Recently Instagram has introduced a brand new feature called IGTV. Namely, it allows Instagram users to upload videos that are up to 1 hour long. These videos are similar to the Stories functionality which was intended for capturing momentary videos and share them with your friends. This feature was getting more and more popular with beauty and travel bloggers, so now Instagram decided to launch the standalone mobile app to create video content.
Technically, the IGTV is still purely mobile-oriented – the videos are in the vertical format intended for tablet and smartphone users. The app has several tabs: For You, Following, Popular and Continue Watching. The first one is a video stream compilation based subscriptions and recommended videos. The Following tab contains the videos from the people you are following on Instagram. Continue Watching allows you to return to some video you haven’t watched up to the end.
Surely, you can like, follow and share the videos with your friends and followers.
Now, what are the opportunities for professional Instagram users and what are the prospects of IGTV on the Web?
How can IGTV change the game for Instagram bloggers?
The Instagram officials say that the creators are the channels and suppose that in the long run IGTV is supposed to become an alternative to the conventional TV. According to some researches, the share of video content in the Internet traffic will be up to 78% by 2021, and without any doubt, up to 80% of this traffic will be via mobile devices. That’s why the introduction of the vertical screen may be a good foundation for future success.
Still, IGTV will have to struggle for leadership with other video content and streaming platforms and the mastodons of the industry such as YouTube or Vimeo may be pretty tough to defeat. But IGTV has a certain audience of users that will for sure take an advantage of it.
IGTV is a really revolutionary feature for spontaneous, on-the-go content makers. Previously, the beauty, fitness or travel bloggers, celebrities, music bands and other representatives of the showbiz world had to use third-party platforms to publish their personal videos and vlogs. Taking into consideration that the logic of modern show business is built around the social network functionality, they were using YouTube mostly as a video hosting for long videos. Now they can do it directly from their mobile.
This doesn’t mean that IGTV is a newborn YouTube killer. The vertical format of the videos means that they will be mostly spontaneous, raw. So, the target audience of more professional content will still use YouTube, but the latest surveys show us that the larger part of content consumers prefer the videos produced by non-professionals (mostly vloggers).
It’s much easier to trace the popularity of your content by publishing the videos directly on the platform getting likes and shares. IGTV will also speed up the creation of a follower base as it will speed up the process of content making. So we may expect an emerge of a new content market in the nearest future.
IGTV and SMM professionals: new horizons
The emergence of a new content format and platform interwoven with the fastest growing social network on the planet will mean that the SMM specialists will have a bunch of new strategies to explore.
First of all, IGTV has a huge advertisement potential in terms of product reviews (for example, the cosmetics reviews by top beauty bloggers), real-life demonstrations and especially viral marketing. In fact, one can multiply the ease-of-use and democracy of YouTube by the huge social resources of Instagram and get the approximate understanding of what can be done with IGTV.
Secondly, the above-mentioned marketing opportunities are now available for everyone and it’s crucial for small and local businesses who cannot afford high advertisement budgets. So SMM specialists may expect an increased demand for their services.
The other side of the medal is that content making for IGTV will require more resources, but considering virality the effort will pay for itself. Besides this, the platform will probably urge the advertisers to mimic the non-professional video content which means that the budgets will be really lower than those required for promotional videos on YouTube.
All in all, IGTV has much to be explored and discovered by the SMM professional and, probably, we will witness new trends and new marketing strategies within this platform.
InstaBF Team have been working both with individuals and professional SMM and PR managers for several years already offering promotional boost services. Certainly, we cannot ignore the changes on the market and we proudly present our new packages for IGTV. Now you can buy IGTV likes, buy IGTV views and buy IGTV comments for your IGTV videos and catch the hype waves in the newly discovered ocean of opportunities.