Why your Dubai property reels stopped getting views

Your reels were doing four or five thousand views. Now they do four hundred. Nothing about how you make them changed, which is exactly why it feels like a punishment.

It is almost never a punishment. Three quite different things get reported as the same sentence — my views dropped — and each one has a different fix. Before you change how you shoot anything, work out which one you are looking at.

First: check you are not comparing against one outlier

Most brokers who say their views collapsed are measuring from a single reel that did unusually well. One reel travelled, the next twenty went back to normal, and normal now feels like failure. Open your last thirty reels, ignore the best one and the worst one, and look at the middle. If the middle is flat, nothing dropped. You had one good day and you have been grieving it ever since.

Second: separate a reach problem from a retention problem

These look identical from the outside and they are opposite problems. In the insights for one reel, find two things: the split between viewers who follow you and viewers who do not, and how far the average person got through it.

• Reach to non-followers fell, retention held. Your reels are still watchable, they have just stopped being shown to new people. That is a distribution problem.
• Retention fell, reach held. Instagram is still offering your reels around and people are leaving early. That is an opening problem.
• Both held and the number still fell. Look at dates rather than content. Instagram has changed what it counts and calls a view more than once, and a drop that starts on one particular day across every post at once is a change in the yardstick, not in your work.

The opening problem is the common one

A broker’s reel usually opens on a slow drone push towards a tower, or on a logo. Both spend the one second that decides everything. The viewer has not been told what they are about to find out, so there is nothing to stay for.

The fix is blunt: delete the first second. Not trim it — delete it, and start on the sentence that would have come second. If the reel still makes sense, that was always the better opening.

The distribution problem is a sameness problem

Instagram shows a reel to a small group, then widens it if that group stays. What it is really deciding is whether your reel is worth showing instead of the next one in the queue. Ten agencies in the same community posting the same sweep across the same marble with the same piano under it are not competing on quality. They are interchangeable, and interchangeable gets the small group and stops.

The way out is not higher production. It is showing the part nobody else shows: the service charge, the commute you actually timed, the room that is smaller than the photographs suggest, the number at the bottom of the page.

Count sends, not likes

For property the signal that matters is one person sending the reel to another. A like is a reflex. A send is a husband forwarding it to his wife, and it is also the thing most likely to put you in front of people who have never heard of you.

So ask a different question when you review a reel. Not whether it was good, but who would forward this to whom, and why. If you cannot answer that, the reel was decoration.

What not to do about it

• Do not post more of the same thing faster. Volume on a format that has stopped travelling just gets you a smaller audience of the same people.
• Do not delete the slow reels. It does nothing for the ones that follow and it destroys the record you need in order to work out what happened.
• Do not start again on a new account. You would be throwing away the only asset you have, which is the handful of people who already know you.

The order to fix it in

1. Ignore the outlier and find your real middle.
2. Read a week of insights for the follower split and the retention curve.
3. Fix the opening on the next five reels and change nothing else, so you can tell what the change did.
4. Then, and only then, change the subject matter.

One variable at a time is slower, and it is the only way you ever learn anything about your own account. Change the opening, the length, the music and the topic in the same week and you will have a result with no idea what caused it. Instagram’s trial reels exist for exactly this kind of test.