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📊 Carousels are beating Reels on Instagram
Welcome back to TWISM!
Instagram carousels got more views than Reels at every account size Socialinsider measured, from 1K followers to over 100K (Socialinsider).
On Oct 15, Socialinsider published an analysis of 62.7M brand posts from January to September 2026 across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and X.
If most of what you post on Instagram is Reels, you may be skipping the format that gets more views at your size. Carousels were ahead even for the smallest accounts in the study, and the gap gets bigger as accounts grow.
I'll walk you through the numbers for your follower size, how to build a carousel people swipe through, and why you shouldn't copy this to Facebook. 👇
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📈 Carousels win at every size, and the gap grows with you
Socialinsider, which sells social media analytics software, looked at 21.6M Instagram posts from brand accounts with at least 1K followers. Here are the average views per post, carousels against Reels, at each follower size:
1K-5K followers: carousels 700 views, Reels 652
5K-10K followers: carousels 1,525 views, Reels 1,117
10K-50K followers: carousels 3,990 views, Reels 3,047
50K-100K followers: carousels 9,720 views, Reels 5,628
Over 100K followers: carousels 35,147 views, Reels 19,167
Single images got fewer views than carousels at every size.
The gap grows as the account grows. At 1K-5K followers, carousels lead by 48 views. Above 100K followers, they get nearly twice the views of Reels.
Carousels also have the highest engagement rate at every size except the smallest. Under 5K followers, Reels edge carousels, 0.80% to 0.75%, even though carousels still win on views there.
Two limits are worth knowing. Engagement here means likes plus comments, divided by followers. And every account in the study is a brand account, so personal accounts and creators aren't in the count.
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🧩 Why slide 2 is your second chance
Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a 2024 tip video that carousels get more reach than single photos. One reason he gave: if someone sees your carousel and doesn't swipe, Instagram can show it to them again, starting on slide two (RouteNote). Socialinsider's report gives the same tip and calls slide two your backup hook.
Here's how to build a carousel around that:
Make slide two work on its own. It may be the first slide someone sees the second time the post comes around, so write it as a hook that stands without slide one.
Build the carousel to be saved or shared. A checklist, a step-by-step how-to, or a before-and-after gives people a reason to keep it or send it to a friend. Socialinsider notes that Instagram has named shares by DM one of its strongest signals. (The study's engagement number doesn't count saves or shares, so this part is their advice. Their data doesn't measure it.)
Use more slides when the idea needs them. Instagram allows up to 20 photos or videos in one carousel (Social Media Today). Mosseri's point was that more pieces of media give people more to engage with, so a how-to with 12 steps can have 12 slides.
Keep Reels for reaching new people. Socialinsider's advice is to use Reels to reach new people and carousels to turn that attention into engagement. Add carousels to your mix instead of dropping Reels.
Open the caption with the words people would search for. Socialinsider's reason: Instagram search now leans more on the words in captions than on hashtags. Add alt text to every slide while you're there.
The easy part: turning a Reel idea into a carousel takes no filming. You already have the idea, so it's a format you can add this week.
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📘 On Facebook, Reels win by 4 to 6x
On Facebook, the same data says the opposite. Reels get the most views at every page size, roughly 4 to 6 times any other format. A page with 10K-50K followers averaged 1,043 views on a Reel, compared with 260 on an album and 248 on a single image. Above 100K followers, Reels averaged 5,778 views, compared with 937 on an album.
Engagement on Facebook has no single winner. Albums (posts with several photos) lead for the smallest pages, at 0.33%. Plain status posts lead from 5K to 50K followers. Reels take over above 100K. Link posts finish last at every size, between 0.03% and 0.13%.
On LinkedIn, document posts (PDF-style slides) and multi-image posts are the top two formats for engagement at every size. So the carousel you make for Instagram can go there as a document post.
Post the same idea as a carousel on Instagram and as a Reel on Facebook, because each platform's numbers point to a different format.
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✅ What to do this week
Find your follower size in the list above. It tells you how big the carousel gap is for an account like yours.
Turn one recent Reel into a carousel. Keep the same idea, run it across 5-10 slides, and write slide two as its own hook. It tests the format with an idea you already have.
Post that same idea as a Reel on Facebook. On Facebook, Reels get the most views at every page size, so the Reel version belongs there.
My suggestion: if your Instagram is mostly Reels, add one carousel a week before you change anything else. That lets you see how carousels do on your account before you move more of your posts over.
☝️ The one-sentence version
On Instagram, carousels get more views than Reels at every account size, so add a carousel with a strong second slide to your week and keep the Reel version for Facebook.
Your turn: what share of your Instagram posts last month were carousels?
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📚 Sources
That's all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…
Go BIG or go home!
~ Josh from "This Week in Social Media"
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