An account's most popular reels: how to find the top by views and what it tells you

Where to see reel views: your account and someone else's

Someone else's account

Instagram Help separates two places. On the Reels tab, anyone who visits the profile can see view counts on the covers. On the main grid, only the owner sees views for posts and reels. So you look for a competitor's top reels on the Reels tab, not on the grid.

Numbers may be missing. The owner of a professional account can hide view counts in profile settings, which removes them from the Reels tab too. Counts can also be hidden on a single post before it goes live. On a private profile, reels are visible only to approved followers.

The counter tracks plays, not people. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, announced views as the primary metric for reels, stories, photos and carousels. According to Instagram Help on reel insights, a view counts each time a reel starts to play or replays. Someone who watches a video three times in a row adds three.

Your own account

Open the Reels tab on your profile, pick a reel and go to View insights. Help lists five numbers: views, watch time, viewers, average watch time and follows. Viewers counts separate accounts, a truer measure than the counter on the cover. Insights require a public account, personal or professional, and cover reels posted since May 14, 2021. They stay available for two years.

Account insights summarize all your content over the last 7, 14, 30 or 90 days. Our guide to Instagram insights explains what each line means.

Why a profile does not show the top

The Reels tab runs by date, newest first. Say yesterday's reel with 900 plays sits above last year's with 400,000. Reaching a three-year-old hit means scrolling past hundreds of covers. The profile has no button to sort by views.

The first spots on the grid reflect the owner's choice. Instagram Help lets you pin up to three posts to the top of your profile grid. Instagram has also announced that owners can now change the order of posts on their grid by hand. What the audience chose shows only in the counters.

How to find the most popular reels by hand, and how long it takes

Take a sample coffee shop account with 240 reels posted over three years.

1. Open the profile's Reels tab and work down to the very first video.
2. For each reel, write down the date, a few words about the subject and the play count.
3. Mark pinned posts separately, since they sit outside the timeline.
4. Sort the sheet from highest count to lowest and keep the first 10 rows.
5. Open each of those ten again: note the length, the first line spoken and the audio.

Say each row takes 15 seconds: open the video, find the date, copy the number. That makes an hour for 240 rows, and reviewing the best ten at three minutes each adds half an hour. That is an hour and a half per account, and the same for every competitor. A hand-built list has three weak spots.

• Age. A three-year-old reel collected plays for over a thousand days, yesterday's for one day. Compare posts from the same quarter.
• Replays. Every replay adds to the count, and a short looping video picks them up more easily than a long one.
• Hidden counts. Where a number is missing, leave the cell blank instead of entering zero.

What to look for in the top

The best ten work as social proof: viewers have already voted with their plays. Copying the videos gets you nowhere, so look for the technique that repeats. For each reel on the list, fill in five fields: topic, opening seconds, length, audio and cover. Then do the same for the ten weakest reels from the same period.

Topic

Group the account's best posts by subject. Six videos out of ten on one subject point to demand more clearly than any survey. For a coffee shop that could be drink recipes rather than news about the venue. A topic from the best list should not show up among the weak ones. If it does, the problem is the delivery.

Opening seconds

The Reels card in Meta's Transparency Center names two predictions about how a video starts. One is whether a person watches less than three seconds. The other is whether they watch more than 95% of viewers of reels the same length. Write down the first frame and the first line of every reel on your list. Look for the move that repeats: the payoff in the first frame, an argument, a scene people recognize.

Our article on reels retention covers how to hold viewers after that.

Length and format

The same card lists reel length among its signals. Watch time is compared against reels of the same length, so 15 seconds does not lose to a minute by default. There is one hard limit: reels over 3 minutes are not recommended to new audiences.

Describe the format in a word or two: talking head, how-to, before and after, list, skit. In his 2023 post, Mosseri listed the reels Instagram shows less. They cover low-resolution, watermarked, muted, bordered and mostly text videos, plus reuploads of existing reels.

Check the cover separately, because on the Reels tab a visitor sees it first. Instagram Help recommends a cover of 420 by 654 pixels.

Audio

Audio comes in three kinds: the creator's own voice, someone else's original audio and a track from the library. According to Instagram Help, a reel with licensed music is added to that song's audio page, where more people may find it. The Transparency Center card also predicts whether a viewer will reuse a reel's audio. A list built on the creator's voice shows the audience came for the person, not for trends.

Top reels of another account in one check

Doing it by hand takes an hour and a half, and old hits are easy to miss. The Top posts and reels of an account report does the job for a public profile, with no login to your account.

• The account's best reels of all time: an old hit sits next to yesterday's post.
• Recent posts of any type in the same table: reels, photos, carousels.
• Views, likes, comments, saves and shares for each post.
• Sorting by any column in one click.
• Likes and saves per thousand views, to compare old and new posts fairly.
• A CSV export with the same columns.

Where saves or shares are not public, the report says so instead of showing a zero.

The sample shows why ratios matter. The home brewing video got half the plays of the latte art one, yet people save it more often. That subject deserves more useful reels, while latte art stays in the plan for reach.

How to turn someone else's top into your own plan without copying

The first urge is to film the same thing. In a post for creators on April 30, 2024, Instagram explains why that fails. When two identical pieces of content exist, only the original gets recommended. An account that posts 10 or more unoriginal pieces within 30 days loses eligibility for recommendations.

Instagram counts a meme, a parody compilation, a new voiceover and a remix with a reaction as material edits. A plan rests on techniques: take the subject, the opening and the length, then film your own material.

1. Build three lists: your own and two competitors'. Subjects that repeat across all three show demand in the niche.
2. For each repeating subject, find your angle: your experience, your city, your numbers.
3. Move the opening technique onto your own footage, and keep the length in the same range, under 3 minutes.
4. Test a new format with a trial reel. It is shown to non-followers first, and its numbers arrive about 24 hours later.
5. A month later, rebuild your list and compare the two.

Our collection of reel ideas suggests ready formats for your niche. How a video reaches people who do not follow you is covered in our guide to getting recommended on Instagram.

Common questions