Exclusive: How Mamdani’s Campaign Used a New Instagram Feature to Swell Its Follower Count

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s campaign won praise for its social media strategy. 

But behind the scenes, one of the consultants working with his team was testing a new feature on Instagram that helped his campaign’s content find new audiences beyond Mamdani’s massive follower list. 

The feature, called Trial Reels, is intended to allow users to test content with non-followers to see what kind of material performs best. The idea, according to Gabriella Zutrau, a freelance digital consultant who helped hone the Mamdani campaign’s Instagram operation, is to lower the risk in posting new content by seeing how non-followers react to it.

In the case of Mamdani’s campaign, however, Zutrau posted some of the most viral content from Mamdani’s account on Trial Reels, allowing the new feature to amplify existing videos to Instagram users who didn’t follow Mamdani. 

The result, according to Zutrau: Those Trial Reels would “rack up hundreds of thousands or millions of views. And they had a follow rate 10 times that of the original video.”

“Every reel you posted would get a million views,” Zutrau told Campaigns & Elections in an interview. “And we are now in one of these, like, accidental Instagram hack moments where if you know how to use Trial Reels – and it’s very easy – you can blow up like crazy.”

Zutrau said that she mainly experimented with the Trial Reels during the New York City mayoral primary earlier this year. And during that time, it helped Mamdani’s follower count explode; Mamdani’s Instagram account reached 1 million followers by Primary Day on June 24, and more than 575,000 of those followers were brought in by Trial Reels, according to Zutrau.

“Basically, this is like the new big thing that Instagram has going on for it right now that they haven’t quite figured out how to rein in,” she said.

Mamdani handily won last week’s mayoral election in New York City, defeating former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo by nearly 200,000 votes. His victory was driven in no small part by young voters, who turned out in droves to support the 34-year-old democratic socialist. 

Of course, Zutrau’s Trial Reels strategy – republishing already-posted content on Trial Reels – isn’t exactly what Instagram intended in rolling out the feature. The idea, according to the social media platform, is to post new content on Trial Reels to test its performance among non-followers before sharing it with actual followers. 

Zutrau said that Instagram has started to crack down on recycled content on Trial Reels, but argued that it’s still a useful tool for campaigns and causes. Social media teams can post something to Trial Reels first and then post the same piece of content on their main Instagram grid a few minutes later. 

Trial Reels was just one feature that helped propel Mamdani’s Instagram strategy. Zutrau also helped pilot the use of another feature, a chatbot called Manychat, for the campaign this year that helped send links and collect emails from Instagram users that commented on Mamdani’s posts.

Both tools are readily available and ready to use, Zutrau said. But, she added, it was the Mamdani campaign’s willingness to invest early in social media and make use of already-available features that helped set their strategy apart from the competition.

“I don’t feel like the campaign did anything we didn’t already know worked,” Zutrau said. “We knew all this stuff worked. They just did it all and they did it all really well, and they invested very early a lot of resources in organic social media content.”