When it comes to social media marketing, video is one of the most useful and effective content formats. “These days, people are watching less TV and more digital video. By 2021, mobile video will account for 78% of total mobile data traffic. And we’ve learned that younger audiences are spending more time with amateur content creators and less time with professionals.” IGTV provides the perfect opportunity to reuse your popular video content and give it new life. You can repurpose horizontal videos you’ve posted on YouTube and Facebook, or live-stream recordings.
IGTV is Instagram’s new dedicated app for watching videos from the people you follow on Instagram. Videos are full screen and vertical (not landscape) and aren’t limited to one minute. Instead, each video can be up to an hour long. With IGTV, the creators are the channels. When you follow a creator on Instagram, their channel will show up for you to watch. And anyone can be a creator – even you.
If you’re a brand looking to utilize this feature, you’re in luck: your followers on Instagram will automatically be following your IGTV video content as well. This might raise concern for the tool not being able to expand its reach to potential new followers; however, this also means that brands and publishers won’t have to work as hard to build an audience, either.
Instagram told the media that the new IGTV app is designed to make it easier to find and watch videos on the mobile phone. IGTV will also let creators to upload long-form video, allowing Instagram to better rival YouTube. There will be advertisements on IGTV, so Facebook-owned Instagram can generate more revenue. There will eventually be a revenue-sharing deal with partners, but not at launch.
IGTV is probably a worthwhile platform to at least test out if you already have a large Instagram following and your content is video-heavy. If you’re not quite making videos yet, or your videos are still quite short, YouTube and Stories will still work. Remember that Instagram Stories are only temporary, and with IGTV, you can create content that sticks around. So, it really depends on what kind of value your brand is getting out of a short versus lengthy video.You also have a lot of room on IGTV for creative and educational video production and sharing, which could give your brand a whole new level of meaning to a certain subset of users.