Do Instagram carousels or videos work better for a local brand?

"Instagram carousels are working really well, guys. I know some people doing video, which I would assume would be the better play, and people are having more luck with carousels."

That surprised me. I don't go on Instagram personally. But the results keep pointing the same way. My honest answer now is to do both: carousels as the daily base, and a few short talking-head videos on the bigger news.

What's the evidence?

• A partner of mine in a college town grew an Instagram to 10,000 followers in four months, organically, with almost completely automated carousels. No video at all.
• Another young operator I watch has about 23,000 followers in a town of roughly 150,000. Every post is the same carousel template.
• A guest on my podcast posted the same weekend events as a carousel and as a reel. The carousel got almost 40,000 views and more engagement. The reel got about 9,000.
• John Apolinar told me a carousel about a grocery store coming to Arizona drove over 1,500 followers and about 4,000 shares and likes.
• A plain post of mine, white background, dark text, no branding, did about 2,200.

Those are mostly other people's results plus one of mine, not a controlled test.

Didn't you used to say video was better?

Yes, and I was partly wrong. For about a year I believed custom video was essential. Here's how my view moved:

When	What I saw
Early 2025	Our list carousels did okay.
Mid 2025	Canva graphics barely moved anything. My team stopped carousels because they took time without much success. Green-screen video looked like the best return for the effort.
June 2026	My partner told me I was wrong. His AI carousels were outgrowing my accounts.
September 2026	Carousels, including news carousels, were working best for the local brands I watch.

Part of the difference is effort. Carousels used to take my team real time by hand. Now AI or a VA can make one in about 10 minutes. Plenty of local media companies skip Instagram entirely because making carousels by hand is too hard.

What should a local carousel look like?

The simplest template I've seen, from that 23,000-follower account, has three parts:

1. A conversion-style headline, written like an email subject line.
2. The news.
3. A prompt to follow.

That's it. AI can do most of it, or a VA can do it in about 10 minutes. The one thing that operator focuses on is making the opening copy really good, because AI is sometimes bad at it. Rewrite that by hand.

Other rules I use:

• Pick news people talk about. A restaurant opening, a restaurant closing, a new business coming to town, big events this week.
• Lists get one image per item. A top 10 gets 10 images.
• Weekend events on Thursday, when people are planning.
• An arrow on the first slide so people know to swipe.
• Plain beats designed. More on that in plain vs polished posts.

For WilCo Guide my rule is at least two carousels a day and up to about five. We're also building software that stamps a brand's logo, section name, title, subtitle and photo onto a template, so a branded carousel takes no effort.

When does video still make sense?

For the bigger news, and when you're in it. When Walmart announced it was coming to my neighborhood, the move was a 30-second green-screen video: did you see Walmart's moving in, how do you feel about it? Images of the store and the map go behind me. I talk for 30 seconds in CapCut and hand it off to be edited. Each one should take no more than about 30 minutes.

The math works across brands. Say one presenter makes two green-screen videos a week per newsletter at no more than 30 minutes each. Across about 10 brands, that's roughly 10 hours a week, 20 if I'm wrong. One person can cover every location, because nobody in one town will notice the same face in another.

For events, the common move is a "top five events this week" graphic with a moving background. My improvement: talk through them on camera. Look at this event, that sounds super fun, I might take my family this weekend. Thirty seconds of personal commentary raises your chances a lot. A guest who does this posts two or three green-screen TikToks a day over event flyers, then puts the best one on Instagram.

Even with AI video, the content that works is the same as carousels: interesting community news. Generic footage of food zooming in doesn't cut it.

What's the risk with news carousels?

Images. Grabbing a local news brand's photo for your carousel can get you in trouble. That's the part I worry about most as we automate carousels across locations.