Emplifi released research last week on the specifics of what drives Reels viewership, using data from 10,110 Facebook Reels published by 704 brand pages.
Unsurprisingly, human speech is important for engagement, with videos including human speech in the first three seconds driving better response. Human speech even performs better than music, with 10-second retention increasing almost 25%. Speech-based videos see a 5.6% higher engagement rate compared to music-only content.
Another important takeaway is the importance of seamless looping. For very short videos of up to seven seconds, seamless loops result in 18.7% higher replay rates and 16.1% higher engagement rates.
Finally, text overlays drive engagement, but only delivers “modest improvements”.
How to Reel-y pull in fans?
Mix performance with speech. If you’re ever in need of some convincing data for your artists to try out voiceovers or talking directly to camera, here it is.Get in on seamless looping. Next time you’re preparing content with your artist, look into how to create better looping for smoother viewing, like this one from Meg Smith.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source musically.com ’













