How to schedule Instagram Trial Reels in bulk without disrupting your regular publishing queue

Yes, it can now. Clipflow adds the automatic drafts, trial-only time slots and bulk review on top, once your Instagram channel is connected.

Not a separate automation, but a separate action. One automation can hold an action per post type, each with its own conditions and instruction.

The draft sits in the project. Publishing only picks up posts in Ready status.

Yes. Create Instagram Trial Reel posts by hand in the project and mark them Ready. Automations only remove the manual create step.

Turn on Skip if Media In Use on the Create Post action. It skips when that media is already used in a post of the same type on that project.

Teams running high volume in Clipflow see the same reach. Content and audience fit move the numbers far more than the publishing method.

Your time slots and your Ready queue set the limit, not Clipflow. Some teams target around ten a day, others fewer.

Trial Reels have very quickly become one of the biggest ways to grow a following on Instagram, so if you’re trying to build a buying audience for your business, this is the perfect way to get started. We’ve got people on Clipflow adding tens of thousands of followers a week from using Trial Reels and, like, abusing them, like posting a lot, but you can’t really post a lot unless you’ve got a scheduling tool.

Unfortunately, the Meta Business Suite doesn’t let you schedule Trial Reels, and if you don’t want to be on your phone all the time remembering “I’ve got to go schedule my Trial Reels”, bulk scheduling them is the best way to go and you need a platform like Clipflow for it. (Meta Business Suite has added Trial Reel scheduling since this was recorded.)

Now the accounts that are getting tens of thousands of followers a week, obviously they’ve already got a big following, they’ve got 200,000 followers. We’ve got someone who started at 150,000 followers and then after they started bulk scheduling with Clipflow, I think they’re at about 230,000 followers now. If your audience size isn’t that big, you’re not going to necessarily see the same amount of growth, but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be taking advantage of it as much as you can.

At least at the time of recording this, it looks like Instagram’s giving about five Trial Reels a day proper exposure to the algorithm. It used to be 20, but I think they realized that people were gaming the system too hard, but you want to be making sure you’re getting at least five Trial Reels out a day across all of your channels where possible.

And the good thing about it is it only goes out to people who don’t follow you yet, so not only can you test and experiment a lot more without putting things on your main feed, if you’re like us and you run ads, a lot of people don’t convert from an ad through to “learn more” to go to your landing page, they go check out your Instagram profile first. So you might be a bit more particular about what’s showing on that main feed, and Trial Reels don’t get in the way of that. It’s a completely separate thing. No one can see what you’re doing there.

That is one of the reasons why it’s a really good way to grow audiences, because it’s just going out to people who don’t follow you yet, and the types of things that you’re promoting. And while you can and should use the exact things you’re posting on your main feed through trials to experiment with them, you don’t have to, you can go a lot wider and a lot more experimental and attract a lot more audience that way.

Clipflow has an official Instagram API integration and, like all of the other posts that we let you schedule, this is just another type of post. So it’s exactly the same part of your process that you’re currently doing to automate creating Instagram posts, to create Facebook posts, to create YouTube Shorts, to create LinkedIn posts, exactly the same process. You’re just setting up another product type in the platform.

First things first, what you’re going to need to do if you haven’t already is connect an Instagram channel, and then the setup basically has two parts. An automation is going to draft a Trial Reel post every time you approve a piece of media, and the time slots will take trials and keep them from using a spot in your main feed. These will just go to slots designed for Trial Reels so that you can have those five completely separate from what you’re doing over here.

Once you’ve got Instagram connected and you’ve got some media uploaded in a project ready to approve, and you’ve decided if the clips are going to trial or they’re going to your main feed as well. Just noting that if you want to promote a Trial Reel up to the main feed, which is an option that Instagram gives you, that has to be done natively in the platform. Some people like to do that because it carries social proof up to the main feed and you’ll get comments, likes and so on from it. Other people say you may as well be getting as many views as you can from both by posting two completely separate ones. It’s up to you which way you do it. We recommend doing both because a new audience gets to see it, the existing audience gets to see it, and as long as there’s a little bit of a difference in the time that you’re posting them, it won’t affect either algorithm.

So you’re going to go to your organization settings and open Automations. You may already have one, depending on when you signed up, for drafting social posts. So you can check that one first and you can add trials into that, or you can create a brand new one. Click Add, call it “Draft trial reels”, set the trigger of the automation to media file status change and save it, and then you can add a condition for media status equals Approved, and that will stop the draft post appearing while a clip’s still in review.

Then you can add an action and call it “Instagram Trial Reel”, pick your agent, give it the Create Post tool and choose Instagram Trial Reel as the product, then write the instruction, which is how you want the caption written. The agent is going to read the video’s transcript and write a caption from it. And if you’ve already used Claude or ChatGPT to write your captions, you can basically just port the instruction over to here and then you don’t have to type it, paste it, remember where your prompt is every time you want to make a post. It just knows that that’s the exact instruction for that, and it’ll write it into your post.

Next up, open your Instagram channel and go to time slots, and add some slots that only accept Trial Reels, and take Trial Reels off your main feed slots. Because you’ll have an Instagram post type of any, you actually want these ones just to go to the trial schedule, which will generally be different because you’re probably putting more Trial Reels out than you are main feed videos, and the two will never compete for the same spot because they’re completely separate in Instagram.

And from here every video that you mark as approved is going to get a Trial Reel drafted, with the caption written and the media attached. Nothing will be published until you say it’s ready. Marking it as ready is very easy. You go into the post review queue, you can flip through them on your keyboard and hit R to mark them as ready, and each one will just automatically find the next available trial slot and put it in there so you don’t have to think about it. You won’t look at that post again until you’re reading analytics of all of your posts. So you’re not paying too much attention to the micro, granular post by post and just looking at the bigger picture.

Now, depending on the size of your team and your business, you might have a lot of resources for editing and you might want to put a lot of Trial Reels out there, or you might just be getting started. If you’re new, I would go trial first and then feed second, and I would test everything that you make as a Trial Reel, checking your analytics and then putting the winners on the main feed. If you’ve got a lot more resources, you might want to be recording completely different hooks and editing the same video in three different ways and testing it that way. It’s totally up to you.

If you need any help getting that set up, we’re always available in our help widget, the little headset in the bottom left of your screen. If you want to talk about how other people are using Trial Reels and what strategies they’re using, or you’d like some information that you could brief an editor on for how to make more Trial Reels that test more things, just book a call with us and we’ll tell you how people are getting the most out of Trial Reel experimentation. Peace.