Write something worth sending

The most reliable way to earn a send is to be useful or to be recognisable. Useful means the viewer can act on it — a specific technique, a list they will want back later, a mistake they are currently making. Recognisable means the video names an experience precisely enough that someone thinks of a particular person while watching it.

Saves work the same way but for a different reason: people save what they intend to do. If your script ends with something that requires a step, a setting, or a number, it gets saved. If it ends with a general observation, it gets liked and forgotten.

That is why the last beat matters more on Instagram than the outro does anywhere else. Land the concrete thing, then stop.

Format and pacing for Reels

Fifteen to thirty seconds is the range where most Reels perform best, with up to about ninety seconds workable when the content genuinely needs it. Structure it as hook, three quick beats, payoff. Any beat that needs a sentence of setup should be cut or moved.

Keep burned-in text inside the middle of the frame: roughly the top 15% is covered by the platform UI and the bottom quarter by the caption, username and action buttons. Instagram's own text tool respects this, but text baked in from an external editor frequently does not.

Choose the cover frame deliberately and write it into the script. The cover is what appears on your grid and in the Explore tab, and a frame grabbed at random from the middle of the video is a wasted slot.

Instagram-specific mistakes

Treating the caption as an afterthought. Instagram captions are indexed and read; a two-line caption that adds context or asks a real question does measurable work for comments.

Chasing every trending audio. Original audio is fine and often better for talking-led content — the audio only matters when the trend itself is the joke.

Recycling a TikTok with the watermark on. It performs worse and looks lazy. Export clean and re-caption natively.

Ending on "follow for more". Follows come from the profile visit that a good Reel triggers, not from being asked inside a video someone has not finished yet.