Social media powerhouse Instagram is enticing businesses, influencers, and users with its IGTV platform. IGTV, allows users to post up to one hour of vertical video. As a now official long-form video platform, Instagram is competing with the number one video portal — YouTube. Surprisingly, IGTV has many features that set it apart from YouTube, making it a unique experience for business owners and viewers.
Social media is about more than creating brand visibility and producing sales; it’s also about showing up in Google search results. Here is how you can use IGTV to do all of it.
What is IGTV?
IGTV is Instagram’s latest effort to make the platform a long-form video network. Users can post up to one hour of video discussing, reviewing, and vlogging whatever they’d like. While this makes IGTV a direct competitor of the already established YouTube community, there are some very exclusive features of IGTV that YouTube just doesn’t have. Perhaps the best feature is that when you create an IGTV profile, all of your current followers are automatically followers of your TV profile. As a result, you don’t have to start from scratch, and you have a massive starting number that YouTube doesn’t provide.
Video Content Creation
Let’s start here. If you want to drive traffic to your site through IGTV, you better get started on creating some video content. Hopping on camera can be a little intimidating, but once you start, it will come naturally. While creating content is obviously crucial, there is a catch. Your content needs to be original, entertaining, and informative.
The ability to post long-form videos means you can be extremely in-depth and informative with your content. For example, If you’re a doctor, you can pick a trending procedure or diet and give your users the lowdown on that topic. State facts, opinions, research, and even do a Q&A with your audience. If you’re in retail, product demonstrations, sneak peeks, and behind-the-scenes access into new launches is a great way to attract users and keep them coming. Remember, engaging with your current followers is an effective technique in social media marketing.
Advertising on IGTV
If you’ve done your research, you’ll know that IGTV does not currently support paid advertisements. However, we can pretty much guarantee that won’t last long. Instagram is a highly used app that already generates tons of user traffic.
Our advice: jump onto IGTV as soon as possible. The more prominent you are when paid placement rolls around, the more traction you’ll get if you decide to place advertisements.
IGTV Equals Web Traffic
So if there’s no way to place ads or connect links to your videos, how does IGTV increase web traffic? By posting content to IGTV, your business is gaining exposure, brand awareness, and popularity. As of now, there isn’t much competition on IGTV. As a result, your videos are much more likely to be seen by browsing users. Once a user stumbles across your content and clicks your profile, they have already become a lead. They trusted your video enough to want more, and now they are on track to clicking the link in your bio and becoming a customer.
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