IGTV from Instagram is one of the most important standalone apps of the platform that allows customers to watch long-form videos from content creators. It was launched back in 2018 and continues to be one of the most-used mobile apps on Instagram.
About 80% of the US social media marketers highly use IGTV as their way of deploying a fun and creative marketing strategy to engage with clients and target audiences using Instagram.
By using IGTV for marketing purposes, social media marketing professionals are engaging their audience with the hopes of turning them into actual customers.
Having IGTV for the growing social media marketing strategy shows that there are other ways for you to sustain interest and boost brand awareness among your prospects.
Aside from just showing what your brand has to offer to the customers, boosting their engagement will make sure that you position your brand among them. Consequently, this enhances customer retention.
To optimize your social media marketing strategy, there are several tips on how to use IGTV for marketing.
Know the IGTV Requirements
Verified Instagram users can post up to hour-long IGTV videos while the regular users can upload videos that are up to 10-minutes long which are still much longer than videos intended for Instagram Reel uploads.
Now, there is an Instagram IGTV series feature which allows creators to produce a regular series of videos to be released weekly, monthly, and so on.
Below is a more comprehensive list of requirements from the Instagram Help Center.
- Length: Videos must be at least one minute long. When uploading from a mobile device, the maximum length of your video can be 15 minutes but when uploading from the web, it can be up to 60 minutes.
- File Type: Videos must be in MP4 file format.
- Resolution and Size: A vertical video must have an aspect ratio of 9:16 and a horizontal video must have an aspect ratio of 16:9. Videos should have a minimum frame rate of 30 FPS (frames per second) and minimum resolution of 720 pixels. The maximum file size for videos that are less than 10 minutes is 650MB. The maximum file size for videos with up to 60 minutes length is 3.6GB.
- Content: You should follow the Community Guidelines to avoid the risk of getting your videos removed from Instagram.
- Cover Photo Size: The ideal size for cover photos is 420px by 654px (or 1:1.55 ratio).
Use Repurposed Video Content
About 83% of US marketing professionals find repurposing video content as an efficient way to produce more videos for different social media platforms. There are instances where you need to create video content that can also be posted on different platforms such as TikTok, Pinterest, and Facebook. Through repurposing video content, you will less likely run out of content to post.
The essential requirement in using repurposed video content is to be aware of the purpose of your video content. Aside from ensuring that IGTV stabilizes online presence, it also helps you boost brand awareness by getting people to watch fresh snippets of longer videos.
When repurposing video content from another social media platform to IGTV, or vice versa, you need to be aware of the platform’s purpose and other technicalities such as aspect ratio, length of the video, and several other video requirements.
Target Niche Audience
One unique feature in IGTV is the essence of immediately targeting niche audiences. Before deploying your video content, make sure that your specialized video topics effectively address the target audience.
To target the niche audience via IGTV, you need to be generous with your keyword tags. Take note, avoid making use of oversaturated keywords such as #food, #candle, #cool, and other vague keywords. You need to be as specific as possible.
While targeting the niche audience, you can also determine the insight reports of the keywords that you will be using under your niche audience. You can determine how many content creators have frequently used those keywords, and how strong the visibility you would get once the video content is already deployed.
Explore Video Content Types
About 78% of the video content is concentrated on interview types of video content. This figure means that when you are about to just use an interview type of video content in your IGTV channel, your visibility might be affected,
Because of the promising and varied features of IGTV for marketing, you can actually use the different tools that are present in the platform. Aside from this, make sure that your video contents are also dynamic for the audience to get excited about the things that your brand can offer among different aspects.
Video tutorials, interactive video graphics on the technicalities of your brand, the science and art behind the creation of your products and services, promotional videos, several trivia videos about your brand, and other video content types can be explored in IGTV for marketing.
Host Q&A Interviews
Aside from just plainly posting pictures and videos, IGTV is a good start to discover and foster collaboration videos with influencers. IGTV is also considered a good place to facilitate and host interviews with influencers or other experts that are considered relevant to your industry.
In hosting Q & A interviews, IGTV offers generous and free features that allow all users to navigate the necessary tools in the social media platform. This can be a great avenue for you to also tap into the audience of the influencer.
Host Game Shows
Game shows scientifically engage the audience in any way. Aside from boosting the engagement of the audience, this also allows your brand to be entertaining and remarkable to the people.
Using IGTV for marketing may be challenging in terms of hosting game shows, but fitting the desired game show with your brand will allow further engagement among people from different angles you could take.
For instance, if you’re an insurance company making use of IGTV for marketing, you can invite two people who could guess the fundamental financial terms and then encourage them to write on the whiteboards. After that, they can show it to the camera, and then let them share some of the insights that your company can provide.
Educate or Entertain
In boosting brand awareness and customer count, it is always important to let viewers know about all technicalities of your brand. The modern times in marketing do not call for clickbait and plain brands, but to the brands that encourage the customers to be familiar with them in all aspects.
Using IGTV for marketing, you can make use of at least minute-long videos to educate and entertain the audience. To evaluate the videos, you can access the insights tool to determine the level of effectiveness incurred in each video that seeks to educate and entertain people.
Monitor Engagement
Uploading a video on your Instagram page does not necessarily mean that you have already provided value to your audience.
It does not stop there. After posting the videos, you need to continuously monitor the engagement of the viewers to determine the length of engagement incurred by the audience, and the videos that they have commonly watched on your channel so you can adjust your strategy for the next videos.
The insights tool in IGTV is detail-oriented. In addition, the platform also gives you generous options on what you can do next to increase brand engagement with your channel. Leverage these features for a data-driven IGTV marketing strategy.
