How to Find a Creator's Best-Performing Instagram Reels

A creator's best-performing Reels are hiding in plain sight: Instagram prints play counts on every Reels thumbnail but stacks the grid newest-first, so the winners sit wherever the calendar dropped them. The fix is to sort the Reels tab by views (or likes, or comments) with the free FeedRama Chrome extension — open the creator's Reels on instagram.com, pick a metric, and the grid re-ranks from best to worst in seconds.

That one sort is the difference between "I scrolled their profile and got a vibe" and "I know exactly which ten Reels built this account." This guide covers the steps, which metric to trust for which question, and how to turn the winners into research you can use.

Why the Reels tab hides the signal

Instagram's Reels grid answers only one question: what did this person post recently? Recency and performance are barely correlated — an account's defining Reel might be eight months old, sandwiched between two that went nowhere. And because you can see counts but not sort on them, manual research degrades into scroll-squint-remember, which caps out at maybe fifty Reels before the numbers blur together.

Instagram Insights doesn't rescue you either: it ranks your own content beautifully and tells you nothing about anyone else's. For competitor or inspiration research, the public thumbnails are all the data you get — you just need something that can order them.

Rank a Reels tab in four steps

1. Install FeedRama. It's a free extension — grab it from the Chrome Web Store and you're set up in under a minute, no account required.
2. Open the creator's Reels tab on instagram.com. Desktop Chrome. Any public account works; the creator isn't notified.
3. Sort by your chosen metric. The feed sorter panel offers views, likes, comments, shares, saves, and date — pick one and the grid reorders in place.
4. Shortlist the outliers. Note the Reels that beat the account's typical numbers by a wide margin. Five to ten is usually enough to see the pattern.

Which metric means "best"?

"Best-performing" is doing a lot of work in that phrase — different metrics crown different winners, and the gap between them is itself informative:

A useful two-pass habit: sort by views first, then re-sort by saves. Reels that rank high on both reached strangers and gave them something worth keeping — that's the format to learn from.

From ranked grid to actual research

Finding the winners is step one; extracting why they won is the payoff. The pattern we see work over and over: take the top Reels and transcribe them right in the same panel. On paper, the first two lines of each transcript are the hooks that earned those millions of plays — collect a dozen and you have a proven opener library, a process we detail in How to Extract Hooks and Scripts from Viral Reels.

Beyond transcripts: save standout Reels into a FeedRama folder so your shortlist survives past the browser session, or select the batch and export metrics plus transcripts to CSV on Pro. Repeating the sort across four or five accounts in a niche turns anecdotes into a dataset — the backbone of proper Instagram competitor research.

Separating lucky hits from repeatable formats

One trap to avoid once you have the ranked grid: treating every top Reel as a lesson. Some winners are luck — a celebrity comment, a news cycle, an audio that peaked that week. Copying those teaches you nothing you can reuse. The signal you want is repetition: the format that appears three or four times in the account's top twenty. If a creator's talking-head myth-busting Reels occupy five of their ten best slots, that's a machine, not an accident — and machines can be studied.

A second tell is what happened after the hit. Scroll the date-sorted view around each top performer: did the creator immediately produce follow-ups, and did those follow-ups also perform? A sequel that lands confirms the format; a sequel that flops suggests the original rode something unrepeatable. This is why having both the performance sort and the date sort one click apart matters more than either sort alone.

Scope, limits, and the phone question

The usual honesty section. FeedRama sorts what's publicly visible, so private accounts and hidden metrics stay hidden — if a creator hides like counts, rank by views or comments instead. The free plan sorts an account's previous 25 posts or last week with unlimited sorts; ranking a multi-year Reels catalog takes Pro ($10/month, or $5/month billed annually). And no, none of this works in the Instagram phone app — extensions live in desktop Chrome. Reels research genuinely is a sit-down activity: you want the sorted grid, a transcript, and your notes doc visible at once. If you're ranking regular grid posts rather than Reels, the same technique applies — see How to Sort Instagram Posts by Likes on Any Account.

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