Three executives, nine departments, and the people who put us on air every day — mapped clearly.
Select any department to see its leads, roles, and team size.
An estimate of where artificial intelligence can take over or sharply augment work across Shams TV — concentrated in a few departments, not spread thin.
Every department rated on how much of its work AI can absorb or improve today.
How to read this. These are informed estimates from role titles and a broadcast-workflow model — not a desk-by-desk audit. Treat them as a prioritisation map, not a staffing decision. Validating the top three departments with 2–3 days shadowing real workflows turns this from a hypothesis into a plan.
Across 1,055 current-month items, a 233-item deep review, and the Reuters Connect log, Shams TV reveals a multi-desk operation pulling broadcast-grade media at deadline speed — dominated by the Iran–US–Israel–Lebanon war, anchored by a Washington bureau, and spiking around the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Editorial weight is overwhelmingly geopolitical. Click any segment to filter — the World Cup surges in the current month, but conflict coverage is the structural core of the account.
Downloads cluster tightly on the day of broadcast, with a dense evening burst aligned to a bulletin cycle — and a thin tail of 2025 archival pulls used for explainer context.
Identical Media IDs reappear minutes apart — the Iran footage at 19:35 then 20:32; the Lebanon bridge-repair video at 19:23 then 19:31; the Qasmiyeh bridge pulled 4+ times in different formats. Signal: parallel editors / multi-workstation pulls — a coordination signature of a busy multi-desk room.
The account is not one person — it's a structured newsroom with a video desk, a picture desk, a DC bureau, and a social team. Click a desk to filter, or sort any column.
| Editor / User | Desk | Primary Beat | Formats | Source log |
|---|
Seven editorial behaviors recur across all three sources. Expand each to see the verified evidence.
Themes cross-referenced across the three source analyses — with prevalence, formats, the desks that own them, and what each means strategically.
| Theme | Prevalence | Formats | Owning users | Strategic implication |
|---|
Real downloaded items from the history, grouped by the behavior they illustrate.
~580 Reels ran on each platform over the period. Facebook wins raw distribution by ~9×; Instagram holds a higher median and is the stronger engagement engine.
The question. Of everything Shams Plus made over four months, what actually worked — and on which platform?
The numbers below come straight from Instagram's and Facebook's own reporting tools, so they describe real behaviour on real posts. The job of this page is to translate those numbers into decisions about what to make next.
Facebook crushes Instagram on raw reach — but Instagram's typical Reel actually beats Facebook's typical Reel. Use Facebook to swing for reach; use Instagram to build dependable engagement.
Why this happened. Facebook's 36,513 average views per Reel is dragged up by a few mega-hits — its typical Reel only gets 850 views. Instagram spreads attention more evenly, so its typical Reel (1,391) actually beats Facebook's even though Facebook crushes it on totals.
Why the gap exists. Facebook has a much larger general news audience in our region, and its recommendation system is willing to push a single Reel into millions of feeds when early signals are strong — that is how a handful of hits create the huge total. Instagram's system is more cautious: it tests each post on a small audience and only expands the ones that hold attention, so few Reels run away with it but most get a fair shot.
In plain English. Facebook is feast-or-famine: most Reels are quiet, a few go enormous. Instagram is steadier: most Reels get a respectable run, but very few break out. Use Facebook to swing for reach; use Instagram to build dependable, engaged audience.
What this means for planning. Aim Facebook posts at the widest possible hook — a simple emotional payoff, a universal claim, a number anyone can grasp. Aim Instagram posts at a recognisable look and a clear theme, because every Instagram post is pulling roughly its weight and consistency compounds.
Every organic Instagram post from 16 Mar – 14 Jun 2026, grouped by type and ranked by how much engagement each impression converts. "Per impression" matters because formats with more reach naturally collect more raw likes — the only fair comparison is action per view.
| Post type | Posts | Avg ER | Impressions | Reach | Engagement | /1k impr | Reach eff. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1VIDEO | 404 | 5.24% | 1.72M1,723,869 | 1.31M1,306,870 | 90,267 | 52.4 | 75.8% |
| 2CAROUSEL_ALBUM | 224 | 2.65% | 242,963 | 115,240 | 6,435 | 26.5 | 47.4% |
| 3IMAGE | 78 | 1.66% | 68,292 | 40,710 | 1,136 | 16.6 | 59.6% |
Why this happened. Instagram's algorithm pushes video into Explore and non-follower feeds, so video both reaches more people and converts more impressions into action (5.24% vs 2.65% carousels, 1.66% images). Carousels (multi-card swipe posts) hold attention well once someone starts swiping, which is why they sit in the middle. Single images get the least distribution because they offer the fewest "moments" for the algorithm to test interest.
The compounding effect. Video wins twice — first it is shown to more people, and then a larger share of those people react. Stacked together that explains why video earned 90,267 engagements in this window while images earned just 1,136. The gap is not a tiny edge; it is an order of magnitude.
In plain English. If you want each post to work harder, make video — not close. Save carousels for content that genuinely benefits from a step-by-step story. Single images should be the exception, not the default.
Instagram reports those only at the account level, per day — never attributed to the post that triggered them — and Meta has deprecated both for this account. The honest, measurable per-impression conversion signal is on-platform engagement per impression, where VIDEO converts ~3× better than images.
What topics consistently outperform the account average — sorted by score, with the breakout theme highlighted.
Each theme is rated 0–100 by combining three signals: how often its posts beat the account-wide average plays, the average engagement those posts earned, and their save and share rates. A score above 70 means the theme reliably outperforms; below 40 means it consistently underperforms. The point isn't the precise number — it's the rank order, which tells us where to spend the next week of production time.
The takeaway. Kurdish identity and heritage content sits at the top with a score of 96 — meaning posts in this lane almost always beat the average. Daily news clips, which dominate the volume (124 posts), sit at the bottom with a score of 28. We are publishing the most of what works least, and the least of what works most.
Why this pattern exists. Identity and human-interest content earns saves and shares — viewers send it to family, return to it themselves. Daily news clips compete against every other newsroom on Earth posting the same story; there is nothing distinctively Shams about them, so the algorithm gives them small distribution.
Click any Reel to expand its metrics and the read on why it performed. Sorted by plays — the big numbers tell you what got attention; the expanded "read" tells you why, so the win is repeatable instead of accidental.
Three patterns repeat. First, every top Reel is built around a named person or place — Faisal the Jordanian boy, Salah Al-Hamdani the writer, the Sheikhan district of Kurdistan. Specific beats generic, every time. Second, the highest-engagement Reels (20.1% and 15.9%) both sit in the Kurdish-identity lane — confirming the theme score above with single-post evidence. Third, the absolute biggest reach (416k plays) came from the "Other" theme, a viral child-and-animals clip — pure emotional payoff with no editorial framing.
What this teaches. Pride content holds engagement; universal-emotion content explodes reach. A healthy posting mix uses one to feed the other — emotion clips to bring new followers in, identity clips to keep them engaged.
Three accounts worth stealing from — decoded by hand from their live Instagram feeds. We are not copying their topics, because Shams Plus already has stronger source material on the Kurdish and Arab story. We are studying how each one packages a story (cover frame, headline style, watermark, series naming) — the part that decides whether a viewer stops scrolling in the first place.
"More Story. Less Noise." — fast explainer Reels.
Editorial elegance — culture seen through a fashion lens.
Listicles, engineered for saves & shares.
The wrapper is the visual and verbal envelope around a story: the cover frame, the headline style, the music bed, the watermark, the recurring series name. It is everything around the actual content. Shams Plus's stories are already strong — the data above proves it. The opportunity is to standardise the wrapper so that every reshared clip is instantly recognisable as Shams Plus, and so that production gets faster (a template is quicker than designing from scratch every time).
Concrete moves grouped by whether to lean in or scale back. The impact tag on each line estimates the lift if the move is adopted consistently for 60+ days — based on the patterns elsewhere in this report, not on guesswork.
The question. Are we publishing at the hours when our followers are actually online — or are we publishing into an empty room and hoping someone scrolls back?
All times below are local Gulf time (UTC+4), the working clock of the Shams Plus social team. "Followers online" is Instagram's own count of how many accounts that follow Shams Plus had the app open during each hour, averaged over the last 60 days. "Your posts" is how many Reels we published in that same hour over the same window.
Why this matters. The Instagram feed is ranked partly by recency: when a follower opens the app, posts made in the last few hours get the strongest boost. A Reel published when nobody is online has to fight for distribution the next morning against fresher posts — usually a losing battle.
Your followers' online hours crossed against your own publishing cadence — Instagram, last 60 days. Bright-but-empty columns are reach you're leaving on the table.
Each column is one hour of the day (00 on the left, 23 on the right). The top row shows how many followers are online that hour — darker means more people. The bottom row shows how many Reels we published that hour — brighter gold means more posts. A gold-outlined cell is an opportunity gap: lots of audience present, almost nothing posted to greet them.
The pattern. Your audience is most online roughly 03:00–14:00 (peak 6,324 at 13:00), yet you pack ~40% of posts into 16:00–20:00 — when the fewest followers are online (down to 1,544 at 19:00). Your single biggest batch, 48 posts at 18:00, lands in a window with ~70% fewer followers online than the midday peak.
Why this is happening. 18:00–20:00 is the natural end-of-workday slot for the production team — it is the easiest hour to publish, not the best one to publish in. Habit, not data, has been the schedule.
Why the algorithm punishes it. When a Reel goes live at 18:00 with only 1,544 followers online, the platform sees a tiny first hour of engagement and assumes the post is weak. It then under-distributes the Reel even after the audience comes back online the next morning. Timing decides the algorithm's first impression — and first impressions stick.
In plain English. You've been scheduling around when past hits happened to land, not around when your people are actually awake and scrolling. Day-of-week barely moves the needle (±6%) — the hour is the lever.
The three hours where the biggest audience meets the smallest publishing volume. Ranked by followers online. Each slot below could absorb a single shifted post per day with very little extra work — these aren't asking for new content, just for existing content to land at a different hour.
Best daytime gap if overnight feels impractical: 14:00 — 6,045 online (near peak) but only 21 posts in 60 days. This is the realistic first move: scheduled the night before by the social team, published while the audience is on lunch break, no overnight staffing needed.
Comparing the broader time blocks tells the real story — and demonstrates why averages can mislead.
The first bar shows average engagement per post in the evening block — the slot we currently over-publish in. The second bar shows the same evening block with the two biggest viral posts removed, to reveal what a typical evening post actually earns. The bottom two bars are the daytime and morning blocks for comparison. This is the classic "average vs. median" trick: a couple of outliers can make any time window look like a winning slot.
Timing isn't buying engagement — content is. The evening block looks ~5× better only because of two viral posts (44,079 engagement at 18:00; 13,607 at 16:00). Strip those two and the evening (73/post) is basically identical to the high-online daytime block (69/post).
Why this matters. If we had only looked at the average, we would have concluded "evening is our slot" and doubled down on a habit that was actually carried by two lucky posts. Looking at the typical post instead reveals there is no intrinsic evening advantage — just survivorship bias from two hits. That is the difference between a repeatable strategy and a coincidence we mistook for one.
So the experiment. Shift a slice of the 18:00–20:00 batch into the under-served morning/midday window and watch whether baseline (non-viral) engagement lifts. If it does, we've found free reach. If it doesn't, we've at least confirmed that the evening slot isn't actively helping — and freed up production time for higher-leverage work.
The question. When a Shams Plus Reel goes big, can we make the next one go big on purpose — or are the hits just luck?
Performance told us what works. Timing told us when to publish it. This section is about the craft: the specific design choices inside a Reel that decide whether it gets a chance to perform at all. Three signals matter most here.
Shams Plus already picks viral-native topics — heritage, achievement, human-interest. It loses the easy battle: engineering the hook. Here's the system to fix it.
Your #1 post — the Kurdish-scientists Reel (34,820 engagement · 2,697 saves · 9,461 shares) — opened with a complete statement, the playbook's #1 "don't". It won anyway, on raw awe + pride. Every winner you have breaks the rules and succeeds on topic alone. Engineer the hook and the accidental becomes a manufacturing process.
What "engineering the hook" actually means. Deliberately designing the first frame and first line of every Reel to provoke a reaction — a question, a contradiction, a surprising fact — instead of leading with context. Topic gives a Reel a ceiling; the hook decides whether the Reel ever gets near it.
You're already in the winning genre. @el7ashoura — a top performer in the viral playbook — runs your exact lane (identity, origin-stories). Same topics. The only difference is an engineered hook. So do @blinxnow and @voguearabia — both your competitors, both case-studied in the same guide.
Why this is good news. If the topic was the problem, fixing it would mean changing what Shams Plus stands for. The topic is not the problem. The packaging is — and packaging is a craft, not an identity. Crafts can be taught, templated, and repeated.
Every viral piece wins these three — everything else (editing, trend, caption) just serves them. The order matters: a Reel that loses battle #1 never gets the chance to fight #2 or #3.
Win the first second — a visual + verbal hook by 0:03. You compete with the thumb, not with other creators.
What it looks like: "Which Kurd changed modern medicine?" beats "Kurdish figures in medicine." A question opens a loop the viewer wants closed.
Specificity, stakes, and pacing. Numbers in the title. Tension that only resolves at the end.
What it looks like: "5 inventors. 1 lab. 400 patents." Specific numbers tell the viewer exactly how long to stay and signal that the payoff is real.
Identity, pride, surprise, save-worthy facts. Give the viewer a reason to send it to one specific person.
What it looks like: A Reel that ends with a fact a viewer wants their cousin or their teacher to know. Shares are the only kind of reach you do not have to pay for.
What's blocking repeatable virality, ranked by severity. Each gap is mapped to one of the three battles above, so the fix is always specific — not "do better" but "fix battle 01" or "fix battle 03".
Critical — blocking repeatable virality today. Until this is fixed, even strong topics will keep winning by accident, not by design. High — capping the ceiling on every post until fixed. Posts can still perform, but never as well as they could. Medium — quietly leaking efficiency over time. Each individual loss is small; the compounded loss over months is large.