My First Facebook Reel And Progress

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In this blog post and video, I want to talk about my first Facebook Reel and progress with my Facebook page. I decided to create this short post to document my early progress with a Facebook page and, more importantly, my first attempt at using Facebook reels.

To be completely honest, Facebook has never been my favourite platform. In the past, I lost a personal profile without warning, which meant I also lost access to the pages attached to it. Despite contacting Facebook several times, I never received a response. That experience put me off the platform for quite some time.

However, a couple of months ago I decided to start again with a brand-new Facebook page and approach it more methodically, treating it as an experiment rather than expecting instant results.

Starting From Scratch

The page has now been live for around two months. Before doing any paid promotion, I had built the page up to around 24 followers just through light posting and engagement.

Recently, I decided to test Facebook advertising at a very small level — just £1 per day — purely to see whether it would help bring some initial traction. After a few days of running the ads, the page has grown to around 60 followers, which suggests even a small budget can make a difference when you’re starting out.

I’ll continue running this test for a month and then review whether it’s worth continuing or not.

Creating My First Facebook Reel

One thing I’d been meaning to do for a while was create a Facebook reel. I finally did this on Christmas Eve, and it turned out to be a really useful learning experience.

The first reel picked up views quite quickly, which immediately showed me the potential reach that reels can have compared to normal page posts.

I then created a couple more reels, but I made a mistake — I used the same background image for more than one video. The background was an image of Thessaloniki in Greece, and in hindsight, people may have assumed the videos were the same. Engagement on the second reel was noticeably lower.

Lesson learned: even small visual changes can make a big difference.

What the Analytics Show

Looking at the page insights over the past couple of months, activity was fairly flat when I was only posting occasionally. Views began to increase slightly as the page became more established, but the biggest change came when I introduced reels.

There’s still plenty of fluctuation — some days are up, others are down — but overall, reels have clearly increased visibility. Even over the Christmas period, when engagement is typically lower, reels still made a noticeable impact.

How I Created the Reels (Without Using My Phone)

I didn’t create these reels on my mobile phone. I do most of my content creation on my PC, and these videos were made using Camtasia.

All I did was adjust the canvas size to a vertical format suitable for Facebook reels. It’s not widescreen, but it works perfectly well and means I can stay within a workflow I’m comfortable with.

This approach may be useful if, like me, you prefer working from a desktop rather than filming everything on a phone.

Final Thoughts

If you’re running a Facebook page and haven’t tried reels yet, I’d strongly suggest giving them a go — even if it’s just as an experiment.

I’m not claiming massive success here, but I am seeing steady progress, and more importantly, I’m learning what works and what doesn’t. That alone makes the process worthwhile.

If you’re interested in building an online presence more broadly, you may also find these posts helpful:

I’ll continue to share updates as this Facebook experiment progresses. If you have any thoughts or experiences of your own, feel free to reach out.