How to Post Video to Instagram as a true REEL

Question

My users authenticated via an Instagram Business account and connected their pages within my app. The authentication was successful and when they wish to post a REEL to a connected page on Instagram the following code was used to achieve that:

async function publishVideoAsReel() {
    let containerParams = new URLSearchParams();
    let mediaContainerUrl = `https://graph.facebook.com/${igUserId}/media`;
    containerParams.append('media_type', 'REELS'); //Notice here
    containerParams.append('video_url', firstMediaUrl);
    containerParams.append('thumb_offset', igVideoCoverOffset);
    containerParams.append('access_token', pageAccessToken);
    try {
        let mediaContainerResponse = await axios.post(mediaContainerUrl, containerParams);
        let { id: mediaContainerId } = mediaContainerResponse.data;
        await finalizePost(igUserId, mediaContainerId, metaData);
    } catch (e) {
        console.log('Error posting to Instagram');
        console.log(e);
    }
}

async function finalizePost(igUserId, mediaContainerId, metaData) {
    let mediaContainerStatusEndpoint = `https://graph.facebook.com/${mediaContainerId}?fields=status_code,status&access_token=${targetAccessToken}`;
    try {
        let { data: mediaContainerStatus } = await axios.get(mediaContainerStatusEndpoint);
        let { status_code, status } = mediaContainerStatus;
        if (status_code === 'ERROR') {
                //Return here
        }
        if (status_code !== 'FINISHED') {
            setTimeout(async () => {
                //Wait For 5seconds and recursively check for the status of the uploaded video
                await finalizePost(igUserId, mediaContainerId, metaData);
            }, 5000);
        } else {
            //The video has been published, finalize the post here
            try {
                let mediaPublishResponse = await axios.post(`https://graph.facebook.com/${igUserId}/media_publish?creation_id=${mediaContainerId}&access_token=${targetAccessToken}`);
                //More code omitted
            } catch (e) {

            }
        }
    } catch (e) {

    }
}

With the above code the video was successfully published to the Page as a REEL and was also showing under the REELs tab.

However a user generated a report from Meta and noticed that the post was showing as Type:Post and not type:REEL.

So, I tried checking whether anything has changed as regards publishing REELs and then I bumped on this link https://developers.facebook.com/docs/video-api/guides/reels-publishing

Now, after attempting to follow the latest changes on that link I'm getting an error that says

"Subject does not have sufficient permission to post to target"

So, I have 3 questions:

1. Was my initial code not doing the job of posting to Instagram as a true REEL
2. Do I need to refactor to suite the changes in the new link https://developers.facebook.com/docs/video-api/guides/reels-publishing
3. My initial code worked perfectly however when I tried following the instructions in the new docs in no 2 why am I getting that error above?

Thanks

Answer 1

Seems like your page-access token is not having the sufficient permission to publish Reels. You can debug your access token by pasting your token here https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/accesstoken

Then cross verify that your access-token have sufficient permissions, which are required to publish the Reel as mentioned in the following screenshot: