Digiday conducted a research on influencer marketing, revealing that images perform better than short-form videos in sponsored posts on Instagram. The research analyzed data from 15 influencers and their Instagram and YouTube channels, collected throughout 2023, in collaboration with Dash Hudson, a social media management company.

The study found that sponsored still images had the highest engagement rate on Instagram, with Reels having the lowest. However, when looking at the brand category, beauty brands received higher engagement on posts with a single still image. For fashion and other categories, carousel posts had the highest average rate of engagement.

Beauty content on Instagram is primarily image-focused, as the beauty audience tends to be well-educated in beauty products and includes many industry professionals. Carousel posts, which allow up to 10 images or videos to be grouped together, have been beneficial for categories outside of beauty, like fashion and technology, for their ability to showcase more information in a swipeable interactive format.

For example, influencer Alix Earle partnered with Warner Brothers on a sponsored carousel post to promote the "Barbie" movie, which received over 926,000 likes and over 1,000 comments. Another successful carousel post was for Victoria’s Secret, featuring nine different fashion looks, which garnered over 658,000 likes and nearly 2,000 comments.

Carousel ads are becoming a preferred posting format for brands, especially with the recent addition of a carousel ad feature on Instagram by Meta, which allows advertisers to automatically apply custom positioning to media feeds.