The argument
On Instagram, agents who get comments ask for them
By Roberto Cerda, Founder, Digital Vibes Design ·
In 142 Instagram reels from US life insurance agents, the ones that asked viewers to comment a keyword earned a median comment rate of 0.24%, against 0.12% for reels with no call to action at all.
That gap is the most useful thing in this dataset, because it is the one thing an agent controls on every post. 69% of the reels we measured end without asking the viewer to do anything. The 15 reels that said "comment ACCESS" or "comenta AYUDA" reached 2.1 times the median of the 98 that said nothing.
The second pattern is length. Reels over 60 seconds reached a median of 0.51% across 20 posts, the highest of any length bucket. The usual advice is to keep it short. For a product people have questions about, the longer explanation is what gives them something to respond to.
The third is the account itself. The three strongest accounts in the sample (@insurance__cowboy at 0.42%, @t_rod19 at 0.41%, @dmndlegacygroup at 0.31%) sit an order of magnitude above the bottom four, which ranged from 0.00% to 0.04%. Same products, same platform, same year. What differs is the account, not the format.
The case against
The honest counter-argument: these are small numbers. A median of 0.13% means most agents get one comment per 794 views, and 26% of reels got none. And a comment is not a lead. Of the 42 comments we read on the top reels, none came from a consumer asking about coverage. They came from other agents and friends.
That is exactly why the keyword matters. A keyword turns a comment into a request you can answer, and it tells you which comments to follow up on. A reel that asks for nothing collects compliments. A reel that asks for a keyword collects a list.
Does it hold on TikTok?
It does not carry over to TikTok. There, the 15 insurance videos with a comment-keyword prompt reached a median of 0.04%, against 0.18% for the 103 that asked for nothing. And TikTok comments were closer to leads: of the 53 we read, 3 came from people asking what the product was or where the agent was based, plus 5 from licensed agents answering a recruiting video.
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