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Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
Does The Edits App Boost Vews On Instagram?
00:18:26
In today’s episode, I analyze the impact of the Edits app on Instagram Reels views. We’ll take a closer look at a study of Reels posted using the Edits app and examine whether using this tool truly increases views and engagement. I’ll walk you...
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- [00:00]
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Darwin would approve. T Mobile's network has adapted to so many locales because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's largest 5G network. Switch now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off up to $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines of your virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualified unlock device, credit service port in 90 plus days device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card is no cash access and expires in six months.
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Does using the Edits app from Instagram help you get more views on your reels? That is probably the number one question I've been getting over the last few weeks. And while I have my own hypothesis, I wanted to figure out the truth. And so I did what we always do here at this podcast Build you'd Tribe and in our business, the Insta Club Hub, which is I looked for the data, I did a study, I pulled the numbers, I did some calculations, and I got an answer. And so the purpose of today's episode is to outline the study that I did and my conclusions with you. But first, let me get you up to speed as to what the heck we're even talking about. Earlier this year, actually the exact day that TikTok and Cap Cut were unavailable in the U.S. instagram announced that they were coming out with their own editing app called Edit. It doesn't take being a crazy conspiracy theorist to figure out why Instagram decided to announce their editing app on the same day that probably the number one social media editing app was unavailable. But I digress. That's not the purpose of today's episode, regardless of the reasoning behind it. That was the day that Instagram announced Edits. And then on April 22, 2025, Instagram officially rolled out this new app. Now, in case you haven't downloaded it or checked it out yet, Edits is a very simple editor. It is built to help you make Instagram reels. And that's about it. You're not gonna be editing any long form content, any horizontal content, any content for YouTube or any really compl edits within the Edits app. It was an app that was intentionally and explicitly designed to be simple and to be user friendly. Now, with that being said, I don't think it's necessarily the best editing app. It's not the one that I prefer. I know they do have some features planned for the next few months that are going to really improve the app and improve the editing capabilities of it. But for now, I will say for the majority of my short form content, I prefer to edit on capcut. Like I said, April 22nd was the day that edits officially became available worldwide. And almost immediately they there began the rumor mill. And the rumor mill, of course, was that if you use the edits app, you will get more views on Instagram. There's this very tried and true school of thought, which is when a social media app, specifically a meta social media app like Facebook or Instagram or Threads, releases a new feature, they give preferential treatment to people who use the feature, or they give extra views or extra reach to people who are actively using that new feature or that entirely new app. But in addition to those rumors that were being immediately spread by other social media coaches, there were also reports immediately coming in from people who had made their first reel using the edits app and saw that they were getting a lot of views. And so people were suddenly like, wait, is this actually the gold mine? Is this actually the secret sauce to getting more views on Instagram in 2025? Additionally, people very quickly noticed that if you created and posted a reel directly from the edits app, there would be a little button or a little badge in the bottom left corner above your username. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist or a social media expert to figure out, hey, if your reel has a big glowing made with edits label on it, that's going to grab people's attention and that might result in more engagement or more views. And then finally, a few days later, people started to realize that if you were viewing your notifications page, a lot of people were getting notifications that people they follow had posted a reel using the edits app, and that notification included a link to take them directly to the reel. And it was kind of like free advertising that, hey, I just posted a new reel in my followers notifications. And so all of this made me question my original hypothesis. And my original hypothesis was that using the edits app would not get you more views. I believed this because this is what Adam Mozeri has directly said himself. This is what he said in the interview that I did with him here on this podcast just a few weeks ago, which I will not stop talking about, because it's like the coolest flipping thing ever. If you haven't watched it yet, do yourself a favor and go check that out. I literally had a one hour sit down conversation with the head of Instagram on this podcast. Just a few weeks ago. So go back and check that out. I'll link it up in the show notes as well so that you can check that out if you haven't already. But that was something he said in the interview. That is also something that he has said numerous times on his own Instagram. On his own Instagram stories, he has explicitly stated, no, you will not get more views automatically just because you are using the edits app. And so when the edits app rolled out, that was my belief, that was my stance, that was the statement that I made. I literally posted reels myself telling people, no, you're not going to get more views. But then the reports started coming in, the rumors started flying around, the news about the notification and the badge started appealing. And it made me question, will you actually get more views if you use the edits app? And so I decided to do a study. I do want to give a shout out to my friend Abigail Pugh, who she is awesome herself on Instagram. Definitely give her a follow. We'll link up her Instagram down in the show notes. She helped me with this study. Her and I were brainstorming and talking about it back and forth, and she actually had a post that did really well that she edited in the edits app. And her saying that she had such a great experience kind of added extra motivation for me wanting to do this study. She also posted a story encouraging people to get involved with my study, which was very helpful. So thank you, Abby. But anyways, how did I actually do this study? I posted a series of posts and Instagram stories inviting people to basically self apply, involvement, volunteer to be a part of the study. And basically the only qualifications to be in the study is you had to have a public Instagram account so that we could look at your views and your data. And number two, you had to be someone who used the edits app. From there, we had over 200 people apply, which, by the way, if you were one of these 200 people who volunteered to be a part of the study, thank you so much. You are awesome. And this podcast episode would literally not be possible if it wasn't for you. If you were one of those volunteers, then you know what I'm about to say. But what I originally had the volunteers doing was submitting how many views their reels received when they edited using the edits app. That ended up being somewhat problematic for a few reasons. Number one, some people made typos, some people pressed enter or submit before they were finished typing in their number. Some people were submitting reels that didn't quite meet the criteria that we later decided were more important. And so, long story short, what we eventually ended up doing and is taking the long list of people who had volunteered and manually inputting the data ourselves rather than relying on their self submissions. And I do think that this ultimately made the data more accurate and more refined and more precise. So like I said, what we did, and when I say we, I mean me and the Insta Club Hub team who helps me out with this. What we did is we went to the profiles of every single person who volunteered to be a part of this study. And, and we scrolled through their recent reels and we basically input into the spreadsheet how many views they received on all of their reels that they had made in the Edits app. Up to 10 reels. We didn't find anyone who had done more than 10 reels using the Edits app. So we looked at at least one, but up to 10 reels that they had made using the Edits app. And we also tracked and logged how many views they got on their 10 most recent reels that were not made using the Edits app. Now, originally I thought this data collection would be impossible because there are no automated tools or services that currently can tell whether a reel was made using the edit app or not. Basically the only way to tell is if that little badge is applied to the reel, if that little icon that says Made in Edits or made with edits is on the reel. That's the only real way of knowing currently. And so it was a very painstaking process. It was possible, but it took about a week or two for me and my team to sift through all of this content and write down and note and track everything. So like I said, for every single person we tracked, up to 10 reels made using the edits app and 10 reels made not using the Edits app. And we excluded, we did include some exclusions because I felt like they would really skew the data. We excluded any posts that were collab posts because of course, collab posts just operate differently. Collab posts are literally shown to your audience and the person you're collaborating with. So that wouldn't really be a fair apples to apples comparison. That would be like apples to oranges. We also excluded any, any reels that were posted within the last 48 hours of our time of checking the person's profile. Basically, we decided that if it was two days or more since you had posted that reel, it had gotten the majority of its views. Now, don't worry. In a second I'm going to talk about some issues and some problems within this study. But essentially we figured, hey, if it's been 48 hours, that reel has gotten most of its views, or it's at least gotten enough views for us to have a good idea, a good indication of its performance. So all this to say we collected Data on over 460 reels that were edited using the Edits App and over 2,000 reels that were made not using the Edits app, which to me is a big enough sample size to draw some conclusions. And obviously that's what we're getting at here. That's what the point of today's episode is. But I admit that there are some problems with this study. It is in no way perfect. One of the problems is, of course, we don't have a massive sample size. I think that unfortunately, without an automated tool, without some sort of technology to do this for us, the realisticness, the plausibility of doing a study that includes 200,000 profiles and a million reels that were posted using the Edits app is just not possible. So, again, the sample size is not exactly massive, although I would argue that it's good enough to get a good indication as to where things are at. Number two, a definite problem is that views can change over time. It is totally possible that someone's reel that they made using the Edits app has gone viral since we saw it. Maybe we saw it a week or two weeks after it was posted, and since then the views have tripled. That's totally possible and we would have no way of knowing. So that is something that could have affected the outcome of this study. And then number three, of course, there are mistakes that are made. There is user input error, just like we originally were planning on having the people submit how many views they got on their reel, and they could have made a mistake. Us and our data analysts could have made a mistake as we were inputting the reels ourselves. Of course, we tried to do everything in our power to check each other and to make sure that we were going through everyone's profile at least twice to make sure that the numbers were accurate. And we did try to update the numbers as frequently as possible. So just because we wrote someone's views down on one day doesn't mean that it stayed that way. We would continue to check on their views while the study was ongoing. But of course, things get messed up. There's human error and there are typos that are made. But these are the types of studies that we use to determine the strategies that we teach in the Insta ClubHub. That's why our members get results. That's why last year our Average engaged Insta ClubHub member grew by 15,947 followers, almost 16,000 followers just for being an engaged member. Those are the kinds of results that we get for our 5,000 plus members. And we are committed, I am committed as the leader of the Insta Club Hub to sharing factual, evidence based strategies. Because yes, there are flashes in the pan and yes, there are exceptions to every rule, but if we can give you the things that are proven to work for most people, then you are more likely to get results in a shorter amount of time. The ultimate goal that I have for the Insta Club Hub is to get people the results they're looking for. Whether that's new followers, more business, more sales, more customers in the shortest amount of time possible. And one of the ways we do that is we have someone who basically is a doctor of Instagram on our team. This is someone who I didn't know this was a real thing when she first applied, but we were looking for someone to help us with this research and someone who really had a background in data analysis to help us keep abreast of trends and figure out strategies and do these sorts of studies with us. And we literally now have someone on our staff who has her PhD in strategic communication and she did her dissertation research on Instagram. So basically she's a doctor of Instagram. But enough about the club, I'll stop talking about it. I will link up a $7 two week trial that we have down in the show notes below the episode so you can get a taste of the club and see what things are like in there and see what kind of results we are getting for people and how we're getting those results. But I'm just so flipping proud of our team and so thankful for them and the geniuses, the super smart people on our team who help keep the business afloat and help do these really, really cool studies so that we can give you the actual facts, the actual data. And that's what we're committed to in the Insta ClubHub. That's what we're committed to at Build you'd Tribe. That's what I'm committed to on my Instagram is giving you the facts. Not my opinion, not what I think, not what I hope, but the actual tried and true tested facts. And so with all that said the results of the study, what did we conclude? Looking at all of the numbers, there was no significant difference between reels that were posted using the Edits app and reels that were posted not using the Edits app. In fact, when you average out all of the views on all of the reels, both for the Edits app and people who did not use the Edits app, the difference in views was less than 1%. 0.4% was the average difference in views. So basically no difference. And that was when we included the VFM data, which VFM stands for viral for me. And essentially that is a term that I often use here at Build you'd Tribe. That means a reel that far outperformed your average reel. Sure, it might not have gotten 10 million views, but it was viral for you. It was a big moment for you. It far outperformed what your reels normally do. And we looked at what the numbers look like when we excluded those sorts of numbers, because there were definitely people who had some reels that were edited in the edits app that went viral. And then we had some people who edited some reels not in the edits app. They edited them somewhere else, and they posted them as reels and they went viral. And so we decided to look at the numbers and say, well, what would happen if we excluded those? What happens if we exclude the reels, regardless of where they were edited, that got double the amount of views that you would average get, that got four times or five times the number of views that you would get on average? And even when we excluded all of those viral reels, the outliers, so to speak, we still saw that there was less than a 5% difference in views when you were using the Edits app or when you were not using the Edits app? The only real noticeable change that we saw in any of the numbers when we compared any sort of data set is that people who consistently use the Edits app for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 posts, they did see slightly better performance on each of those reels. It wasn't significant. It wasn't like suddenly their views were tripling just because they hit the third or the fourth reel made using the Edits app. But there was slight improvement on average from reel one to two to three to four. And so. So what does this lead me to conclude? I don't think it takes a rocket scientist or a data analysis to say what I'm about to say, which is edit wherever you want to edit. If you prefer editing in capcut, great. If you prefer Editing in edits. Great. If you prefer editing right on Instagram and you're fine with dealing with the constant glitches, that's fine too. Edit wherever you want to edit. Also, according to a study that was done by hootsuite just last year, there is no difference in views or performance for reels that were edited in cap cut or reels that were not edited in cap cut. Again, all of this to say, it does not matter where you edit your reels. You are free to make them on whatever editing app you prefer. That's the first thing I wanted to say. The second thing that I want to say is, stop chasing silver bullets. Stop looking for magic pills and solutions. They're going to make you go viral overnight. Very, very, very rarely do such strategies and such hacks actually exist. I can only think of a handful of actual hacks, actual things that you could try that allowed you to get a ton of views, a ton more than normal, even if your content wasn't significantly better. I can think of maybe two or three things over the last decade, and usually those things last for a day or maybe a couple weeks before they get patched and Instagram fixes their software or they tweak the algorithm so that those things are not effective. But what is effective on Instagram? What are the strategies that are proven to work? Well, of course, we've done tons of other build your tribe episodes about that. So rather than just rehashing all of that right now, I'll just link up a few of those in the show notes below. But what I can tell you even from this study is this, the more you put the reps in, the better you will get. I think that the reason that people who use the edits app for 4, 5, 6 reels continue to see better and better results was not that Instagram's like, oh, hey, this person used edit seven times. So let's make sure to push their reels out to slightly more people. I think it was simply that that person has made seven reels in the last few weeks since the Edits app has rolled out. And so they've been putting the reps in. They've been practicing, right? I am an absolute believer that at the end of the day, quality content is king. And if you can make the best quality content, you will get views regardless of what the algorithm thinks. You will reach the people you want to reach. But of course, the question becomes, how do we make high quality content? Yes, there are tips, yes, there are strategies. Yes, that is the whole point of build you'd tribe is to give you the tips and strategies to make higher quality content. But ultimately it is quantity that breeds quality. It is practice that leads to progress. It is putting the reps in and posting time and time again. Not just to post, not just to throw spaghetti at the wall, but to learn from each and every single post. To get 1% better, to improve one aspect, one element of each post. That is how you improve the quality of your reels and that ultimately is how you get more views on your reels. Thank you so much for listening today. And if you want more factual evidence based strategies for growing on social media, don't forget to hit that subscribe button because every single Thursday I release a new episode of this podcast to give you the updates that you need to know to actually see results on social. Thank you so much for being here. And as always, happy networking.
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Like your favorite startup's growth curve, T Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's largest 5G network switch. Now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off up to $800 per line via prepaid cart. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more at t mobile.com. keepAndSwitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card left 15 days qualifying unlock device credit service port in 90 plus days device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card is no cash access and expires in six months.