can utilize this option later on in a way that is quite beginner friendly as well. So the one last thing that you may not have noticed is usually you will also have a countdown to determine how long your real can be. But at this stage, we've only got a couple of seconds that we can film, and that's just because of the audio track I've chosen. If I was going to remove this audio track, it's going to also give me one more option. If I delete this clip, which is length. So if I'm starting from completely from scratch, I can choose if I want to make a 15, 30, 60 or 92nd reel. So that's the last option there. And if you are using an audio track, it's just going to automatically tell you that the reel you're making is as long as the audio track, which in this case is only a couple of seconds, so that options just not going to be there. It's going to tell you you can only record up to 5 seconds. So if I was going to record, I can do that, or I can bring in some clips that I've already created. So in this case, I'm going to go ahead and just preload a couple of photos and clips that we can use for demo purposes. I can either do this one by one or I can select this option here and that's going to allow me to select multiple clips at the same time. We're going to do that and then click on next. I could shorten them here and probably because my audio is really short, it's only going to allow me to use a couple of seconds of each one, and that's totally fine. That's fine. Okay. Currently, there's an effect that's been applied to this, and I'm just going to go ahead and remove that. We don't have any effects on the clips that I've chosen. And at this stage, I can play around with a few things. The first thing I want to do, obviously, they're going to cycle through really quickly, so I'm going to go over to pausing this and then editing clips so that we can see that in here I can adjust these clips by clicking into each individual one and shortening it because I can see my audio has already ended and the clip just keeps going. So if I wanted to adjust it, I can do that there. If I was going to just click and hold, it's going to allow me to reorder my clips or I can click on reder down here and I'm going to have the same option. Let's say I wanted this clip to be second and this one to be last, I can do that here. And in terms of the audio, a lot of the time, if people are ever recording tips and tricks, but they selected a song, they sort of freak out that it hasn't taken the audio from their camera, and that can be a bit scary. So if that ever happens because you've preloaded an audio track, then if you just head on over to this music icon up here, This is where you're going to have some options for how loud you want your camera audio to be and how loud you want the song in the background to be if you're using one. So let's say I was sharing some tips, I would want to make sure my camera audio is all the way to the top, and then maybe I want the song to be just really, really subtle in the background. And of course, I can keep playing that to make sure that it's not overpowering. Same thing with voice overs. Let's say I wanted my voice to be in the back, but I haven't actually recorded anything yet. I can utilize the voice over function here and talk over these clips. Again, it's going to allow me to put that at 100% and then put the music just really subtly in the back if I wanted to do that. That's that music icon there. We already know what our effects icon there does in case we wanted to add some effects afterwards, which in this case, we don't. Then we've got our sticker option here and we're going to play around with this a little bit more in later lessons. I'm going to skip that for now, and finally, we've got our text option here. The beauty of the text option is you can add additional dynamic elements to your reels and I'm going to show you how to play around with this. But the first thing I wanted to point out is just like in Instagram stories, you can obviously change your font styles down here. Your colors up here. So you have some limited colors. But if you know, for example, for me, I know my brand color is a blue but not really this kind of blue. So either I could use the color picker and select it from the back there if it was appropriate because it was in the shot, or I can just press and hold on the blue icon and try and find my business color over here, which this is pretty close. But obviously, that's just the actual font. I want the back to be that blue, so I can just hit this one again and it's going to make that background blue. If I was going to hit it again, it's going to remove the background altogether. So This allows me to cycle through a few different options. I could also potentially animate my text, but I find that to be a little bit distracting within reels when you've got so many different moving elements. So I prefer to just keep it as is, and then I've got some different other styling options. But in this case, I'm happy with that. The one thing to note with text is that it's going to apply it to your entire reel, just as a default. More often than not, that's not going to be relevant and you want to shorten it to just a particular section of your reel. I can see that I've written hello. Down here, I can see it says hello. If I had multiple different text boxes, let's say I had one more, it's going to give me all the different options, so I can see hello and hey, and if I was going to just click into hello first, and let's say I only want this to appear on the first frame. I just need to click and drag until that frame disappears. Roughly around there, takes a little bit of finessing. Then let's say, Hey, I only want to appear for my second shot. I need it to go and start right around there and as this last frame appears. Now I can play around with where this appears, effectively, it's going to move from one frame to the next. Hello is only going to appear in the first couple of seconds. And then hay is going to appear on my second frame, and then the last frame is going to have nothing at all. So, this can seem really, really fiddly. But with the types of reels we're creating here, you may not utilize these functions a whole lot. I just wanted you to be familiar with them. So it's not this big, scary world out there, and so that you can confidently go into these reels creation interface and know exactly what everything is. So now if we were going to hit next, These options are something that we're going to talk about a lot more later on. I'm going to skip it for now, but I just wanted you to know that when you click next, it's not going to share it to your feed because I know that can be scary. You are just going to get to this section where you can optimize final few things before hitting share. But in this case, what I'm going to do is just click on Save Draft so that we can head on over to our profile and see that within my reels tab here, it's in my drafts folder. So this allows me to then jump back into it at any time and continue editing. But one thing is that if Instagram ever does glitch, let's say, or there's any issues with you maybe uninstalling the app on your phone or there's any kind of technical issue, your drafts folder may completely get wiped out. So you always want to make sure you are also saving your work, As you go, it will not necessarily save it with the audio in the back, so you need to be aware of which audio track you're using if you're using any, but always make sure you're saving a copy of your work to your phone before you save as a draft. So those are some of the basics, and we are going to continue to talk about all of these different functions and how to use them and how to get the most out of them when it comes to creating your Instagram real throughout these lessons. Hopefully, you're getting a little bit more comfortable with the app itself. Now in the next lesson, we're going to start talking about how to save some precious time, which is your most valuable asset, when it comes to creating rails in bulk. I'll see you there. 5. Time Saving Hacks: One of the biggest tips that I can give you when it comes to successfully creating content for social media, all of social media, not just reals, is to back create. And what I mean by that is that when it comes to creating multiple pieces of content, instead of doing something like, I'm going to create a real on a Monday, and then one on a Wednesday and then maybe one on a Friday. And then maybe write a caption here and research some hash tags there. Instead of that, just set aside some time in your diary to just focus on rails as an activity and break that down even further into really tailored chunks of time. Because Instagram is very good at sucking up all of your time and energy if you're not careful. So having this sort of scattered content approach can take up an enormous amount of time. And if you don't believe me, seriously, set a time or the next time you're doing this, and you'll realize that you've spent 3 hours looking at cat videos when you were sort of planning to do research for reels. So to avoid this, what we're going to talk about is how to batch your activities, not just, you know, saying, I'm just going to do reels and focus only on reels on this particular Monday, but actually break that down into even smaller chunks so that you can get laser focused on only one activity at a time. Let me show you what I mean. Recently, I challenge myself to push 21 reels in one month. Now, this was a lot for me and probably not something that I will do again, but I love a challenge and I did it in preparation for this particular lesson so I could challenge myself to get really hyper organized and pass that wisdom on to all of you. Because I had to not only create 21 reels in one month, but I had to do this on top of, you know, doing my weekly YouTube videos, my newsletters, my bookkeeping, client projects, living a little bit outside of my screen and creating course content and everything else in between that goes into my day. So that is a lot, and you have to get really, really organized in order to pull that off. But the reason I was able to do it is because I broke the process down into the same steps I'm going to be teaching you, which is to plan in one session, create in one session, and edit and optimize in one session. So the planning phase looks a little bit like this. You first spend time gathering ideas for your reels. You then organize your ideas, and I'm going to go into my preferred way of doing this, of course. And then finally, you make a plan for the non video elements of your reel, like your captions, your hash tags, et cetera. Then by this stage, you're so organized that the actual creation stage, which is where a lot of people get stuck, will be an absolute breeze. The next step is to actually create your reel or your reels. This will be relatively seamless for any reels that you're creating in camera or just ones that don't require you to be on camera. But for any of you that might be doing on camera reels in the future, This is your opportunity to change outfits, change location so that you can still batch create all in one day, but it looks like it was done in different days. And then at that stage, you can go on to the next stage, which is to edit your reel. For the kind of reels we'll be creating, this could include things like adding in text to your wheel, adding in music, adding in your captions or tagging relevant accounts. You can then also create a cover for your reel if you need one. Finally, you can ensure accessibility features are taken into consideration before you're ready to publish your beautiful. Some reels will require you to combine the creating an editing stage into one. But as long as you can separate out that planning stage, I promise you'll be so much more efficient. And this is particularly key for those of you working with clients because having a really solid plan in place so that all your client has to do is press record and then hand back over to you for editing is going to be a huge time saver. Now we've touched on how to make your workflow a little bit more efficient, but we are going to go into more depth into each of these areas a little later on. Now the next lesson, let's start gathering some ideas for what we can do with our reels inside of Instagram. So I'll see there. 6. Easy Faceless Reel Ideas: In the next lesson, we're going to take a look at how you can do your own research for Instagram real ideas, which I think is really important because then you can accommodate for your own industry and your own unique circumstances. But in case you do get a little bit stuck or you just want some extra inspiration, I also want to include this particular lesson because it's going to be full of awesome ideas that don't require you to be on camera, but are still really powerful that you can draw inspiration from. So let's start with a few that you can create just using Canva and the Instagram app, which is a really, really good place to start. I'm going to head on over to my saved folders here because I've created a beautiful folder of faceless real ideas that we can take a look at starting with this one, which is just a really, really simple collection of different background shots and different tips that you can share hair with a bit of an audio track there. So this is one that I really, really like, and especially can be really easily utilized from within cama. Then we've got a slightly simpler version of this where you've got a beautiful powerful quote that's animated on top of just a really pretty neutral background. The beauty of these clips is they can be quite short and easily digestible and also really sharable if the quotes are really powerful. Then we've got the tweet reel. This is a really great way to share any tips or advice that you might have for your followers in a way that's a little bit more dynamic because you can add that background video element and then pair that with a trending sound or a music from within Instagram. Now, we've got just a slightly more elevated version of the Tweet reel, where you're also adding in a bit of a meme, like fun element, whether you're using a gift or just a static image there and maybe also a video in the background like I've done here. This can be just again, another really fun one to engage with your followers in a slightly more lighthearted way if that's appropriate for your brand. And then this is a really brilliant one from Ladies Finance Club because it's actually just an image. They've created probably within Canva and used just a couple of animated elements over here, which makes it a real and it makes it nice and dynamic and moving. If I was them, I would have made that fully vertical. They sort of made it into this ten 80 by 13 50 mode, which isn't quite the size of a real, which probably hindered how much visibility it got because it's not quite in the right dimensions. I really, really like this because let's say you already have some graphics. You want to just repurpose into reals. All you have to do is add a couple of moving elements, and all of a sudden, you have a real made from a static graphic that's really informative and engaging. Again, this is just another one of those really, really great ones where all it is is just a really quick video clip in the background that's neutral enough, so it's not too distracting. And then just some text that's been placed on top of it inside of Instagram. You wouldn't even have to use Cvra for this particular one. This is pretty much a similar thing I did where I just put a video in the background and then put a list of tools and their uses on top of that from within Instagram. And the reason I wanted to bring this up because it is quite similar to what we just looked at. But this real, in particular, just had so much great momentum for me in terms of getting 107 saves from my audience, which is quite a lot from my account. So what this tells me because saves are quite an important metric for me to measure is that people were really engaged with this and it gave them a lot of information, that they wanted to save for later, or it gave them a bit of inspiration of what to create next. These kind of reels, while they're really simple to make, can be really powerful. Again, this is something that people would be more likely to share as well. Now let's talk about a couple that you do actually have to film, but you still don't have to show up on camera. Starting with marketing Harry here, who has just held his phone while he's writing something down, which doesn't actually require a whole lot of effort, but it's really dynamic because the camera is moving a little bit and he's used a very slight transition at the end there. But it just keeps you really engaged because his hand is writing it. So this is a really brilliant one, which you could have a voice over on top of or just use a song in the background. Then this one is for me. The reason I'm including this one is because it worked really well for me to get people onto my email list. So it was me demoing something that is new from within Canva and then telling people, Hey, if you want to shortcut to this, I've actually got a way for you to jump onto my email list with the link in my bile. That is a really optimized lead magnet to that particular reel where people can come in here and download free versions of the animations that I'm talking about in this particular reel. If you're looking for ideas of how to use faceless reels that can still give you that way to get people onto your e mail list or to achieve other business goals, then doing something like this where you're showcasing something, but then you're also saying, Hey, I can help you actually shortcut your way to success here, and then using that as a lead magnet, that's worked really well for me. Definitely make sure to check out this particular reel in your resource guide. And then finally, for anyone who's got a product based business, I really liked these sort of quick stop motiony ones that I did with my friend Kit for her business where she's selling pins because it's actually just a couple of photos. This was probably ten or 12 photos that we've put together where it looks like it has a bit of motion. Yes, you technically do have to get your camera out for this one, but there's a really handy stop motion app that's free for you to use that makes this really, really easy where you just sort of make one slide movement, take a photo, another movement, take a photo, and it makes this beautiful video for you. So I've linked that within your resource guide, and definitely definitely want to encourage you to try it out for any of you, that are looking for a really cool and easy way to showcase your products. So hopefully, now you're feeling a little bit more inspired. And now the next lesson, we're going to jump into the Instagram app and take a look at how you can do this on a more regular basis for your own particular industry. So I'll see there. 7. Gather Ideas For Your Reels: In this lesson, we're going to get into how to find inspiration for your reels. And I'd like you to begin by setting a dedicated idea gathering time slot in your diary, maybe an hour at the end of each day or a couple hours each week and putting that in your diary as dedicated scrolling time. Because otherwise, like we've already talked about, you can spend hours and hours looking at funny dogs, and planning at your dream house on Instagram and all in the name of research, but you actually sort of forget to do the thing that you came there to do. So definitely block out a little bit of time in your diary for this. And then you have some options. The first option is to look at accounts in your industry for inspiration. This can be a really great option if you're in the right head space and maybe you're not so prone to feeling impostor syndrome and comparing yourself to other people in your industry. And also, if you're feeling really confident that you can draw inspiration from these accounts without directly copying their ideas. The second option is just to head to the reals feed and let Instagram do its thing and gather inspiration from accounts you don't know yet and gather inspiration from all different types of creators and industries. So, for our purposes here, we're going to be going with the second option, and there are four different categories that I want you to keep in mind as we're going through this. The first category is ideas for your existing followers. So for me in particular, I might be on the lookout for people sharing reals about how they started as a business owner. Or a typical day in the life of their business or showing people behind the scenes. Things that are sort of funny and relatable, that would be really, really good for my existing followers. The next category is what a non follower would want to see from you. So I would look at people who are doing educational videos really well because likely non followers who I would want to follow me would want to see these types of tutorials about marketing tips, tricks, and tools. Our third category is ideas for promotional content to sell your product or service. So I would look at people launching new courses into the world or promoting their existing courses or maybe featuring customer testimonials. But if I was, let's say, a physical product business, then for this type of content, I might be on the lookout for, you know, how to style an outfit with my jewelry brand, in which case, that's sort of showcasing the product, but it's also promotional at the same time. And finally, you may also want to look for trends and trending music. This last category is entirely optional. I just don't want you to completely rule it out just because you may not be comfortable jumping on camera or doing any dancing or lip syncing or pointing or any of the things that people maybe associate trends with a little bit more. But there are still so many clever ways in which you can leverage trends and trending sounds without having to do all of that. And we're going to talk more about that, but I just don't want you to rule it out. Because this kind of content can still be really valuable to your audience and help you get more exposure on your reels as a result of using trending sounds on Instagram, which will help Instagram possibly push that reel out to more people on the platform. But as with anything, always think about your audience and your own unique circumstances with everything that we do, and that is especially true when it comes to gathering ideas and making sure they're applicable for what you're hoping to achieve on Instagram. Now, let's go ahead and start looking at some ideas. If you're ever on your actual feed and you find a real that you lack the look of or post that you like to look of, you can really easily save it and organize it at the same time from your feed. If you were to just click this, it's going to just save that to your just general collection. But if you click and hold, it's going to ask you where you want to save it to. If I already had a collection, I want to save it to, I could easily do that, or I can just create one. I'm just going to say collection one, and save that. This makes it really easy to organize as well. If you're doing it for different accounts or different clients, you can organize that by clients. If you're in the reals feed, this is a little bit harder because it doesn't quite have that option. So you would just click the three dots here and then save that and it's going to save that to your general collection, and then we have to go through and actually organize that. So I'm going to go and head on over to my saved folder and see all posts. And now I can click into it and I can organize it a little bit more. So this one, I can just click and hold and say, I want to save that to collection one. If I was going to click and hold and select this one, I can save it to a different collection, and I can sort of keep going that way. So that makes it really nice and easy for you to organize your ideas. So even if you're just sort of collecting things from throughout the month, it means that you don't get to the end of the month and try and figure out What all these safe posts actually mean. It's nice to organize your ideas in the moment so that when the time comes for you to actually create, based on the ideas you've gathered, you know exactly what you are intending to do with that particular real. That's really handy if you're within the actual reals tab and let's say you have a pretty active account and you're following accounts that are similar to your industry or similar to the type of reels that you want to create, then chances are your feeds going to give you some good suggestions. But what if you don't fully have that and you don't really know where to start? You can just head on over to the search icon, and let's say I want to be looking at there's been real estate. Because I am looking for inspiration for my real estate client. I can now search for this and either go by accounts, which can be quite handy or just look at the top recommended reels here, or I can go by hashtags. So if I was going to go by the Brisbane real estate hashtag, it's going to pop up with both reels and posts here or just reels within this section. So this will give me a lot of ideas about which accounts to follow for inspiration or just reels to create based on view accounts or based on the metrics that matter most to me. So I could look at these reels and go, Okay, that's pretty cool. I really like the look of that, and then I could start saving a few things here, or I can just look at the accounts themselves. So in this case, let's say I really like the look of that reel. I would then go follow this account, which would allow me to get a more tailored Instagram algorithm. So the more accounts that I follow that are similar to the type of content that I want to be seeing, the more Instagram is going to start recommending me this type of content. And then you can kind of go down the rabbit hole as well by clicking this icon over here, which is going to tell me what are accounts that are similar to this account? The reason that's handy is because you don't have to go from scratch again and again with hash tags, you can just go, Okay, this account is perfect. This is exactly the kind of account I want to be following to draw inspiration from. Show me more accounts that are similar to this. Then I can keep going down that rapid hole and keep looking at accounts that are similar to this one. Similar to that one. And slowly, you start developing a really good base of the types of accounts that you're following that will allow you to get a lot of inspiration from within your industry. Keep in mind that some of your greatest ideas might come from completely unrelated industries that you would have never thought to look for. So just keep an open mind when it comes to gathering ideas from other creators. And if you do get stuck for gathering ideas directly through Instagram, there are some other websites that can really help kind of spark that creativity even further. For example, answer the public is a really good one where you can put in your keyword to get ideas about what questions people are asking about your service or industry. You can then explore all these ideas into a spreadsheet and just pick a question and answer it in a real. Using one of the off camera techniques we're going to talk about a little later on or on camera, if you're comfortable with that as well, of course. And so now that we've gathered some ideas and gotten a little bit of inspiration, in the next lesson, we're going to talk about how to actually organize your ideas into a logical plan for execution. So I'll see there. 8. Organise Your Worfkflow: So at this point, we have some ideas flowing, and now it's time to put a plan into place. So I'm going to be showing you two different ways you can do this, and of course, there will be many more out there. So just do whatever feels right for you, but hopefully one of these two will resonate with you. The first way of organizing your ideas is to do it with a free project management tool like a sauna. With a signer, you can take your ideas from your head or from within Instagram and organize them into neat little columns, which allow you to take just general ideas, move them into the creation stage, and then into the edit and post stage. So the way that I normally do this is I always have one task that remains completely unchanged, and I always just sort of duplicate that for every new real idea. I would create that task. Moving into the video idea stage, putting my ideas, and then potentially this can be quite handy for any of you who might be working with several team members on your reels because you can then assign individual sub tasks to different team members to execute. So what I mean by that is, you know, let's say I had a real idea based on a particular Instagram reel. I would put the link there. If I had any audio from Instagram that I wanted to use for my particular reel, I could put that there. I could sort of elaborate a little bit about what it is that I am trying to do here. Potentially drop any images as well. So if I have screenshots or anything like that, that I'm going to remind myself of, I can put that in here. Any call to action. So let's say this was just a real for fun, then there wouldn't probably be a call to action. It might be to comment or to like or share. But it could also be to actually buy my product, buy my course or sign up to my e mails. And then I would put in my caption and my hash tags. And then let's say I did want to assign things to particular team members. Then let's say the call to action was to sign up to my newsletter. I would just put in that I need a new lining page for newsletter, designed, and then I would assign it to a particular team member and put a due date attached to that, as well. So that's just sort of a crash course through Asana. I have included lots of helpful links within your resource guide if you're not already familiar with the tool, and if this might be your preferred way of doing this. But for those of us working on this alone, My preference is actually just to go a little bit old school with a spreadsheet. And that works really well for my brain because I'm sort of a big picture of gal, and I just like to see everything that I'm going to create for the next month or the next quarter, all in one place. But if maybe for you, you prefer to sort of laser focus in on every single real in isolation, then maybe the project management system is a little bit better for you. But for those of you who might want to try out the spreadsheet technique or you're at least a little bit curious, I'm going to jump in and show you how I would go about this and make sure to also check your resource guide because that's where I've provided you with a link to your very own template for your planning spreadsheet. For all of you, what I've created is this spreadsheet that has two tabs, one for your ideas, and one that's pretty much identical, the colors are different for reels that you've already posted just so you can keep this tab clear of any reels that have already gone live. So it's pretty self explanatory. We are going to go through it one by one because this is my preferred way of doing this. So if it's not all making sense, write the second, I promise it will in a couple of lessons. But just in case you ever get stuck, I have also included some descriptions of what each column should entail, in case you can't quite remember. And in addition to this, you'll also find an example of an existing reel that I've posted and how I've sort of planned this out so that if you're ever stuck for inspiration or you can't quite remember what I was talking about, you've got that there as an example, as well, but, of course, feel free to delete that if you find it distracting. So when I did my month of reels, these are the exact same steps that I followed for posting all of my 21 reels in one month. So I'm essentially going to be taking you through my exact process with your own custom template, but, of course, feel free to customize things to the way that they make the most sense to you. So, for me, I'm going to be using this particular video as my inspiration video because I want to be planning a quote reel that's going to be a little bit similar to this. So I would jump into my planning guide and put that into the inspiration video. Column so that I can reference it later on. Then if I also had music or audio that I wanted to use from within my saved folders on Instagram, I could also link that within my planning guide. But for this one in particular, I'm going to be using my own track, so I'm not going to be using anything from within Instagram. I'm going to leave that blank, and I could put in A or using on track. The call to action, the hash tags, the caption, all of that, I'm going to leave for now. But what I'm going to fill out is my body text, which is what's going to appear on my screen. And the quote I want to be using is this one here from Zi zigler, which is you can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want. And if you do want to create a similar reel and you're ever struggling for good inspirational quotes to use, I can really recommend momentum, which is a free Google Chrome extension that essentially gives you the time, a beautiful photo, the weather of the day, and also an inspirational quote in a new tab on your Google Chrome browser, every time you open a new tab, And it also has a backlog of any quote that it's shown you in the past. So this makes it really, really easy for you to gather inspiration. And if you ever have any favorites, you can also heart them and have them in your favorites folder for inspiration for later on. So I've linked that within your resource guide. And now the last thing I'm going to add in is my theme, which is going to be inspirational and business. The reason I like the themes column, even though it might seem like an extra step is just because it then allows me to make sure that I'm hitting all the different themes that make up my business, and I'm not just focusing on one solely with every single reel. I'm going to leave it there for now, but as we go through the following few lessons, we are going to go through each of these different columns and how to fill them out to make sure that your plan is solidly in place before you go through to creating and posting your reel. Now, I know at this stage, you might be thinking it's a lot of work for one reel. And you're probably right. But if you're planning even five or ten reals at a time, I promise you that it can be a lot of work if you're doing things ad hoc and don't have a system in place, and doing it this way is going to give you a really good overall picture. But it's also going to give you a bit of a sense check to make sure that A, the reels you're creating are definitely relevant to your business, and you're not just getting swept up in trends. And be that you're actually actively promoting your offer. Because people have a tendency to go one of two ways. They either just go way too hard on the sales stuff and forget to actually create valuable free educational content, or they go way too hard on the value side and forget to actually sell the thing that they're to sell and the thing that actually makes the money in their business. Neither is really all that good. When you're doing your planning, try to aim for one out of every five content pieces that you post on Instagram to be promotional. Otherwise, we're just creating content for the sake of creating without seeing any real revenue impact. Now we've thought a little bit more about how to organize our workflow if we're planning to create multiple reals at any one time. And that is going to be so handy for you if you're maybe doing this for our client, where you need to get approvals for each individual thing that you post and create so you can send them to one place. They know exactly what they're looking for. They're going to approve everything or make suggestions to everything all at the same time. And that is going to save you so much time and hassle going back and forth with your clients. And now over the next few lessons, we're actually going to start filling this out and piecing together our real starting with captions and hashtags in the next lesson, so I'll see there. 9. Add Captions & Hashtags: So let's now talk about captions and hashtags. First of all, what I do want to say is that hashtags are not nearly as important or powerful as they once were. Instagram has gotten really good with its other SEO features at determining what your content is about without you having to sort of tell it exactly what it's about. And there's a really good chance that someday in the future, hashtags may be non existent because Instagram's going to get so good at this that we will no longer need them. But for the time being, they are still relevant, and they can still be quite useful, so we are going to go over what hashtags are all about and how to use them. But I just don't want you to stress about them too much because there are plenty of Instagram accounts that don't use hashtags at all and especially not for reals, and they still see great success. What hashtags might do for you is to give you a little bit of extra exposure because it gives you the chance to appear on these types of search pages for that particular hashtag, which can especially be powerful for localized hashtags where people might be looking for local recommendations for cafes or restaurants, and there might also be people who are following that particular hashtag, which is especially true for industry professionals who might be following hashtags like finance or stocks, for example. Now, personally, I use a tool called flick because it allows me to organize my hashtags in different interest based categories, so I can really quickly jump into them, copy that entire collection and use them in a particular post. These categories are really easy for me to make. I can jump into the search option, and let's say I'm looking for inspirational quote ideas. It will give me related hashtags to the one that I've just typed in that have low, medium, and high competition. I could select a couple from each of these different categories, which gives me a much better chance of actually ranking for the low to medium competition ones because what this means is that there are fewer people using these as opposed to the high competition ones. And Flick will also then analyze my performance of my content and let me know which hashtags I'm ranking for and which ones are working the best for my content and for my audience. And they also have a scheduling option, which allows me to schedule content including reels as long as the reels only include my own original audio or songs that I've added in outside of the Instagram app. So I could just jump in here and either save this to a new collection or copy my selected hashtags to a clipboard and bring them into my spreadsheet. So basically, it does do quite a lot. And if you are working as a social media manager, it might be a worthwhile investment because it will help to save a lot of time working between different client accounts. But otherwise, I would honestly just use the free trial of Flick and then make categories of hashtags for your business and put these into a Google Doc instead. And you can also keep an eye out for what your competitors are doing and copy those hashtags directly from within the Instagram app and add those to your Google Doc, as well. So, for my quote reel, I've just selected my initial inspiration quotes and a couple more over here. And 19 is pretty good. I could actually save this to a new collection. I'm just going to go ahead and create a new one, that's all about inspirational quotes. In case I want to use some of these in the future. And I'm also just going to go ahead and copy these to my clipboard and bring these into my spreadsheet. Just over here in the hashtag section, I can now paste these in. Just try not to use the same set of 30 hashtags over and over, because generally speaking, people who are doing this are doing this because it's a set of 30 that's relevant to their account, not to the real itself because your hashtags should be relevant to the piece of content, not to your profile. So try to switch things up and only use as many hashtags as you need. So if you only need ten hashtags, then use ten. Do not use all 30 just because you think you have to. And there is a bit of a great debate as to whether you should put hash tags in your caption or in the first comment of your post. There is some research to suggest that putting it in the caption can give you a slight advantage. But if you are using 30, which I'm not saying don't do it as long as they're irrelevant. If you're using 30 hashtags, it can look a little bit messy in the caption in my opinion, my preference is to put them in the comment whenever possible, just because it makes the caption look a little bit cleaner. But you just have to test it out for yourself and work out what actually works best for your account. This then brings me to our captions. You have up to 2,200 characters to use for your Instagram captions. But that does not mean that you have to use all 2,200 characters just like with hash tags. Just use as much or as little texts as you need in your caption and also test out a few different lengths with different pulps and different reels to see what resonates best with your audience. For example, you'll have reels like this one that will show you a little clip, but then tell you to read the caption to get the full story. In this case, of course, you'd want to make sure you have this nice big long caption that tell people everything you need them to know that's not included in the reel. But then you'll also have reels like this one over here that pretty much speak for themselves, so they don't necessarily need a long caption to complement it because you've included all of the different information bits within the reel itself, and then your actual caption is really, really short. No need to scroll because it's just a couple of lines, and that's perfectly fine. But there are a few things I really want you to remember when it comes to captions. The first of these is that links and captions are not clickable. Often people forget this, especially if you're scheduling content for the likes of Facebook Linked in and Instagram all in one go inside of a scheduling tool. It's easy to forget that while other platforms allow for clickable links, Instagram does not. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't ever put a link in your caption. Just be aware of the fact that it's not clickable. So if there is a link in there, make sure it's really easy for people to remember or type straight into their browser, or better yet, just point them to the link in your bio. I also want you to remember that the first line of your caption is super important. Mine here says, This is a game changer for your brand, which is a good hook that will get people to want to read the rest of the caption. Then while they're reading that caption, the reel will still autoplay in the background, which gives you even more views. You also want to give people a call to action. Rock Johnson here is the king of this. You'll often see him use a call to action like, write the word cool in the comments, and I'll DMU with more details like with this reel. Now this can be a little bit of admin. Don't get me wrong, but it can give you incredible results. But you can do this a little bit more subtly by just saying something like, Do you agree with X Y edge? Let me know in the comments or out of the tips that I've mentioned, which is your favorite, or do you have a question about this topic, DMM. And I've included these in some additional call to action prompts in your resource guide, so make sure to refer to them there whenever you're feeling a little bit stuck. And finally, if it's appropriate for your brand, try to break up your texts with some symbols and moges It's not right for every brand, but it definitely helps readers engage better with longer captions if they're broken up into more digestible chunks. Following these tips, I have filled in a sample caption, and I'm going to add it to my spreadsheet and it's time for you to do the same. For our purposes here, I'm actually just going to copy and paste my caption in here because I've already written it. But I did want to say that I know writing inside of Google sheets can get tricky if you're ever writing a caption, if you just hit return on a Mac or enter on a PC, it's actually going to just shift you down to the cell and that can get annoying. Instead, you can hold down the option key and then hit return if you're on a Mac. Or if you're on a PC, you hold down the Alt key and hit Enter, and that's going to give you a new line and you can do that again to get another new line. The other cool thing is that if you hit control command and then your space bar, if you're on a Mac, it's going to bring out your Emoji keyboard. If you do want to add some emojis inside of your captions, inside of your spreadsheet here, you can do that really easily. But for now, I'm just going to go ahead and delete this and paste my caption in here. So I could then make this row a little bit taller so that I can see everything, or if I just double click into the cell, I can see everything there. Alternatively, I can also make some changes up here. So whatever you prefer. But effectively, I'm just following the exact same rules that we just talked about where my first line is quite captivating because that's something that people are going to see when they are scrolling through my reels. And then I've added in some kind of nuggets of wisdom throughout my caption, including some emojis, because that's the right thing for me in my business and making sure I'm making enough line breaks that it's really easy for somebody to read on a mobile app. So my caption basically goes through and says, you know, this could change your business forever, and it's been the case for me. Soon as I switch my mindset from what do I want or need to what does my audience want or need everything change. And then I go through how this has changed by me charging less for my courses, which is something my audience needs, actually brings more money into my business, which fulfills my needs. Because my content is then more accessible to more people, and then also providing more practice activities and engaging with my student needs, which is something that fulfills their needs, has taken up a bit more of my time. But as a result, I've gotten better reviews and more students taking my courses, which has allowed me to take on less client work and have more free time role, which fulfills my needs. So then I sort of give them a call to action to say, if you're interested in learning how to make this shift in your own business, comment the word mindset below, and I'll send you one of my favorite videos on this topic. And then I would DM anyone who commented with that word. Now, the reason I'm using this as a particular example is because I don't actually have a video that would suit this particular prompt. But what I could do is send them to a YouTube video of my favorite Ted Talk on this topic. So a lot of the time, people get stuck in thinking that they can't leverage these strategies because they don't have a backlog of their own content to use for this. And yes, that can be hinderance. But really, you can sort of make up your own rules as you go. Don't let it stop you from doing these kinds of strategies because what it does and the purpose of doing this is really just to start the conversation with these people and strengthen the connection that you have between these accounts. As soon as somebody comments on your content and then engages with you in your DMs, Instagram now sees that as, okay, this account is engaged with your account. So the next time you post a real, I'm going to show them that content because they've expressed an interest in communicating with you in the past. So hopefully, you're starting to get some cool ideas about how you can leverage these types of strategies. And of course, I have included some extra links in your resource guide as well for tips on captions and hash tags. So make sure to check that out. And now in the next lesson, we're going to jump into actually creating your real. So I'll see there. 10. Quote Reels in Canva: So because of all the work we've done up until this point in our planning phase, by the time I'm actually sitting down to create my real, I already know everything I need to know in order to do that really quickly. I know which audio I'm using, music, if I'm using music from within the Instagram map. I know my captions, my hash tags, and all of that that makes up my real is already prepared and planned. So now it's time for me to just create. And in this lesson, I'm going to show you how I would go about creating my chosen real style within Canva. And I'm also going to show you a few others that I think are really, really fun and easy to create within Canva. And then later on, we'll also talk about a few additional real styles that you can leverage that are still really easy for beginners to make. And if you're brand new to using Camva, I would encourage you to check out my social media content creation in cava class as that will give you a really solid foundation for using CamaF social media. But even if you've never used the program, you can absolutely still follow along, so let's jump in. I'm going to be demonstrating this on my Camva P account. But if you are a CmvaFree user instead, we are going to talk about a few ways to get around some difficulties of not having the pro account. So not to worry, The first thing you want to do is you want to search for Instagram reels and just select the Instagram reel option to have a look at what templates can I can come up with that might suit our simple real style, which is what we're going to be creating first here. So, of course, I could start from scratch. But in this case, I actually quite like these kind of really simple reels that just have a nice, you know, simple background video and a little bit of text on top. The one challenge is, of course, this is a pro template, which means that the video in the background is probably a pro feature. So we're going to have a look at how to work around that. But I'm going to select this one and go through to customize this template. Now I'm going to just double click into my text box and bring in my beautiful quote that I want to use. I can see that it's a little bit clunky, so now I can use all these adjustments on the sides of my text box to make it a little bit easier to read. Now, I can also play around with some font options. So over here, I can select a few different fonts. I do already have my brand kit pre loaded in here. So if you're not seeing anything there, you can head on over to your brand kit within your actual ama dashboard and set some fonts and colors over here. If you're on a free account, you will be limited to just a couple of fonts and colors. If you're on a prior account, of course, you'll have more options. But not to worry if you just need to manually look for some fonts that you like. I quite like this one, but again, keep in mind that not every font will be available to you if you're a free user. So that's just something to think about when you're selecting your fonts. I'm just going to pick this nice, big bold font for my quote, and I'm going to use my more cursive font for the author's name. So one thing you will notice straightaway is this is all in caps, and that is a canva option, which is over here, which allows you to uppercase or lowercase with just one click, which can be quite handy if you've got big quotes like this one, so you don't have to hold down caps lock the whole time. But in this case, for the name of our author, I want to make sure that that function is turned off. The second thing I've noticed is that the letters are really far apart. So that is probably just a spacing option, which I can edit over here. For my author's name, I would bring this down to zero because it's hard to read cursive fonts if they're spread far apart. For my quote, I actually don't mind this too much, so I think I'm going to leave it for now, and I'm just going to leave that design for now because we're going to be swapping out our background video. So I will adjust the text box if I need to. And I will also adjust the colors if I need to based on the background video we choose. So if I wanted to swap out this video, I would just head on over to elements and look for a particular video of a particular style, something like nature. Maybe I'd just head on over to videos, and then I would try and find a video that doesn't have that little crown in the bottom right hand corner, which means it's completely free for me to use even if I'm on a free plan, and I could just drag it over and snap it into place, and then I would just bring my quote down a little bit. So that's the first option. The second option is to head on over to a free video website like Pexels. Now, the reason I like this is because it gives you a lot more options. It has 47,000 videos on the topic of nature, and I find it a lot easier to search as well. I can look at videos that are only vertical, and I can browse through particular creators and collections. And then anytime I find a video that I like, I can like it or save it to a particular collection for later, which then allows me to sort of organize myself a little bit. So if I head on over to my profile here, I just have everything in the one big likes folder at this point. But I can head on over to my likes. And now that I've collected all my videos, I can look at them and have a look at one that might suit for this particular kind of quote. And I really like to look of this one. So I would click into it and make sure I'm downloading this at the correct size. So, in this case, that would be full HD, which is ten 80 by 1920, which is the dimensions of our Instagram reels, so that's perfect. And then I can just bring this into my uploads folder within cava just by dragging it onto my screen, and it's automatically going to add it to my uploads folder. If you do want to take an extra step and you are on a pro account, I would recommend organizing a few things because it can get really messy. If you just keep everything in your uploads folder, if you're on a free account, you won't have the option to add endless folders, and that's totally fine. This is very, very optional. But if you are in a pro account, you can add new folders in here, like I have over here, and then you can drop all of your different videos and assets into these folders, and you can also easily then access these within your actual Canva design by heading on over to projects. And folders, and then any background video folders that you've created within Canva will be here and easy enough for you to drag straight into your design. That's a really, really cool option. But in this case, I'm happy to just use the video that we've just selected. Of course, now I have to adjust my quote. I probably would actually have to play around with the letter spacing because this may not fit quite as nicely as I wanted to, and I would also just adjust the color of my text here. And making sure that it fits into this kind of fake frame, and I can also use the arrow keys on my keyboard to just really slightly move things around. And now, my author's name, I would just make a little bit larger, so it's easy to read. And the last thing I want to bring to your attention is this animation. So if I was to play this video, you can see that it's got this sort of typewriter effect, which is quite cool. If I pause this and I click into my text box, you can see it says typewriter up top. If you're starting from scratch or you're choosing a template without a text animation, it will just say animate. So you'll just click into it, and then you can choose from various different animations like typewriter or block, burst, et cetera. So I like the typewriter one for this particular type of reel, and then I can choose to animate on just on it or both. And then if I'm on a prac coount I can also adjust the speed of the typewriter, and then also whether I want it to show one word at a time or one character at a time. I'm quite happy with what it's sort of pre selected there for me, so I'm actually going to leave that for now. So I will be using a track that I have from pb.com, which is the site I pay about $7 a month for to use for my YouTube videos primarily. But you can also use their music on other social platforms as long as you're producing content for yourself or for a company with less than ten employees. So that might change in the future and always check terms of service. But as of right now, these guys are awesome in terms of searchability. It's super, super easy to find exactly what you're looking for. So I really I think it's a worthwhile investment. But I have also included some great free resources in your resource guide, so make sure to check those out. And of course, you can also use audio tracks from within Canva itself, but I find it quite hard to find what you're looking for within Canva. So I would recommend either looking to a paid service or some of the other free services that I have mentioned in your resource. Or, of course, use audio from within Instagram itself, which is something I do really, really often. It's just for the purpose of this lesson. I wanted to show you what it's like if you want to use your own music. But if you've got an audio track like this one from within Instagram, you can easily use that for your real. Just make sure you're noting how long it is. So if it's let's say 30 seconds, that doesn't mean you want to use all 30 seconds. So just note the actual sound and figure out how much of the sound that you want to use so that you can make your real, the appropriate length. So that when you export it and import it into Instagram, it'll nicely match up with the audio sound. So I've already exported my soundtrack from within upbeat. But just so you know you can organize things within particular folders. You can look by artists. You can look by similar music, and you can like tracks and add them to your favorites and organize them into your playlist later. And then, of course, you can go ahead and download and then drag into Cva it'll automatically go into your uploads folder into the audio section here. So once that's uploaded into canva, you can basically just drag it onto your timeline, and it's going to add it to your design. And then you can move around to which part of the song you want to use for your reel. Generally speaking, the beginning is more than adequate for what you need, and then you can adjust the actual sound if you want it to fade in or fade out. Again, for reels, you kind of want them to have that looping effect, especially if they're short. This one's only 7.8 seconds. If I wanted it to be even shorter, I could just jump into the video and trim that down. So let's say I only want to use 7 seconds of it. I can go ahead and trim that down. So now I can just go ahead and check that with the music. That's quite nice. And then it would just lop again on itself within Instagram. The last last thing I want you to check is to bring in the template that I've provided you within this course, which allows you to just see where the extra elements will be within your reel. So in the real screen, you will not be able to see these edges of the video. Up here down here is where you'll have your actual user name and the beginning of the caption. And here's where you'll have old interaction buttons for people to like, comment, share, et cetera. So you just want to make sure that any text that you are creating is within the transparent boundary, which it is, and then I can go ahead and delete that. And now I can just jump into Share download, and I want to make sure I'm downloading this as an MP four video, and I'm good to go. 11. Tweet & Meme Reels in Canva: Let's talk about a few more creative ways in which you can use Canva to create beautiful reels. Starting with a tweet style reel that looks a little bit like this. Within Canva, you would just search for the word tweets. You can look for tweet reels only, or you can just look for tweet designs in any dimensions and just select the ones that are in vertical format that would best suit the style of reels. Once again, you can look for free designs only and just put a video in the back there, or you can look for ones with a pro marking if you're a pro user. I'm just going to go ahead and select this free beautiful real style over here and start customizing it. It's always a good idea to make sure that it is in the right dimensions, which is ten 80 by 1920 pixels, which is exactly what we want. So this is designed to be an Instagram story, not a real, so it has a static background, but that's all right. We'll fix that. I'm just going to go ahead and delete a couple of the elements that I don't want here. If you ever want to bulk delete, you just need to make sure that any elements that you don't want to delete are locked in place, and then you can sort of click and drag and just delete anything that you don't want there. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. And same with this blue tick, I don't have a verified account, so I don't need that. And now I can unlock it in case I do want to continue editing it. So it looks good. I'm going to bring in some texts that I've already pre written. And now I can probably just adjust the height of this so that it looks a little bit neater. Now, I'll bring in my own handle. And I will just make sure that that is black and put in my name. Now I can also change my fonts if I want to do that. But in this case, I actually think this works pretty well. And the last thing I want to change is this profile image. So we can't see it very well. I'm just going to go ahead and zoom in. I don't know what this blue circle is about around my image here. So I'm just going to go ahead and stretch that to the edges. I'm going to right click on this photo and say, Send backward, so I can bring this blue circle up front and delete it. And now I just want to replace this with my original profile photo from my Instagram account. But of course, you can just check it into your uploads folder. I've just got it a bit organized within my Canva folders over here. If you don't have that option because you're on the free version, just check an image of yourself in the uploads folder, and then you can drag it in that way. All right, so that's looking pretty good. And now I just need to put a video in the back there. So much like I have before, if I have a folder organized with my own beautiful videos from pixels or just ones that I've sort of added into my collection here, I can just go ahead and use that. Alternatively, I can just head on over to the videos tab or within elements, I can just search for anything like nature. And head on over to the videos tab this way and try and find something that might suit the style of this type of real. So for me, I'm just going to go ahead and select a video that I've pre selected here because it's a little bit more sort of on brand for me in terms of it being freelance related. And now I can just play that to see how this might look. That looks great. So I could just go ahead and download that as an MP four. But in this case, I'm just going to go ahead and add a new page, and we're going to keep creating some other designs. So the next design I want to show you is this sort of Mam style reel. So I'm just going to head on over to design. This way, we don't have to start from scratch every time. We can just keep bringing it all into the one design document, and that makes it a little bit neater. So I'm just going to look for mean templates. Now, again, some of these might be for Instagram stories, not exactly real, so they may not have moving video elements in them, but that's totally fine. And we can just select one that suits here. Okay. I think that's pretty cute. You can, of course, go through and find one that suits. This is obviously not moving at this stage, so we're going to fix that, but it suits our purposes pretty well. So once again, I'm just going to go ahead and update these details with my own details. I'm just going to bring this down and bring in a little bit of text. So my text here is going to say my face when I receive a friend request from my client on Facebook. We've all been there, and it's tough times, and this is why memes like this exist. So I'm going to try to align this text with this meme at the bottom here. I also think that this is a little bit too stretched out. I would maybe play with the design a little bit just so that I can stretch it out a little bit more and give it a little bit more real estate. So now I can just make it a little bit bigger. That looks pretty good. And Now, I could choose a static image for the actual mean part, or alternatively, I can use a gift. So if you're not seeing your giffe integration here, just head on over to apps, and you will see Giffe down here. As soon as you start using it, it's going to add it to your left hand side bar. So it'll be easy for you to access every time. So I'm just going to search for something like Yikes. Okay, I like a load of these. Some of these may not actually work for this sort of more horizontal format. So we're going to see if this one of OPR fits, and if I just double click into it, I can slide it down so that it's only showing the part of the gift that I want. That looks really cool. I really like that. So I'm going to go ahead and keep that, and now I just need to add a moving element to my background. That's an optional choice. You don't necessarily need to have a moving gift and a moving background, one or the other will do, it'll still export as an MP four. If you're not adding a video to the back, if you just want to be able to control how long your video is because a gift is quite short. You just need to make sure you're clicking on the page and then heading on over to edit timing. Let's say you want your real to be 10 seconds. I'm just going to go ahead and select that. Now if I was going to download this as an MP four, making sure that it's just the second page that I'm downloading, it will now be a ten second reel, or you can adjust that to be longer if you need it to be. Otherwise, if you then add a video to the back of this, it's probably just going to take the timing of that video. So let's go ahead and do that. These types of reels are designed to be a little bit more fun than a lot of the other types of reels. So first of all, we'll definitely make sure that they're right for your particular industry. They're definitely not right for every kind of industry and make sure that whatever you're putting in here is still relevant. So, you know, this is quite funny, but it's very relevant to what I would teach on Instagram because I teach people how to freelance, and this is quite a common fear that a lot of freelancers have. So it's really relevant. And if a real like this was to ever go viral, it would still make sense for people who are not followers of my account to see this and get a good sense of who I am as an account. And now let's have a look at how that's going to play. So that's quite a subtle movement in the back there. I could go ahead and just keep on playing around with all the different gradients or different background videos, even if you just put in the word background, whether it's within Camva or within pixels. Again, just looking out for that pro icon, if that's not quite right for your particular business. But just making sure that whatever background video you choose, it makes sense with your brand. If you want to make it a little bit more branded, you can adjust the transparency of the background video and then adjust the color to your brand colors. So that makes it a little bit more branded even if it wasn't to begin with. So, for example, for me, I have now just made that my brand color, which is quite a cool little workaround, if you find a video you like, but it's not quite the right colors that you want. Now, this is just for one easy bonus reel, which is to head on over to pixels or you can do this from within Canva. I'm just going to be doing this for demo purposes, I'm just looking at ocean videos here that are vertical format and trying to find something that would work for a really nice soothing post, and I'm going to download that in full HD. And as it downloads, I also want to make sure it's saving to my photos folder. So I'm going to go ahead and click on this arrow and click on downloads. Click on this one. Share and make sure it's saving as video because sometimes it doesn't actually save to your photo library, and that can make it hard to access from within Instagram. So now with an Instagram, I can go ahead and create a real. I want to bring in my video clip here. It can be it would probably be shorter than that, so I could shorten that. But really at this stage, all I want to do is add some texts to it. But let's say I also want to add some audio. I could do that here. If I had some really nice saved music that I could add to this, but in this case, I'm happy to just select any kind of music so that there's something in the background. And I've got my video clip here, some music in the background, which we can't hear at this stage. And now, I just want to add a little bit of text. So I could just paste in my predetermined text that I was going to add into here. I probably wouldn't want it to have that background color. So I just wanted to be the text only, so I'd remove that, and the color of the text would probably be a little bit darker so that it stands out. So this is a super simple type of real you can create within 3 minutes that actually has quite a lot of potential to resonate with your audience, get them to share it, get them to engage with it. If you do want to add an extra animated element to it, you could grab the text box again. I'm going to paste this. And let's say I want the second line of this quote to be animated, to give it a little bit more of that extra dynamic edge. I can make that happen. I'm going to go ahead and animate that and I'm just going to go ahead and delete it from my first quote here. My first line. There we go. Now the first line will not be animated and the second one will be, and this is what it's going to look like. Paired with a nice bit of background music in there. Honestly, it's not super complicated, but it's just another really great way for you to create a very easy faceless. 12. Multi-Clip Reels in Canva: Okay. Okay. And now, finally, let's take a look at how you can create reels that feature multiple clips like this over here. So there are two different ways to do this. We're just going to go ahead and first of all, duplicate our existing quote reel so that we can have a look at how we can leverage the first way of doing this. So we're going to make a copy and jump into that. So the first way of doing this is to essentially just have the text appearing and disappearing, but keeping the background video the same. So in this case, I would remove this animation and now I can duplicate this so I can just hit Command D or duplicate page here. I'm just going to duplicate it one more time. Now what I want to do is in the last frame here. I'm just going to hit Command C to copy, of course, you can right click and copy and paste over here at any time, but I'm just going to be using my keyboard shortcuts to make this a little bit quicker. I've just copied over my text box, and the reason for that is because I want to delete everything except the author's name. But I still want to line it up with the original quote here, and now I can remove the rest of this. And then over here, once again, I'm just going to paste this text box. And this time, I want to remove the author's name. And I also want to remove this section over here. Now, this does make it a little bit trickier because it's center aligned, so I need to make sure that I'm using just the space bar to move this text over to just where I need it to be, and then I'm going to use the mouse keys on my computer. Just bring it up a little bit. It doesn't have to be perfectly aligned. This is probably off by a little bit, but you won't be able to tell the difference. And now I can delete the background there. And then for my very first frame here, I again want to just paste in this text box, and this time, I'm going to delete everything except the first line, which again, I need to use the space bar to bring that word want, just to where I want it to be. And that's pretty good. And now I'm going to delete the back. So the reason that I'm doing this is so that it looks like one sort continuous frame, but using the text animations of fading in and out. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to animate this and fade this in and also out, so I would use animation for both enter and exit for this one, and I'll do the exact same thing for the rest of my animations here. That looks good. And now, what's going to happen is that this background video is just going to keep looping, and that's not going to look very natural because it's basically going to start from scratch. So instead, what I want to do is I'm going to click into my video, and I'm going to shorten it to just the first 2.5 seconds here. And for my second frame, I'm going to do the same thing, but starting from the first 2.5 seconds. So as I'm using the slider on the bottom of it, you can see where it says 2.5 seconds. So that's where I need it to start, and I'm going to end that at 5 seconds. That looks good. And for my last frame here, I'm going to do the same thing, but starting at 5 seconds, and this time just ending where it ends. So now, here's what it's going to look like when it plays where that background video is going to basically look as one continuous video, but the text is going to zoom in and out. And then within Instagram, that would continue to loop again and again and it makes it look really nice and seamless. So that's the first way of doing this. The second way is, of course, to just have them as completely separate scenes with separate videos in the back. So to create that, I would just go ahead and start from scratch with an Instagram real template. And then we're just going to create a blank one for this. Because it knows we're already creating an Instagram reel. It's already going to set that up as a video document for us, which is great. So what that means is that we have this timeline over here, and it gives us a bit more creative control. So for this one, I'm just going to go ahead and pull in a couple of videos. So we're just going to do three here and just going to select a couple from the ones that I've already got included in here. Obviously, they're going to be too long and we're going to have to shorten it, but that's totally fine. I'm going to go ahead and select this one here and let's do this one here. I'm going to have to shorten these. I'm just going to say probably only needs about 3 seconds. This one probably only needs 3 seconds. You don't want these to be too long, but also just make sure that people have enough time to read whatever text you're using. If you're using a lot of texts in each slide, of course, you want to adjust that. Now I'd bring in a little bit of text. So this would be Tip three. I'm just going to go ahead and animate this. Probably just fade in. That sounds good. So that way, when I go to copy this, and bring it into my first slide. It's already going to copy over that animation, so I don't have to do it again. And I can just make sure I'm going in and doing the rest for the rest of my tips, which in this case is just my second tip and making sure I'm updating the text on each slide as I'm copying and pasting these in. Now, the other thing I can do because I'm in video format is actually cause a transition in between the slides as well. So they're not just kind of jumping from one to the other. I can select a bit of a dissolve there, circle wipe if I want to. I think the dissolve works really well. And happy for that to be relatively quick. I'm just going to say apply between all pages. I could add music to this within canva like I have before, or I can just add it within Instagram reels. In this case, I'm more just worried about the actual design, so I'm just going to go ahead and play that. 2.8 seconds there, transitioning into tip two, transitioning into Tip three. That might seem quite quick, and if your tips are longer, I would extend those videos, but it's an 8.4 second reel, and that's actually a pretty good length for a reel. I'm pretty happy with how that's turned out. 13. Make 30+ Reels in 5 Minutes: Okay. In this lesson, I'm going to show you a really cool hack of how you can take a whole bunch of questions like you might have gotten from answer the public or just ones that you know you have for your business or for your clients that are frequently asked questions that you can answer in your reel and bulk create a whole bunch of reels all at the same time. So if you do answer the public and you export a spreadsheet, it's going to look a little bit like this, but you might find that the questions it's selected for you are not super relevant. So generally, I just pick and choose the questions and then make a spreadsheet of my own inside of Google sheets, which looks a little bit like this. So all you need to do is in your Google sheet just have a column with the title of questions, and then associated answers. I've only put in a couple here, but you can have as many as you need. And this allows you to bulk create some reels for yourself or for your clients. Now, we do need to make sure we are starting from scratch with this, and I'm just going to go ahead and create a blank Instagram. Real or Instagram story. Really at this stage, we're just trying to get the dimensions of that nice vertical ten 80 by 1920 P. I'm going to go ahead and create a blank Instagram reel. Now, I just need to be individual pages. I'm going to bring in a little bit of text here and a little bit of text to use for my questions and my answers. That's obviously quite tiny at this stage. We want to make sure we're stretching that out. Then depending on the design you choose, You may want to choose different fonts or slightly different font styles, and of course, you'll be able to customize it once your questions and answers are pre populated as well. Effectively, what we're going to do is that we're going to import our Google sheet so that it does this for us automatically instead of us having to copy and paste everything over 30, 40 times potentially. So I'm going to just use a video that I've pre selected that I'm bringing in from pixels. But of course, you can just use the free or pro videos from within Cambra as well. So I'm going to set that as my video background. This is where my questions will go. So depending on how long your questions actually are, you may need to make this font style a little bit smaller and really depends on how long your answers will be as well, because if they are a little bit too long, then you may need to adjust this as well. But for now, I'm quite happy with that. Now, what I want to do is head on over to apps and bulk create. Now, I could enter my data manually, but in this case, I'm going to upload my CSP, which, again, very handy if you're doing 30, 40 of these, not just five or six, and it's identified two different data fields. So now you just want to go to your text box, right click and connect the data to the questions here. Then once again, we're going to right click and connect the data to the answers here. Now I'm going to go ahead and click Create, and then I can select any questions that might be relevant to this design, but in this case, I'm happy to just generate a design with all six of these questions and answers, and it's going to prepopulate that for me in my design. Now, of course, you would potentially swap out the background video. But you may not want to. If this is something that's quite consistent for your client and they're happy to just have as questions and answers in a reel that they post maybe every Friday for like a Q and A Friday, then this could actually potentially stay the same. But in this case, it looks pretty good. I would need to adjust the sizing or the positioning of my font depending on the length of the question and the answer. And then this is how it's going to look once it's posted as a real. So I would probably adjust it a little bit because the video is moving a little bit to make sure that that's all in there. And I would just adjust these down, a tiny, tiny bit, which you don't have to do if you pick an easier video than the one I've just picked there. But it does save you a lot of time by not having to do this over and over and over again. If you do think that maybe people need a little bit of help in terms of knowing that this is a question and answer situation, you can add a heading, so I could just say question. And of course, this isn't going to get pre populated. So it's going to stay as is, and then this could say answer. Okay. Just going to bring that up a little bit. Brilliant. And now I can just go back to my bulk create option. It's already been connected. It's still connected, and I can just generate that again. So those headings, in this case, would stay exactly the same for every single one of these designs. And then when I want to download each individual design, I would just go ahead and download the particular page that I want as my reel. So hopefully, you're starting to get a few ideas flowing, and of course, I have provided links to all these examples and the templates we've created within your resource guide if you'd like to refer back to them. In later lessons, we'll talk more about how to optimize your reel and post it, of course. But now the next lesson, I just wanted to cover a few different ways that you can still showcase more of in your reels on camera without feeling overwhelmed. I'll see you there. 14. Simple Reels Showcasing You: At this stage, what I do want to say is that in order to succeed on Instagram, it is not a prerequisite for you to be on camera. But it does help to sort of humanize your brand because at the end of the day, as people, we prefer to buy from other people rather than faceless brands, and even with really big brands, you know, we still like to see a bit of that human connection, and get to know the people or the stories behind the brand, the people who work there, the suppliers, the customers, and have that as a way to build a connection with this account on a platform like Instagram. So while it's not a prerequisite, I do want to encourage you to just think of little ways that you can infuse some of your own personality and the story of your business and your brand into your reales content. And that's exactly what this lesson is all about. In a way that's not super daunting and doesn't actually require a whole lot of effort. I'll be looking at a few different ways in which you can do that over the following few lessons. But I wanted to start with a really easy one, which is a tweet style reel we've already created in Canva. But instead of this background video, I'm going to put in a clip that I have filmed of myself, so I'm just going to go ahead and duplicate this. I'll delete this background video or I can just replace it. And again, I've organized this, but you can just drag any video into your uploads folder, and that will give you the exact same effect. I'm going to put that in the back, and I'm just going to adjust it so that it's not so overwhelming to look at because at the moment, it's very bright and colorful. So I'm going to adjust the transparency and then click on edit video, and I'm actually going to make this black and white. I'm going to remove the saturation and then use the background color to add in my brand colors so that it makes it look nice and branded. If your video in the back also has some sound, I would suggest just removing that volume so that any audio you put on top of this inside of Instagram or within Camvra is going to be the primary focus. Then with this, I would probably just make that less transparent so that it's not quite as overwhelming. Now, I'm going to just bring in a slightly different quote here. And paste that in. Okay. And now I can just adjust where this sits in relation to where my video is in the background. If I double click into the background as well, it allows me to move this around a little bit more. So if I'm not quite in the right position, which in this case, I think it looks pretty good. Again, I would just make sure that everything is where it needs to be from an Instagram reels interface perspective, so my text is not being blocked. So I've got a little bit more wiggle room as well. But for now, I'm quite happy with where that's sitting. I would maybe move it down just the slightest tiniest bit so that it's not sort of directly over my mouth. And that looks really good. And a fun little bonus is to use an interactive sticker within Instagram to elevate this type of rail even further and get my audience to engage with it. So with this, I could either just download it from my computer and bring it on over to my phone or I can navigate to my Canva design. Make sure I'm on the right page that I want to download, hit the download button, make sure it's an MP four, and make sure that I'm only downloading the one page of my design and download that. And make sure I'm saving it to my photo library as well, which is going to make it really nice and easy for me to use. So that's done. And now I can just move on over to my Instagram account and create a real. And I should be able to just pull this straight in, add the entire duration of that clip, I could add a bit of a background track, but in this case, I'm happy to just leave it as is. The main thing I want to do here is to go to the sticker option and add this emotion sticker where I could ask the question within this, but I can also just leave that completely blank. I could change the color of this. It is a little bit limited, so I actually prefer the white background and I can change this emoji to be whatever I want it to be. I can also select this plus icon and find all the other emojis as well. In this case, I'm quite happy to select, actually, I think the first one was pretty good. So I would go ahead and just place that underneath my tweet there. Making sure that I'm taking note of where these lines are that will tell me that if I place it beneath this line underneath here, it's going to be blocked by a few elements within the app. I might need to go a little bit above that, which is exactly what I'm doing here. Happy with that. I'm going to align that in the center. That's it. Now people are going to be able to use this as a gauge of how much they agree with this particular tweet. 15. How to Animate a Photo Reel: So this particular design is going to be an Instagram real template, and it's going to be a nice alternative to the previous design. In case you're not super comfortable in filming quick clips of yourself, this will still give you an option to have a photo of yourself that's animated and nice and dynamic in Instagram real format, but that doesn't require you to actually ever be on video. So I'm going to start by just adding a bit of a background photo here. Which is quite minimalistic and isn't going to take away from the foreground, which is going to be a photo of myself. I'm going to right click on this and set images background. Now, this is a pro image. I could use a free image instead. But in this case, I'm quite happy with that. Now I'm going to go to edit image and adjust and just blur this the tiniest little bit just so it's a little bit less distracting. And I've already preloaded a couple of photos of myself that I can use for this purpose. So I'm going to go ahead and use this one here. Now, I'm going to be using another Canva pro feature, which is inside of edit image, the background removal feature. If you don't have Canva P, not to panic, I've included a free alternative to this particular feature that you can use to remove the background of your photos and then bring your cutout into Canva instead. I just takes a little bit longer, but if you are not using Canva P, there's always a work around everything. I'm just going to select erase and just erase a little bit more of my legs here just so that I can bring a little bit more of my upper body into my design. That looks pretty good. And yeah, I mean, good enough. I don't need this to be perfect. And now I'm just going to go ahead and make this a little bit smaller. It doesn't need to be quite so large, and I'm going to remove my legs out of this because they also don't need to be in it. Okay, perfect. So now we can stretch this out and place it on top here. And that's looking. Pretty good. So I would probably just edit this image and adjust it just the tiniest bit so that it's a little bit lighter, so it matches a little bit better with the background there. I mean, this is just me being very detail oriented, but just so the two images look really nice on top of each other. Now we're going to be animating this. But first, I actually want to go back to my initial tweet template and just grab this and command C to copy, and now I'm going to command V to paste it in here so that we can just use this in another design because that's the benefit of creating templates as you can use the same things again and again. Now before we animate this, I'm going to add a couple more animated elements here. I'm going to be using a squiggly line of some sort. In the graphics panel, I'm just going to go and filter by animated elements only here and try to choose something that's not super hectically animated, something that's just got a slight animation like this over here. I can stretch that out. That's looking pretty good. Now, what I'm going to be doing is using my keyboard shortcuts to just move these elements behind myself. But if you ever forget what they are in the position panel, you've got the shortcuts over here, so I'm just going to be using those on my keyboard so that I can move them behind my image. And I'm going to use my magic recommendations to see what other kind of lines but recommends based on the one I've just chosen. Yeah, I like this one. I think that actually works pretty well with this color. I'm going to again just move that behind myself. All right, that's looking quite funky. So now what we want to do is we want to bring this to life. So the first thing I'm going to do is just drag this to only be about 2 seconds. You have to play around with that. It can be longer. But now, what I can do with my cutout here is animate that into drift mode, which is going to allow it to kind of just slightly move back and forth in the direction of coming in from the right. Then I'm going to go ahead and just copy this over. So I can duplicate the page. And now on my second page, I'm going to select it again. And this way, I now want it to go back to the right. So effectively, once this plays, it's going to move it this way and then that way. So just a really, really, really slight looping animation because once it's in Instagram reels, this is just going to go back and forth. So as someone is reading this tweet, It just gives them something else to look at that's really nice and dynamic and makes it really easy for you to showcase your team or yourself or even your products in a bit of an animated way using some of these tips without ever having to actually be on video. So I hope you enjoyed that one, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to keep creating. 16. This or That - Interactive Reel: Okay. The next kind of real I want to cover is a really fun one, which is this or that kind of real, which gets your audience to choose between two things. So, for example, if you're a cafe owner, you could do this where they get to vote on their favorite apetiser and you post them side by side. Or let's say you're a real estate agent, you could do this and get your audience's opinions on two different architectural styles. So for me, for example, I could do this where I could ask my audience which topic they'd prefer to learn about next in an upcoming YouTube video, whether that's video production or camera confidence. So I just started by setting up a tripod and then filming myself, just talking rubbish, really, but just so that I can use that as an audio free clip. And then I also shot another just handheld quick little clip of what my video production side looks like on the other side of the camera. And I can now put these together side by side, either within Instagram itself using their layout function, but I honestly kind of hate it. I don't find it to be very precise or reliable or easy to work with. So instead, I'm going to use camera for this, and I'm just going to be using the grid function. If you're ever looking for it, if you just put in the word grid, It should be one of the first things that pops up. And then you can use a few different layouts here, but we want the side by side option. I'm just going to first actually change my background. I can do it retrospectively as well if I needed to. But in this case, I just want to make sure that that is changed, and then I'm going to put my grid on top of that. So now I can go ahead and upload my files. Now, I filmed a few or two different options for the video production side. So I'm just going to see which one works better. One is a shot of me doing some editing inside a final cut, and then one is just my camera equipment. I just want to see what looks better side by side with my camera confidence clip. I want to make sure that I'm muting this video because it doesn't need to be loud. I'm going to put music over this. So that looks pretty good already. I want to maybe double click into this and I could move it around slightly. I could also potentially shrink it down if I felt that I'm not going to get everything out of these that I need to. So I could still have some color on the sides there if I wanted to utilize more of my clip. But in this case, I'm actually quite happy with how it's turning out even when it's long like this. So that looks pretty good there. And now I've just got a couple of options for the right side. I'm just going to drag in this first clip here, which is me filming my screen while I was doing some video editing. That's a possibility. It's maybe a little bit too hectic now that I'm looking at it, but I could always just duplicate my design and try out a few different options, maybe even import each of them into Instagram and see how it looks on a smaller screen. But in this case, I'm actually probably quite happy with this option. I do just need to make sure that they're the same length on the left and the right though. So I would want to make sure because one is 12.2 seconds. The other one is 9.8 seconds. Then I'm just going to make them both into 5 seconds in this case. I would probably just go with a really short clip. Now, it does depend on which audio you're using, if you're using like a background song, and you know that track needs to be a little bit longer, then definitely take that into consideration, but in this case, I'm happy to keep that of 5 seconds. And then for my other clip, I'm just going to make that 5 seconds as well so that we know that they're nice and consistent on both sides. So once again, I'm just going to download this from within Cambra and making sure I'm only downloading the one page that I want and download that. Once that's downloaded, I can then head on over to Instagram, add in my real. Bring this in from my library over here and just add that straight in. Now, if I had not muted this within Canva, I could do that by adjusting the camera audio over here. I've already done that, but you can potentially do it again, and then potentially add some music if you haven't done that from within Canva. But really at this stage, we're just interested in this pole sticker, so we could ask something like, which would you like to learn about next? I'd say camera confidence. Video reduction. So you need to make sure that it fits because not every single thing that you might want to told your audience about might fit in there. Also, keeping in mind that this text up here may not actually fit with your shots, so for me, I could potentially put it over here, and then you can sort of read it. In this case, I might put something behind it just so that it's a little bit easier to read. But alternatively, you could actually just put it in as an extra text box, which might make it look a little bit nicer because then you can give it that nice solid color background. Again, I could just use sort of something that's relatively close to my brand colors here. I can just put that over the top. And that makes it a little bit easier to read, then people can just sort of vote on that, which is quite cool. And of course, you can make the sticker bigger or smaller depending on what works better for you. In this case, I would probably just remove all this text, so I can be a little bit more flexible with where all of this appears. I could potentially put it up here and put my stickers quite large up here. I could potentially also add in some gifts of some arrows if I wanted to get extra fancy with it, So you can play around with all these different functions within your reels options. It can be just out of frame. It doesn't really matter because it's just an arrow. So this just brings people's attention to this even more than it did before. 17. Behind The Scenes Reels: And now let's look at a few different ways that you can feature the behind the scenes of your business starting with a very classic behind the scenes kind of real because let's face it, we all love to see how the metaphorical sausage gets made. So, as an example, when I was setting everything up in preparation for filming my lessons here, I set my phone up with a few different angles around my room just on a tripod and put it on time lapse mode. In order to get a few different shots of me prepping everything that I could then use into a time lapse real. So I have shots of me just running around, my dog being a pest and a couple of different angles of me doing this so that I can then stack this together. All right. So at this stage, I have some options. I can first of all, just pop this into Instagram, shorten it to the clips, add some texts, add some music, and it's ready to go. That might actually look pretty good. But if I can utilize canva for this as well, I can help to elevate this even further and make it even more dynamic. So let's take a look at how to do that. For this one, again, I just need to make an Instagram reel. I could select it there, I could search for it here or I can just go to create a design, and it's going to have it there for me as a suggested option. But if it wasn't there, I would just search for it. Now I can just upload my clips in. I've got a couple of time lapse ones and one more down here. Now, I'm just going to speed things up here a little bit, but I'm just bringing each of these in as its own page and then right clicking and clicking set as background to make sure that each of them is full screen on that page. So here's what this would look like without any additional canva bits and pieces. Just a regular time lapse, pretty standard. Still looks cool, but just doesn't really have that extra bit of elevation. What we can do is you can now animate this video and make it breathe. So that helps it sort of zoom in as it's doing that time lapse. I can then go apply to all pages, and let's take a look at that now. So that's just a really subtle animation. I would probably remove it from this particular slide here. I think it works for all the other ones. But this one, I find that to be a little bit funny because she's also moving around quite a lot and I didn't have it on a tripod. So I think it works better if it's just not breathing. And then this particular video, I would probably actually shorten even a little bit more than it already is because all of the other clips are two to 3 seconds. So we would probably just shorten that down and see how that looks. Maybe move it to the second part. Yeah, that's pretty good. Now, I could play around with doing some transitions and seeing how that might look. Yes, I think that actually looks pretty good because it's quite a chaotic reel anyway. So I think when it's transitioning like that, it looks pretty good. I would lastly just maybe tap into this video and try to zoom into it a little bit more because I find that there's a lot of that ceiling and not a whole lot of the action. So I think that's pretty much all. I mean, the rest of them have a little bit more of my ceiling as well, but that one was quite distracting. And then I would just continue finalizing that within the Instagram app. I've just brought this over from Canva, and let's talk about how you might be able to utilize a voice over function with this type of real. I've just brought this in and now I'm going to go to the music option up here. Click on voice over. Now I'm going to record my voice over over the entire clip. But just so you know you can press and hold and let go and just record it over sections over the clip. If you're not satisfied with a particular one, you can just under. I'm going to start from scratch, but you can use the slider to start at a different section of your reel if you don't want to do a voice over over the whole thing. I'm quite happy to try and time it over the whole thing, so let's see how we go. Often, my filming setup begins with a little bit of chaos, some more chaos, a dog and some more chaos. All right. So now being set up begins with a little bit of chaos. So more chaos, a dog and some more chaos. All right, so that's pretty good. I would potentially a little bit of chaos. Let me mute this. I would potentially add in a little bit of music because also the audio wasn't super crisp on that because I didn't have it completely up to my face as I would normally, if I was doing voice overs, just so you guys can see the screen. But in this case, you know, I might try and find something that's instrumental. Of course, I'm not going to play it at this stage, but then I could just jump in here, listen to the song, make sure it fits in with what I'm hoping for with the actual music, I would just make it really subtle in the background so that my voice over is the primary element of that real. But I can still have the song in the background, which just makes it a little bit nice and it also gives it a little bit of something for the little sections where I wasn't actually saying anything at the beginning and at the end. So in this case, I'm actually going to go ahead and just remove this clip because I want to be able to download it and it's not going to allow me to download that if I'm using audio from within Instagram. But if I'm using my own voice over it, that's A K, so I want to make sure I'm saving that so that we can use it for some future demos. Lastly, I may want to include a bit of a filter if I just thought, you know, this was a time lap. So obviously, I couldn't have done that using the Instagram app. I had to do that using my phone. If I want to give it a little bit more of an aesthetic, I can do that now. And you can also just do a super quick version of this where you're just taking photos throughout the process. So you can take a photo sort of before, a couple of shots during and a photo after, and it sort of makes it look like a stop motion video. So that's exactly what I did in addition to my time lapse video. I put my phone up on a tripod and I took a photo just before the setup, a couple of shots during, and then after everything was set up. Then you can piece these together in a stop motion way. So we're going to have a look at how we can do that instead of that time lapse option. I'm just going to bring up Instagram and I already have a reel that does this. I'm just going to turn up the sound so you can hear it a little bit. So it's got that sort of ding, ding, ding, every time it's bringing up a new photo, and that gives it a little bit more of a dynamic feel. When these kind of reels are put together with an Instagram, you'll see this used template option, and it will already have the timing of each of those photos rather than me just importing them into my real creation process and having to adjust the timing of each photo to get it to that kind of seamless motion because it can take a little bit of time when you have to do that. So this is a really nice and neat little trick. Anytime you see these sort of time lapse, stop motion type photos, it might have that used template option. If it doesn't, you can just import the photos individually into your real creation process and just adjust the timings. But in this case, I'm going to go ahead and add my media. Now, I've already created a folder, with all of my photos in it, and I've also only selected six so that I know these are the six that I want to use. The important thing is to select them in the right order, which can be a bit tricky if you don't exactly remember which is which, but usually it's just from start to finish. That makes it really nice and easy for you to select your photos in this way and click next. Right? So that's a really, really simple way for me to be able to do that and to have this nice little time lapse real. My lighting isn't exactly perfect. So if I was going to be a little bit more pedantic about this, I probably would have controlled my lighting a little bit more. I would have probably left that blind open so that the lighting doesn't change as well to make it seem a little bit more seamless. But again, it's just about showcasing your process, so that's an easy way to do that as well. Okay. 18. Before/After - Transition Reel: Okay. Lesson, I also wanted to cover one more alternative to the behind the scenes or show your process kind of reels, which also uses the line or transition feature within Instagram. The reason I like these kind of reels is because they actually only require two photos or two quick video clips over before and after, but they're really, really popular on Instagram. In addition to filming my time lapse video of my room setup and taking some photos throughout, I also just filmed a quick clip of what the room looked like beforehand and did a couple of shots of me just snapping my fingers. Then once the room was complete, I brought my first clip into Instagram and selected the best version of the snap of my fingers. Only up until the point where I'm actually about to do the snap. Then I use the align feature to basically get this transparent view of the last frame of that previous clip, so I could align with where everything was in the room and with where my hand was and then complete the snap with a quick clip. I then had to trim these a little bit just to make sure that it seemed like one continuous motion of my hand and here's how it turned out. So I really, really like the style of real because you could do this for almost any business out there as a really simple before and after. Now, I did want to bring in just one more example from this particular creator and this real that got 1.3 million views with just two photos. It's just in before and an after. And that is so so great, but the views is not the great part. The great part is that he got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments from people who are asking where he got his desk from, where he got his chair, where he got what monitor he's using. These are all things that he's an affiliate for and can point them to the Lincoln is bio where he actually features all these products from other brands. They're not his products, but he does earn an affiliate commission from every time somebody purchases one of those products. So this one real that features two photos has gotten 1.3 million views, and I don't know how many sales, but it can be that simple to create a really powerful move for your business and your revenue goals. So Just think a little bit creatively about how you can implement something like this for yourself or for your clients because it really can be that simple and sometimes more complicated doesn't necessarily mean better. Sometimes the simpler moves are the most powerful ones on apps like Instagram, especially with these before and afters because we see the before. We know there's something off because we think, I can't be it. It's just an empty room, and you can't wait to see the after. Because the after is actually only featured for a very short period of time, we have to watch it again and again and that's how these reels get momentum and that's how they get all that wonderful engagement. Hopefully, you're starting to get a few different ideas about how you can leverage these relatively simple strategies to showcase more of yourself and your business and your team potentially in your reels by showing up on camera without that sort of overwhelming factor of having to actually speak to the camera. And of course, there will be many more examples out there, but hopefully that this has given you some ideas. And now in the next lesson, we're going to talk about how to further optimize your reels with some handy apps. So I'll see there. 19. Horizontal Video & Tutorial Reels: Okay. In a few lessons, we're going to take a look at how you can use Canva to create beautiful covers for your reels, if that's what you want to do. But for now, I just wanted to share with you how you can also utilize Canva to make the most of your horizontal videos that you might want to repurpose as reels. Because a lot of times, especially with corporate brands, they might have these beautiful horizontal videos that they want to repurpose into a real format, but maybe you just can't crop that video because it's lower quality, or maybe it just wouldn't make any sense as a vertical video. So you do want to post it in its original format, in its original dimensions, but as a real, and that's where you can utilize the power of cava, Likewise, you can also do this for any videos that you need to shrink down because maybe you're doing like a software demo or something like that, where you need somebody to see everything that's going on in your video. So you can't really post it as a real because it would have bits that are covered by all the different features within Instagram. So you want to sort of shrink it down so everyone could see everything that's going on. So we're going to take a look at how to do that and also how to add some closed captions. So firstly, let's talk about how to make your horizontal videos more interesting with a Canva design. As Instagram reels. So firstly, I would just bring in a screenshot of the video that I plan on using for my reel so that I can make sure everything is aligned design wise, but also color wise, if there are some really interesting colors in your video, you want to make sure you're not using those as a background so that the contrast works and the color combination works. So it can be a good idea to bring this in. And the other thing I would encourage you to bring in is the second template that I've provided you with And the reason for that is it'll give you a good idea of where your video will sit and where your captions will sit as well. So I'm going to move this to the back at this stage. We can ignore the actual Instagram reels icon there. Mainly, we just want to make sure that our horizontal video has enough space for a title and captions underneath because generally, the inclination might be to put the clip in the middle of your reel. But you may actually want to move it up slightly so that you have a little bit more room for your captions underneath. A way that it's not cut off in any way if somebody is looking at this on their feed and not in full screen mode. So whatever works best for you, but just so you know, you've got that there as an option, and then you can add your title either within Cambra or you can do it within Instagram or a different app. But let's say I would just say this is not the best color choice. Let me change that. My title will go here. And I would make sure that that's nice and big potentially over two lines or three lines, which again, is why we're doing this, so we can make sure that everything looks good. I can see the pink lines are telling me that this is in the center. If I wasn't sure, I would just go over to position and hit center, but it's already there, so that looks good. I could put in just a few my text boxes here to say my captions will go. Here, probably just over two lines, you're probably not going to have your captions over any more lines than that. Making sure that that looks good here, it's telling me that there's 83 pixels between my captions and my title above and below my video there, and that's perfect. Everything is nice and aligned. This does look a little bit messy, so I'm just going to go ahead and adjust my transparency here, so I don't actually see it, but it's still in the back there, and I will just change my background color to my brand color here. And now I can add some elements. So either I could actually just use a design from over here. So if I like any of these, I could just add it to a new page and maybe copy some of the elements over from the back here. Let's say I like these particular elements here. I could just copy and paste them over here and add them to my design. In this case, I'm actually happy just adding in my own elements. So I am going to go ahead and look for something like blob within the graphic section. This is sort of my signature style with my reels, so I'm quite happy with just using what they've got over here, mainly just to kind of spruce it up. So it doesn't look so to dimensional. But you also don't want it to be too distracting. Because keep in mind, this is going to be a moving video here. So looks pretty good. My add one more over here. And I would just make sure that I'm changing over all the colors so that they make sense with my brand. That looks pretty good. And in this case, I would just hit the letter r on my keyboard and get a rectangle in here. Or I can also just look for a rectangle within elements here. I'll see it under lines and shapes. But if you just hit R on your keyboard, it will also appear. And that will allow me to replace this screenshot now that I'm confident that the color combo works. I just want to have something in the back there so that I have an idea of where to actually place my video inside of the next step. But I don't necessarily need it to be a screenshot that can be quite distracting for a template. So I'm going to send this backward. I can delete this now, and I'm going to change the color of this to something that is almost the same as the background, but not quite. So if it's hard for you to see that, just change it to whatever color works for you, if you want it to be sort of white or something else, so you can see it a little bit better. Definitely do that. I don't mind it being quite subtle. And then, of course, I would remove my captions because these are going to be added within the next step. Our second option is to make a little screen within a screen. So I'm going to just start a blank new template over here. The first option is to use something like a phone mockup that you can place your video inside of, head on over to the graphics tab and bring in just one of these phone mock ups. It's not going to fit perfectly, so it does depend on what you're demoing. I usually bring in at least a little clip into my uploads folder of the demo that I want to include in my reel. So I can see okay if I use this template, here's how would fit. That looks relatively good, actually. I wouldn't mind using that. But the other alternative is to just have a more evergreen template that you can use again, and again, no matter what your tutorial is of. The first thing I would do is make sure that I'm grabbing these exact dimensions, either as a transparent PNG, if you're on the pro account, all I need to do is go through to download PNG. Hit transparent background. Again, that it's only if you're a pro user, and then make sure I'm only downloading the six page here, and that's going to download this for me without the Turquoise background, and I can check that into my uploads folder here so you can see that. Alternatively, if you're on the free account, just take a screenshot of your outline of where your reel is going to sit. It's going to give you the exact same result. All we really need is just to have the right dimensions to create a bit of a drop shadow, if that's something you want to do. So with the PNG version, I would head on over to edit image, and we're going to go over to shadows and I can create a bit of a drop shadow here. So what this allows me to do is create a placeholder for where my tutorial is actually going to go inside of the next step where I'm going to place my video recording on top of this, but I just want to know that I'm placing in the right spot. So I'm just going to go ahead and move this to the back, delete this clip because now I know it's the right spot. And if you find it distracting, I mean, a video is just going to go on top of this so no one's ever going to see this screenshot. But if you find it distracting, you can also head on over to Duotone and just change the actual highlights and the shadows of your image to be one solid color. So let's say in my case, it might be let's go with my blue here and my highlights can also be blue. So it just changes it to a solid color block. Easy Ps. Now when I have my beautiful video on top of this, it's not going to be distracting in case there are any edges showing. And with your screenshot, for those of you that are free Canva users, you would do the exact same thing. So once you have a bit of a drop shadow, You can see that it's created the exact same effect, and then you can also use duo tone to make it a solid color. So it's just a bit of a quicker work around if you're able to export it as a PNG, but either way works perfectly. So the next thing we want to make sure with this is just to be putting in our actual real template here to see what people are going to be able to actually see on top of this. So I'm going to just move this to the back. And in this case, I might move this up slightly just there. So that it's fully within view, and you may also need to account for where you're going to put your captions. So if you do need any closed captions, are they able to go on top of your tutorial or do they need to sit underneath? If they need to sit underneath, you may need to go even a little bit smaller with it so you can put some captions underneath. It may look really tiny to you now, but on a mobile screen, it's actually still quite a bit of real estate there. Now, just like with our previous template, you could just add some solid colors into the back there or some solid elements. Alternatively, if you do want to add some moving elements and you still want them to be in your brand colors, there is a bit of a work around to this. So, for example, if I was going to put in a word blob here and just search for animated elements. You'll notice that a lot of these don't have any options for you to customize the colors, so it can take quite a while for you to find ones that work for your brand. But lucky for us, there are animations within Canva called lots, which allow you to change their colors to your brand colors. They can be a bit tricky to find, so I've given you access to a whole library of them. So make sure to check that out in your resource guide. And what this will allow you to do is basically just grab a couple of them, hit command C or control C on a PC and command V over here, and then you'll be able to edit them to your beautiful brand colors and have some nice moving elements in the background if you don't think it's going to be too distracting for your tutorial. So they are mostly just really subtle movements that these things do. So they're not usually too too distracting, and we can just go ahead and slowly start making them into our brand colors here. So that looks good, and bearing in mind that this is not going to be a solid colorful block like it is here. It's going to be a beautiful video of our screen flow. So all you're going to see is the actual tutorial and then some slight animations them back. Now you might have noticed that it took me quite a while to actually change all those elements to my brand colors. Unfortunately, this is the only option for those of you on the free plan. But if you are on the paid plan, what you can do is just paste these into a blank page, and then within the design option. You can head on over to styles. And if you've got your brand kit set up within Cambra, you can just customize these to your brand colors with the click of a button and shuffle through a few different options. But that is the really, really handy, quick option, and then you can just drag them onto your template that way. But you can, of course, apply this manually. It's not a problem. And at this stage, this particular template is only 10 seconds. So depending on how long your reel is, you can head on over here and make that up to 30 seconds. If you're just using the slider, or you can just type in whatever duration you need. So I'm just going to go ahead and export this as an MP four and this as a PNG, and then we'll jump into our next app. 20. Add Closed Captions & More: At this stage, we're going to go ahead and open up an app called CAP Cut and start a new project. We're going to begin with the reel we created in the previous lesson, so we can take a look at what our options are in terms of autocptions, and I'm going to go ahead and click on text and Autocptions start That's going to beautifully translate everything that's going on in the background, which if you remember, was just my voice over. Now I would want to check that these are actually spelled correctly. I could batch edit that. With this clip, it's only really quick. I was just doing a quick voiceover. It's only four lines. I could come in here and just edit this and make any corrections. But in this case, it's actually pretty spot on. I might add coma or something like that, if it works. I could add a com here. But really, I'm pretty happy with how that's translated everything. That's a batch edit or you can just individually edit each of the captions as well if you wanted to. Now, the main important thing or the most important thing is to look at the styles. This kind of real actually has a nice faded background, a white font might actually work pretty well on top of that. But in case you need to edit it, just go ahead and click on style. Now, at the moment, apply to auto captions is ticked on, which means anything that I do with the effects is going to apply to all of my captions. That's quite important. I'm happy to keep it white, but I would probably change the font type. I can come in here and change the font type. And that looks pretty good. I would maybe actually change the size because it's a little bit small, which might work, but in this case, I just wanted to change that I could go ahead and change whether this has a bit of a background to it or not. In this case, I'm quite happy keeping it as that. Now, the one final thing I would potentially do is adjust the placement. I'm just going to go ahead and click on style, and I'm going to remove the apply to auto caaptions option, which will then allow me to click into each of these individually and just move around where they're placed on top of my reel here. So for example, this one might look quite good at the top there. And this next one, I'm just going to go into it here. Let's say I wanted to twist it or make it slightly bigger. In this case, I could move it just a little bit to the center there. And this one I could put on the ground here. And this one I could put on the desk there. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Let's turn up our volume. I'm going to go ahead and export that. But also, I would just go ahead and remove the ending there. At the moment, it just says made with cap cut, that's something you can delete. It's only exporting this section of your reel, so I'm going to go ahead and export that. We can take a look at the final result over here. Let's take a look at it. Often, my filing setup begins with a little bit of chaos, some more chaos, a dot and some more chaos. That looks pretty good, and I would just go ahead and import that into Instagram and add some background music if I wanted to. Let's say that as a project for me. Now let's take a look at how this might look if we were going to add a bit of a screen flow or some sort of demo for which we would be using our Cambra created background here. I'm going to go ahead and add that first and add that in. And now I want to use the overlay function and add my overlay. And this is just a demo overlay here. I have the ability? I'm just going to mute that for sex so it's not distracting. I'm going to add that in, and I'm just going to use my fingers here to shrink this down and move it to just where I want it on top of my little thing there that I've put inside of camera. Now, I know that might look quite small, but keeping in mind that this is going to be full screen and that I would potentially want to add some captions in underneath. That's how I would go about adding a video on top of a video, which can be quite tedious going back and forth between camera. This is just an easy little work around, and that background is really slowly moving while you're doing a little bit of a demo and then there's still some room for captions underneath, if I was going to use the auto captions option to then add that on top. Okay. So that's the second option. Then our last option is how to make horizontal videos look nice. So I would first go about importing my actual photo from within Cambra that I've downloaded. And because it's a photo, you can make it as long as you need to. I'm just going to go ahead and click on Overlay and add in my video. And go over two videos. This is just a trailer for one of my courses, but it's quite long. It's two minute 16 and obviously this app is more designed for really short clips. So you can see that that initial photo imported as really really quick. I would want to make sure that I am going through and stretching that out to be as long as the video that's on top of it. I would just go all the way to the end. I mean, you can always trim it, so you can always go longer and trim it if you need to. I would again just make sure I'm deleting the end scene if it's got one for cap cut there. That looks pretty good. So at the moment, it's quite long, and I would want to maybe potentially splice that, but at this stage, it looks pretty good. The one thing I want to make sure is that I'm clicking into the video that's on top that's overlaid and just stretching that out. Now we would want to add some captions underneath. I'm just going to go ahead and go back. Now we're going to click on text again, auto captions and start. That looks good. I'm just going to click into really any of them is fine and go to style. Make sure that it's ticked on to apply to all captions. Again, I could go and auto correct any of the captions that are not quite grammatically correct, either individually or in bulk edit mode. But in this case, just for demo purposes, I'm happy to keep that as is. In this one, I would again change my font style. And I would change the color using the color picker. I would try to get it on top of that title there to use my brand color there. That looks pretty good. Now, it would need to be a little bit smaller in terms of the actual text box, but then I would go in and make the font bigger in this sense. Depending on how many lines you want to have appearing underneath your video, whether it's two or three. I'm just going to go ahead and play that. That is giving me three lines. In this case, I would potentially just do two, if I can. Let's just go ahead and get it down to two lines and make it a bit bigger. Because three lines is quite a lot of real estate. So it might be a little bit overwhelming. Two lines is quite good, and we also want to make sure we're not too close to the edges here as well. So I'm just going to go ahead and click on next, and now we can see how this will look with captions underneath. If you're ever not 100% sure whether the captions are going to be a little too close to the edges for where the instagram real features are, you can just head on over to overlay, add overlay. And adding the frame that I've given you in your resources that you can sort of stretch to the edges. Of course, you're going to be deleting this, so not to worry, but it's mainly so that if you want to kind of stretch that to the duration of your reel, you'll be able to see, in this case, for example, this is a little bit over that section where there's going to be some interaction icons there. So I could just go back and adjust my text accordingly to make sure that it's not overlapped. Or you might just say, Okay, well, it's pretty close, so it's fine. But yeah, once you're then ready, you can just go ahead and delete that. It's just a sort of final check to make sure that everything is nice and accessible before going ahead and posting on Instagram. So hopefully, that's given you some confidence in knowing that there are lots of different ways to make a real outside of the Instagram app. And now in the next lesson, we're going to take a look at some handy accessibility tips, so I'll see there. 21. Make Your Reels Accessible: Okay. Let's talk about a few different ways in which you can help to contribute to a better, more inclusive experience for your community on Instagram through your reels. So there are accessibility features like closed captions, for example, that people would naturally, maybe assume will only benefit users who are deaf or hard of hearing. But really, there are so many different reasons why somebody might benefit from closed captions in particular. They might be scrolling through Instagram on the bus and not want to have the sound out loud. So they need the closed captions to get context. Or maybe the language of your reels is not their primary language, so they have a bit of trouble understanding any audio that's in your. So there are really no downsides to including accessibility features, and there are a lot of upsides to making this a much more inclusive and engaged experience for your community. So I definitely encourage you to really think about how you can incorporate some of these within your Instagram eels planning process. So let's now get into the five different ways you can make your reels more accessible. First, you can add a video description. These will help visually impaired users who are using screen readers to read these out loud for them. This is where you can provide context around locations, what people are in the real, any colors, any objects. Basically, anything that you think might be relevant for someone who can't see what's going on in the real itself. As an added bonus, it can also really help out neurodivergent users who may have trouble interpreting facial expressions. I'm going to go ahead and add a video description for this reel that I've made so far into my reels planner. So I've pre written it, but just so you know, it says, video description, gentle scene of a comfy beige couch and a person's hand slowly placing a white pillow on top. Above hangs a white canvas where the quote by Zizler appears, which reads, you can have everything in life you want if you will just help other people get what they want. And this is something I'll put into the first comment once my reel is live. Second tip is to optimize your hashtag. Taking a bit of an extra step to capitalize all the words within your hashtag can really help screen readers so that it can interpret each individual word that makes up the hashtag. Otherwise, screen readers actually just read this as one big long word that makes absolutely no sense. Now it's time for me to make sure my hashtags are optimized for screen readers. The next step is to check your colors. It's estimated that around 300 million people worldwide have some form of color blindness, so it can be a really good idea to just check your brand colors and know which colors go together in a way that provides enough contrast so that everyone can see exactly what you're putting out there. And I've had to completely re arrange my brand colors for this particular reason because my previous brand color scheme just was not accessible in this way, and now I had to make my colors a little bit bolder and know which colors go well together to provide enough contrast. I've also had to rearrange the types of fonts that I use. So I now use bigger boulder fonts for this reason. So your brand may already be either accidentally or purposefully accessible in this way, but it can be a good idea to just check this. And if you're not quite sure, there are some tools that can really help you with this. The first tool allows you to build an accessible color palette. If you then follow the steps that it tells you to follow, it will make it really nice and easy for you to make sure that all of your designs are always accessible. I'm just going to put in a couple of my brand colors. I'm not going to put in all of them. But let's say I've just got my white, my turquoise, and then my dark blue. If I was going to go down here, it's going to tell me which colors I can combine in which ways in order for it to be fully accessible. Then there are also other tools like this free Google Chrome extension that allows you to activate this on websites or even in your Canva designs to see how other people might view your designs, to give you a last check to determine whether your contrast is high enough and whether everything works as it should. These are just a few of the tools that can be really helpful and I've linked these and others in your resource guide. Okay. Next tip is to add content warnings for any relevant content. You'll sometimes see the letters TW or CW signifying trigger warning or content warning on Instagram and other platforms, and this can be a good idea to put into your reel and also your caption when you're covering topics that potentially are sensitive topics that people may want to avoid on the platform, or in the rare instances, if you have flashing lights in your reel that might be triggering to epileptic users. It can be a good idea to not just include this in the caption, but also add text in the real itself. Finally, adding closed captions to your reels is incredibly key. You can of course do this within the Instagram app. If you're using a voice over or original audio, like I did for this particular reel, you can use the automatic captions option. It will translate your voice and give you some options for different styles of captions that you can have. That is a really, really great option for original audio content. If you do not have original audio content, you can still do it within Instagram, but you will just have to manually type out what your captions actually are. You could say adding it here. And you would have to go frame by frame, and of course, adjust where that text appears or where that audio is within that reel, and that can be a bit of a painstaking thing to do. Or you can use an external app like we talked about in a previous lesson, which is definitely the most reliable option of these. As a bonus tip, try to avoid using lots of modes next to each other in your comments and captions. And that's just because screen readers will read these out as their lt texts, which is the text used to represent that emoji. So if you have six of them next to each other, it will say smiling face with heart eyes, emoji six times over, and that can be very, very annoying. So those are my 5.5 tips for making your wheels more accessible, but as always, remember, it's about progress, not perfection. There will be days where you will forget to put close captions in, and your reels cover will not have enough contrast, and your text will be too small. And it's all okay. Do not be yourself um for any of this. I'm guilty of it myself. Nobody's perfect. It's all okay. Just having these accessibility chips somewhere in the back of your mind as you're creating content will be a huge step towards making Instagram and other platforms a more accessible place to be for other users. So thank you for letting me share this lesson with you. Thank you for watching it, and I'll see you in the next one. 22. Create an Instagram Reel Cover: At this stage, you're almost ready to post your reel. I know it's been a wild ride to get here, and you're probably ready to get to the next step. But one last step is to choose a cover for your reel or create one from scratch. And this is what's going to appear on your profile. If you choose the share to feed function in the next lesson, if you choose not to share it to your feed, it will still appear in the reels tab of your profile. So it's a good idea to make sure that whatever cover you choose is quite representative of what your reel is about and gets people to click on it. So let's take a look at a few different options for your reels covers. Option one is to just go in and select a part of the reel and preview how it'll appear on your profile to make sure it's not cropping out any crucial information. This is particularly easy for reels you might make within cama, like quote reels or tweet reels. Option two is for when you still want to create a cover from your reel itself, but there isn't really a screenshot that makes sense because maybe you're actually filming yourself with captions underneath, so there isn't really a still of your reel that would make sense as a cover. For example, for this reel here, maybe this is not something I would want on my profile for whatever reason. If I was going to edit the cover, maybe there isn't really a section in here that would work because maybe I found that hey, on my profile grid, this doesn't actually look too good. You can use this option to move up and down within your frame. But I've found it to be a little bit glitchy. So I don't like to depend on that. I think that's kind of a last case resort. But in this case, what I would maybe do just for the sake of us looking at a few different things is I would look at the original video. I would pause that and just try and find a screenshot within it where maybe my face is looking all right, but I wouldn't mind having that on my profile, and I would just take a screenshot of this and this is something that I can then add some texts to if I wanted to within Instagram stories, and then use that. I'm going to save this as a draft. I'm going to add this to my stories. Then let's say I still wanted to have some text on it. I could just say something like in this case, I'm just going to say camera confidence. Is key. Because really at this point, we're just looking at a demo of how I would go about this. Let's say I would just add that in here to make sure that it's going to be nice and center. And now I would just go ahead and save that again. I'm not actually posting this as a story. I'd go back into my drafts. I would just go through to edit my cover and add this from my camera roll. Now within my profile grid, let's say that's something I would much prefer to have on my profile because the text is clear, and I've chosen a part of the reel that I really do want on the cover, and that's a really great option for that. Finally, option three is to just use a completely separate cover. This can be a really good option for a lot of companies that might have a very strong consistent look and feel to their Instagram account. They don't want to necessarily break this up with some ad hoc reals content. Or maybe you just prefer the look of a customized real cover. That's totally fine as well. Let's take a look at how to do this. So when it comes to custom covers, Camber has some really great options for different templates, and they're bright and colorful, and they would definitely work for real covers. The issue I have with them is that it's really difficult for you to actually get that consistent look and feel if you're mixing and matching different templates like this, and that's probably the reason you're doing a custom cover in the first place. So I would recommend either just making your own and making, ten, 15 different designs that all sort of makes sense with the different fonts and styles. Or just heading on over to a resource like creative market and purchasing a collection of cover templates within amba that you can just import and quickly customize your brand, and you're good to go from there. I've linked that within your resource guide, but for our purposes, we're actually just going to start from scratch, and we're going to be starting with an Instagram story template this time. The reason that I'm doing an Instagram story instead of an Instagram reel is because covers don't move. We don't need it to be a video template. It can just be a static template. I can either create my real cover from a screenshot. So for this one, in particular, I would just sort of go through the real, find a shot that I like. In this case, it would be this one, and I could either take a screenshot of this on my phone or just because I've got it here, I'm going to take the screenshot on my desktop, and then I can just bring it into my uploads folder to use for my covered design. Or you can completely start from scratch. So the beauty of making custom real covers is that they do not have to have really anything to do with your actual real in terms of the screenshot that you take. You can completely customize them. So completely up to you, how you go about it. I'm going to bring this one in here and show you a few different ways that you can use images in your cover design. In this case, I'm just going to go ahead and adjust this to be desaturated. And then I'll start bringing in my brand colors into my design. So I'm just going to bring in let's say this particular blue here, I'm just going to duplicate this. And with this one, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to use a part of it here for just a part of my image. I can double click into my photo so I can move it up and down to just get the shot that I want. And I'm going to make this almost completely transparent. I just want to see a tiny tiny, little bit of it just to give it a little bit of that extra intrigue and I'm going to bring in some text here. Then change this to my brand colors again and make that a little bit bigger. I'm going to bring that down here. Now, at this stage, I would probably want to make this a little bit more interesting with a photo that might have something to do with me being on camera because I'm talking about being on a camera and filming the behind the scenes of my online courses. So I could just go ahead and select any of the photos from here where people are on camera or feature camera equipment. And then I can head on over to edit image and go to smart mockups to get a mock up of a phone. You can get ones where people are holding them, but I like just the general mock up so that I can sort of play around with them a little bit more within my design. Now, that particular image is not exactly a vertical image. So it doesn't sort of squish it down because we've got it on Phil. But if you want to just move around the image, just head on over to custom, and this way, you can sort of control which part of the image it's showing in the frame. But I'm quite happy with what it's chosen for me, so I'm just going to hit apply, and I'm just going to shrink this down a little bit. And bring it a little bit off screen just to make it a little bit more interesting yet again. Now, I can't see Trudy anymore because I've blocked this, so I could either move my phone to the side or I can just use the flip function so that I can bring her back into the frame there. All right. That looks pretty good. And I might just stretch this out over three lines and left to ale that and just make sure that it's aligned with the bottom of the phone. So that's looking pretty good. It's pretty minimalistic. I could also bring in something like lines or dots or I like the keyword of speckle because that gives me these nice little splatters that can all have their colors change, which is quite cool. So I can just bring these into the corner. Keep in mind, this is not something anyone would actually see on my profile. It's just something that would be seen on the Instagram reels feed because that's where you can see the full picture. So it's just a tiny, little bit of texture there. And now the main thing that I want to make sure of is to see how this is going to appear on my profile. So there are two ways to do this, and we're actually going to do both of them. So the first is to bring in the template that I have designed for you and bring it on top of your design here. So that you can see that in the transparent square is what's going to appear on your profile. Obviously, things are literally cut off and I could just go ahead and rearrange them. But to make this even easier for yourself, because likely you're going to have one of these documents that might have 30, 40 different real covers in it. Instead, if you head on over to file view settings and show rulers and guides, I've already got mine turned on here, but in case they weren't, I could either press Shift R or select it from here. So now I've removed them. I can bring them back with my Shift R. And what I want to do is drag this invisible little line from the top of this roller and drag another one just to where the template shows me is roughly the center of my Instagram real cover. This then allows me to design without this template being in the way. And when it comes to this particular real icon as well, that's a nice little check to just make sure that there's no text behind this or around this because that would make it quite hard to read. So that's just there for you as a final check. But now I can go ahead and delete my template from the back, and I can still see those nice purple lines there. So I can go ahead and just move things around a little bit so that I can make sure everything's going to look nice and professional on my profile. I can see roughly this is what's going to appear on my Instagram profile, and the rest of it will only be visible on my rails feed. Now, at any point, I can hit Shift R again, and it's going to get rid of not just the top and the side ruler, but also the guides. So if you're ever designing, you can definitely get rid of them and then just bring them in at the end just to see how things are tracking for yourself. So I'm going to go ahead and download this, and I only want to be downloading page one of this as a PNG. Of course, I'd want to rename my file so that it makes sense. But for now, it's totally fine. And now in the next lesson, we'll go through and actually post our beautiful reel. So I'll see there. 23. Post Your Instagram Reel: At this stage, we have everything ready to go to go ahead and post our real from within Instagram. And I'm going to be doing this from a dummy account that I have set up, and that's actually a hack I would really recommend to any of you who might be prone to feeling a bit of anxiety around testing out Instagram's features to live accounts that have followers on it because these types of accounts that are just completely blank accounts do not have followers. So even if you do something like testing out Instagram live features, no one's even going to say that you're going live because you don't have followers. So, I would definitely recommend if you're a little bit nervous about testing out Instagram features on your own account that you do set up some blank accounts so that you can test a few of these things out. So that's exactly what we're going to be doing, and we're going to go ahead and post our real. So here we are on her fake account, and we're just going to go ahead and post our beautiful cava real here. And it does have the music in the back there. She can here a little bit of I'm going to mute that just so we don't find it too distracting, but it's good to know that it's definitely back there, and I don't need to do anything over here. This is the section we want to focus on at this stage. We want to bring in our caption from our spreadsheet over here. If I was going to add my hash tags to my caption, I would just make sure I'm doing that before copying it over and bringing it into Instagram. But in this case, I'm actually happy to put my hash tags in the first comment. I'm just going to leave it at that. I'm going to copy over my caption here. Okay. And bring it in here. Now one thing to note, for some reason, with the mobile app, this does give us some quotation marks at the beginning, and at the very end of my caption, not sure why this doesn't happen if you copy it over from your desktop, but obviously, I'm trying it'd be a little bit more mobile friendly here, just so you know that it might have some extra quotation marks there, but it's not a huge deal. It does say video description in the comments. That's all good. Let's talk about our cover. I'm going to go ahead and just select a frame from the very end of my real here and make sure that that looks good on my profile. If I was going to post it on my profile, which I am. Awesome, and there's nothing in the upper right hand corner where the real icon is going to appear. So now I'm going to continue optimizing, and then I'm also going to prepare my video description and my hashtags so that I can quickly post that as the first common once this is live. So actually, let's do that first. I'm going to go over and take my video description, copy that. I don't usually go through all these extra steps of adding it into my notes or anything like that. I'm doing this because I'm not using my computer, but if I was going to be just doing this on my computer, I wouldn't have to do that. I'm just going to go ahead and add this in as a video description, add my hash tags in underneath this. You can just do it all within your spreadsheet as well. This is probably a little bit of extra effort. I'm going to copy that and add it into my notes. Okay. That looks pretty good, and I could just space that down so that there is a nice degree of separation, and now I just need to make sure I am copying this over so that I'm ready to paste this into my first comment. Again, you could just do this all within your spreadsheet at this stage. This is just a little bit more mobile friendly. Now let's continue editing. We've got the share to feed toggled on so that it's going to appear not just within our real speed but also within our actual profile. I could tag people here, or I could invite collaborators. Let's say if I wanted to add another one of my accounts in as a collaborator so that this is a real that goes out to both of our audiences. I could do that here. Then I could tag some products if I was an e commerce business. I could additionally add a message button, which is not relevant for this particular real. I could add in some extra topics on top of my hash tags if it was relevant. So I don't think any of these really are in terms of what I'm talking about. Potentially business, but really in this case, no, I don't think any of this is really relevant to me. And I could rename the audio that I'm using in case people want to be using this audio track for their own reels so that it doesn't just say original audio. But in this case, I'm happy for it to just say original audio because it's not something that anyone would be using. I could also add in my location if it was relevant. This particular reel, even though I did create it here in Brisbane Australia is not about Brisbane Australia, so I probably wouldn't add a location And this is the section that we were talking about earlier, where if we have toggled on the ability to recommend on Facebook, it will then pop up with this option. And I could then turn that off for this particular reel here, which is exactly what I am going to do and say, turnoff for this real only. So it doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing. You can, of course, just have it for some reels and not others. Advanced settings wise. This is where you can go through to show captions if you want automatic captions placed onto it. Again, I don't find this to be the most accessible feature because you don't have the ability to edit what captions appear. It's also not relevant. For this particular reel, so that's fine. Then when we talked about earlier, your highest quality data usage, uploading at highest quality. In case you forgot to do that earlier, here's your final check to toggle that on as well. So we're going to go ahead and share that and then we're going to pop into our first comment and add in our beautiful video description and our hash tags. Now my other account has gotten a notification to say, I've been tagged in a real. And it says, I've been invited as a collaborator, and I haven't accepted yet, so we're going to have a look at that in just a second. I'm going to paste in my video description along with my beautiful captions or my hash tags there. That's all good to go. Here's what that looks like on my profile. I've got some just example posts that I've used for other demos in the past. But just so you know that's how it'll appear, and then it will also appear in my actual real speed here. This is where people can interact with it, share it, et cetera. At this stage, I do want to say there's no perfect time to post Instagram content. You can use a tool like flick that will tell you ideal times when most of your audience is awake and active. Or you can head on over to Instagram insights from your profile and then click on Total followers and scroll down to most active times to get this information directly from within Instagram. And then if you happen to find out that the most active times just don't work for your time zone or you're doing this for clients. Then as you're about to publish your real head to advanced settings and you can toggle on schedule this real so you don't have to manually publish it, or you can, of course, use external scheduling tools as well. One tip I will give you is that most people post on the hours. So what I mean by that is they'll post at 12:00 P.M. Or 3:00 P.M. Or four 30, but they won't post it sort of obscure times. So sometimes it can benefit you to post it like four 13 because no one's really going to think to post at that time, especially because a lot of people are scheduling their content. So if everyone else is publishing at the top of the hour, it can benefit you to publish a little bit before that or a little bit after that. But in terms of the perfect time, doesn't really exist and just do the best that you can. Now, I'm just going to jump into my other account just to see what it looks like if somebody does invite you to be a collaborator on a real. I'll say, they've tagged me in a real, and now I can go on over here and say, review and accept decline or cancel. So in this case, I could accept it and just say, e, I want to be a collaborator, and now it's got both of our names there, which can be a really beneficial thing if you're collaborating with people who have really big audiences because you can sort of cross share audiences, which is really cool. Now, let's just switch back. Obviously, this is also a private account, so no one's going to see it. But once you've accepted that you're going to be a collaborator, it's going to appear on your profile, as well as theirs. Now if I head on back over to this account, we can take a look at what we can actually do with this once a real is alive. We have some editing options over here where we can edit the caption and potentially even your cover. This can be a little bit glitchy, so do not depend on it. Exactly. But you can go through and edit the caption for sure and maybe tag some additional products locations and potentially retrospectively also look at adding captions. Now back in here, we can also have a look at what else is a possibility, including removing this from our profile grid. Let's say I decided that this actually looks really messy on my profile because prior to having it on my profile, this was a really nice puzzle feed and it's rode my vibe, I wanted to remove it. Now it's just going to be in my reels feed. But then I've changed my mind and now I actually really would like this to be back on my profile. I can just go back to manage and add to profile grid, and now it's going to be back there. You can change your mind about these things. It's not a permanent thing. And likewise, you can also pin it to your profile. If you've got a reel that you think really represents your business, You want to make sure that this is the real that people come across first when they come to your profile, you can pin it to your profile, and then anytime you post new things on your profile, your pinned posts are going to be right at the top every time. That's a perfect opportunity for any reels that are really, really important to your business that maybe introduce your mission and vision or your products or services. Okay, so look at this point, I know it can seem like this is a lot of work to post one single reel. And you're probably right. It might be. But the whole point of going through this process is so that when you are posting multiple reels and you are kind of doing this as a strategy to grow your account, not just to get one reel out into the world, which will be the case for you in the future, hopefully. You will have a really solid strategy in place to do that. And if it's any consolation, the time that it took me to plan 21 reels for my business to post in one month was about three days. And if I was doing this ad hoc, it would have taken me a lot longer than that. So if you can get adjusted to having this kind of process in place and breaking things down into chunks, it will really help to save you time and streamline your workflow. And now in the next lesson, we're just going to take a look at a few little tips for actually increasing the visibility of your wheel now that it's live. 24. Get More Visibility For Your Reels: Okay. So you've posted your reel. Congrats. And now maybe the panic sense in a bit. What if no one likes it? What if I found it funny, but no one else did. Should I delete it? Maybe I shouldn't have posted it in the first place. Okay, breathe. I know this can be really scary. But I promise it does get easier. The way that your heart sort of inevitably drops the first time you do anything online, that does go away with practice, or at least it gets smaller and lesser with practice. The first time I did an Instagram live, I completely sweat through my entire outfit, and it was just a puddle of nerves by the end. But the third, fourth, fifth time you do something, it's going to get easier and easier. Unless you're one of those people, that's like cool as a cucumber and does not get phased by any of this, then feel free to ignore me. But if like me, you overanalyze every little thing, then just know it's going to get better. And a really big key of this is to not focus on surface level metrics and keep reminding yourself of the goals that you set at the beginning. Because like we talked about, views and likes are rarely a measure of success, which is why you can buy these things. You can buy followers, you can buy likes. But the things you can't buy are the results in terms of the revenue of your business, the engagement of your audience, the real true engagement, not the stuff that you can just buy online. So just keep reminding yourself of all of that. And also give yourself a bit of a break because if you're a new account or a really small account, Instagram doesn't really know you yet. They don't know whether they can trust you yet. So chances are they're not going to push your content out to as many people as they will once you start consistently posting on the platform and build those beautiful genuine connections. So my first hit for getting you more visibility for your reels is for you to get social on Instagram. People always get a bit shocked when I say they're not going to get much out of social media without being social, but it's true. This is not a passive sport where you can just put content out there and hope it sticks. You do have to actually engage and get a little bit social on a platform like Instagram in order to get the most out of it. And while there's a lot that is unknown about the Instagram algorithm, one thing is definitely clear. It wants to show us more of what we've engaged with in the past to keep us on the platform for longer. So the best way to actually make sure that people are seeing your content is to help by engaging with their content and send them DMs and like their stories and comment on their posts. It helps to strengthen the bond between your accounts, but it's also a huge benefit of having a smaller Instagram account, because for example, if you see really big accounts, they might have thousands of comments. They don't have the time to respond to 1,000 comments. And if they do, it's usually something like thinks or like a thumbs up. But as a small account, you actually have the time to dedicate to not only responding to every comment on your real, but thoughtfully responding to every comment on your real, maybe even asking a follow up question that prompts a conversation in the comments on your real, which helps to boost visibility and engagement. You can also get people to engage with you by giving them prompts, like to ask me anything option within your stories. So adding a story into your Instagram account, I'm just going to select a random photo here to use as my background. And then I'm going to add the question sticker. So over here, I'm just going to say, ask me anything. And then that's going to go live. Now, no one's really following me on this particular account except my other accounts, so that works pretty well. Now I'm going to switch accounts, so we can see what it looks like when somebody actually responds to this. So this account can now see this. They can come in here and say, does your film set up. Look like. And now, if I go back to my original account, the account that I'm trying to grow, I will both have a notification about it here saying they've responded, but also on the actual story itself. If I go to activity, I can see the response there, and that allows me to then either DM them and just reply in a message, so I can just message them and say, Hey, I saw that you're interested in learning about my filming setup and start a conversation that way, or I can share their response with an answer with me actually talking about it or just using a video clip like this one in the background, which basically answers their question in this way anyway. Doing all of this just makes it so much more likely that they'll see your content and engage with it in the future. The second thing I want to talk about is ways for you to boost your views. So we will talk about ways to boost engagement and views on your reels, but just know that you are not supposed to be doing every single one of these with every single real. It's more just about giving you some ideas about a few different things that you can try with each individual reel. Firstly, you want to keep it short. People have a very short attention span, so try to catch their attention quickly and for single clip rails, try to keep them really short. Definitely under 15 seconds, but it can't even be 5 seconds if it makes sense for your reel. Then for multi clip reels, like behind the scenes reels or multi video reels, you want there to be some change every two to 3 seconds, which creates a pattern interrupt and it makes it so much more likely that people are going to watch your reel for longer because it keeps it nice and dynamic. You may also want to tag other accounts in your stories when you're sharing their content, which then alerts them through a DM and prompts them to hopefully share that with their followers. So using myself as an example here, I'm still logged in as my fake account, but I'm on my personal profile here, so I can go into a real like this one, for example, and I'm going to be sharing that to my story here. But I could tag that account so I can go over to mention and actually tag myself, and I could say something about it, obviously, in this case. I'm not saying anything about it, but I could say something like, Wow, loving this real from May Sara, it's been really insightful, helpful, et cetera. If you do not tag them specifically, it will still help them because you're still sharing their content, but they won't actually see that you're sharing it. So if I tag them, I'm just going to go ahead and add that to my story. Okay, so now it's telling me that someone's mentioned me in their story, so I can switch accounts, and let's head on over. I can see it as a notification to say this story mentions me, and I'll also see it as a DM. So it'll say this person has mentioned me in their story and I could now go through and add this to my story. And this is particularly handy for reviews, testimonials, and just people sharing the love so you can then potentially give them a bit more visibility on their account, and this can be a great way to do that. And now let's talk about ways for you to boost engagement. So as we've already talked about, make sure you're giving them a call to action to comment or send a DM or save the real or whatever it is that you want your audience to do. Then when sharing reels to your stories, don't just share it and expect people to watch it. You can ask a question related to the real, which makes them curious and makes them want to engage with it more. So for this particular kind of real, for example, I could share that to my story, and then add a pole sticker up here. So I could add and say something like, which one are you choosing helping yourself helping others. I mean, it's a no brainer. You're probably not going to get anyone picking that first one. This is not the best example. I probably would never say that in my stories. But let's just say, you know, that's something that's that's quite relevant to the real that I am sharing, and it makes them more curious about what this reel is actually about because I've now added in that engagement sticker. It makes them much more likely to click into the reel, and it provides a bit of context around it. Also, don't just continuously create content for people who aren't following you yet. Create some content that would only be relevant to your existing followers, but allows them to get to know you a little bit better or showcases a different part of your personality or business. For example, I shared some photos from our wedding and also when I was first learning digital illustration. Now, neither of these would be particularly relevant to people who don't follow me, but it makes my existing followers feel special and makes them so much more likely to engage with my business content in the future as well. Lastly, make sure you're focusing on the what's in it for my audience angle, not what's in it for me. For example, if you're showcasing a diaper bag for new dads, the fact that it has four compartments, multiple color options, and waterproof lining might be interesting to you because of all the hard work you put into the product. But for them, they'd probably prefer to just hear about the fact that they'll be able to fit everything they need. They'll look cool while they're going out with it and they'll know that no matter what they check in there, it's not going to cause more mess. Technically, you're highlighting the exact same features, but in a way that highlights the benefit to them and speaks their language. Hopefully, that's given you some ideas about ways in which you can help to boost the impact of your reels. Now I'll see you in the next lesson. 25. Take Action & Post a Project: So now it's over to you, head on over to the projects and resources section of the class and include a link to your reel so that I can help you out by showing you a little bit of love on the Instagram app to help give your content a little bit more visibility. So as you go through to create a project, give your project a title, then as an optional step, you can upload an image that you might create within Camva to represent your beautiful reel, but you absolutely don't have to. So I've just created a quick one here, and I'm just going to add that in. And then for your description, I just want you to make sure that the link to your reel is somewhere in there. And as an optional step, I've also added in what I enjoyed and where I struggled with the process of creating my reel. You don't have to share that with me, but it could just be a fun little extra step. And then just head on over to hit publish. Again, just a reminder here that your account has to be set to public, not private on Instagram in order for me and other students to be able to view your real. Now, if you haven't posted a real yet at this stage, maybe you're waiting until the end of the class to do so, that's totally fine. Just remember that you can always refer back to the class guide in order to get a bit of a recap of everything we've talked about and also check out some further resources for inspiration of what to create. 26. Thank You : Well, you've made it to the end. So huge congratulations to you and hope you're feeling incredibly proud of getting through all the content and hopefully feeling a lot more confident with the world of Instagram reels, and you're ready to share some beautiful content with your Instagram community. Of course, I'd love to see it as well. So if you'd like, you can share it with me over on Instagram by tagging me in your stories and in your reels, or sending me a DM, so I can check out all of your hard work coming to life, or you can share it with me in the projects and resources section of the class. And just remember to always choose progress over perfection. If that means only posting reels that don't show you on camera for the first few weeks, months, years or forever, that's totally fine. If it means you're posting reels that have spelling mistakes in them or some glitches or they're missing audio or whatever else might be going wrong with your reels, we've all been there. It's all okay. And the Instagram World will give you a break. I promise that we build things up in our heads so much more than the online community ever would. As long as you're approaching your creative process with kindness and you're just going into it with knowing that you're just doing the best you can, Absolutely, put content out there, even if it's not perfect, and just remember that every mistake is a learning opportunity in disguise. If you enjoyed the class, I would be so grateful if you could leave me a review and follow me here on Skillshare to get updates about future classes I create and receive additional marketing tips I share with my followers here on the platform. And remember, I'm always available in the discussion section. So if you have any questions for me, make sure to pop them in there, and I'll do my best to help. Thank you so much for being here. I really couldn't do what I do without you wanting to learn from me through classes like this one. So I really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day to learn with me through this class. And I hope to see you in another class again very soon. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and I'll see you next time. I don't know. This isn't good. I know it's gotten here. Do you want to go back and say your? Do you want to stay stay? What do we learned about making Instagram eels? What have we learned about making Instagram heels? Anything? Nothing, 'cause you don't have posable thumbs.