8 ways you can add audio to your Reels, even if you don’t have music in Reels in your business account
When we talk about reach and engagement, Instagram Reels is unbeatable. The feature is now over a year old and is only growing in popularity.
Because more accounts are adopting Reels and creating more of them, you may be seeing your Reels not performing as well they used to be.
But worry not: even though you don’t always automatically get tens of thousands likes, comments, saves or shares in every Reel you post anymore, your Reels are still going to get more reach and views than your posts and people will spend more time on your content, so it’s still a big win.
Truth is that audiences engage more with video and entertaining content on Instagram and Reels are the most effective way to offer both.
It makes people stop the scroll much more than regular posts and you have a much bigger chance to land in the explore page.
for Because of copyright, a while Instagram removed the music button from business accounts —rightfully so, since it’s the law. And then later, they brought the music button back, but with a catch: we now have a list of boring, royalty-free, generic “elevator music”.
Since Reels do so well, I definitely don’t want you to stop making them, just because you don’t have the latest Taylor Swift album available to you.
So, if you have a business account and don’t want to use elevator music in your Instagram Reels, here are 7 ideas of what you can do to get music in Reels or add your own sounds to your Reels instead.
8 ways you can add audio to your Reels, even if you have a business account and don’t want to use royalty-free music.
IMPORTANT: before you do any of these, save all your Reels drafts to your phone, because you may lose them. If you don’t have the download button in Reels drafts, here’s a hack to save the drafts to your phone. Or you can just wait until you post the drafts to make this change.
1. Switch your account’s category to Entrepreneur (BEST OPTION!)
This is the most effective hack, if it works for you. It worked perfectly for me and many others, so it’s definitely worth a try. Here’s what you will do:
on your profile, go to the Edit Profile button
Under Public Business Information, tap on category and type Entrepreneur
Tap on done to change your current category to entrepreneur
Important to mention that by changing your category to Entrepreneur, you remain a business account and will not lose any other features like Insights, the ability to auto-publish posts using a scheduling app such as Later, Planoly or Facebook Business Suite (which allows you to auto-publish stories and carousels too!).
2) Use the audios from the Reels Report Membership by B Squared Social
(this is an affiliate link, which means if you join I make a commission at zero cost to you!)
You get 4 trending audios directly to your inbox with a short and easy-to-follow explanation of how to use it for your business and she always includes an original audio of the trend, so any account can use them!
You also get all your questions answered in the Facebook group and a monthly office hour where you can ask anything to Laura herself, who grew her account from 3k to 49k followers and doubled her business revenue in a year using Reels!
When I get her weekly emails I usually record 3 out of the 4 Reels in less than 30 minutes! Yes, I am a member too and highly recommend it!
3. Switch your account type to Creator (not recommended by me!)
Although this is a popular hack to get music on Instagram, I do not love or recommend it because by switching your account from Business to Creators, you’ll lose the ability to auto-publish your posts. Auto-publishing your content is one of the most effective ways to maintain a better overall strategy, save time and more importantly, keep you from going
4. Use trending sounds from someone else’s original audio
When you see other people’s Reels, if they didn’t use the music feature, the bottom of their Reel will read “original music”and their profile. You can tap on their original music and select it to use in your own Reels. Easy pease!
I recommend always saving Reels you come across that has original audio you like.
5. Record your own voice to use as a sound on your Reels
This is the most straight forward solution to those of us who have Instagram business accounts without the music (audio) button or popular songs by our favorite artists in Reels and Instagram stories.
For it not to look like a regular video and maintain the Reels format, you can plan your Reels content in different places, and record each part in a different place, wearing something different or adding a fun transition.
But if the content you’re delivering is valuable for your audience, you don’t need much gimmick, so just go for it!
6. Repurpose your own TikToks
This means that the content will still go to your followers, but not so much to the discovery features like explore page or Reels tab or So if you have a TikTok account, you can still reuse that content in Reels.
I recommend downloading your TikToks and then going to www.musicaldown.com to add the URL of the TikTok you want to use and download it without the TikTok watermark.
Then you can also re-write your text from the TikTok in Reels —just put it slightly bigger on top of it— using Reels fonts and your colors, so it feels more organic.
Before, with TikTok watermark and graphics
After, without TikTok logo and with graphics recreated in the Reels app.
7. Add your own music using an editing app, like Splice app
This also adds another step to your Reel creation, but is a great way to add music to your Reels if you don’t have sound on Instagram.
Record your Reel and download to phone before you add text (you can also save it to drafts, just in case).
Open your editing app (I use Splice) and upload your video
Extract the audio from your Reel video and delete it, so you get rid of that room sound
Record your desired sound playing with your phone screen recorder (you can record from YouTube or Spotify, for example).
Add the next video with your desired song to Splice.
Do the same process to extract the audio, but this time you delete the video part and keep the music you want to add to your Reel
Adjust the audio to start and end with your Reel and save to phone
Open your Instagram Reels camera and instead of recording, swipe up to add your pre-produced Reel
Add text, captions, hashtag, select your cover and post!
8. LipSync your favorite character or celebrity
This is a really fun one. Select a little clip of the audio you want to use from youtube or Netflix, play it and record your Reels lip syncing it.
You can do this two ways:
if you’re able to nail the recording, you can even capture the audio you want as you’re recording your Reels.
If that doesn’t work so well, you can also use Splice and the same steps as above to upload two videos, extract and delete the audio from your Reel and the video from the audio you want. This is one more step but gives me better results.
Just check out my Moira Rose (from Schitt’s Creek) impersonation below.
While most of these add an extra app and step to creating your Reels with music, trust me when I tell you that once you get use to using Splice or a comparable video editing app, you will be able to do all this in only a few minutes!
Adding Reels to your content strategy will bring you a lot more engagement than sticking to posts and stories —my lowest engaging Reels perform better than any videos or memes on my feed.
And don’t forget to add well-designed covers to your Reels and preview them in your feed, so more profile visitors will click and watch them!
Want a few more Reels tips? click here to Get our FREE Reels PRO TIPS GUIDE.
Now get on it and let’s see that engagement trickling back in!
xx
Manu
Manu Muraro is the founder of Your Social Team, an Instagram training membership and content shop to help social media managers and Instagram savvy women entrepreneurs to beat the algorithm and grow their organic engagement (yes, even in 2021). This year she also launched Your Template Club, a Canva Template subscription to provide social media managers and Instagram savvy business owners with content template designed for engagement in their inbox.
Born and raised in Brazil, Manu moved to the U.S. in 2000 right out of college to work for Cartoon Network, where she made an award winning career in creative and strategy. In 2017, Manu started Your Social Team with the mission of helping women entrepreneur and social media managers grow engagement and sales through Instagram without the overwhelm.