IGTV Video: What It Means for Your Business

It feels like there are new platforms and features on social media every day. So, what is IGTV and why should you use IGTV video for your business?

Background on THE war

IGTV stands for Instagram TV or Instagram Long Form Video. You might need a little bit of background to help you really understand what’s going on here.

The top three most popular websites are: #1 Google, #2 YouTube and #3 Facebook. Google and YouTube are fighting to stay at the top and Facebook is fighting to unseat them.  This is good for YOU! There are new features rolling out that you can take advantage of.

Google’s the number one search engine and YouTube is the number two search engine. Did you know that YouTube is owned by Google?

This means that Google has cornered the market on the long form video for quite some time. Facebook wants in on the action and Facebook owns Instagram.

If you have a Facebook business page (you do, right?!) you most likely saw that engagement has dropped significantly recently, that’s because people are seeing your page less and less in their feed. This is due to another change in the algorithm focusing on friends and family.

One major way to combat this is to use video! Facebook really likes video and puts a stronger emphasis on it. To increase your engagement, you should be adding native videos on Facebook and doing Facebook Live.

Battling for #1

Basically, you have Google and YouTube against Facebook and Instagram. They’re really trying to go after one another and come up with new features to make their platforms your go-to platform.

While Facebook already allows long videos up to 45 minutes, and Facebook Live’s for up to four HOURS.  Instagram, however, was only allowing video clips that were 3-60 seconds long.

The issue that Facebook saw is that millennials prefer Instagram over Facebook, and they also prefer YouTube to Facebook.  They really aren’t fans of Facebook especially with the issues in the news about Facebook and their privacy problems.

Facebook needed to find a way to compete with YouTube and grab and retain more of the millennials.

Instagram Long Form Video

In June of 2018, Instagram reached one billion monthly active users. That’s a huge milestone for them. To take aim right at YouTube, Instagram added IGTV, which increased the length of videos you can upload. No longer are you limited to a measly 3-60 second clip!

Now with Instagram, you can upload much longer clips.  It’s been touted as hour-long video, however, after uploading a few myself, I noticed that it lets most users upload 10-minute videos and the hour-long feature is available only for larger or verified accounts and must be uploaded from your computer, not the app.

Let’s hope they change this silliness soon.

Going Vertical

You can comment, like and share your videos on Instagram, IGTV with your friends, but the biggest difference with IGTV is how the video is sized. For YouTube, it has always been a horizontal video (1920 x 1080).

Instagram has decided to switch things up a bit and the size of an IGTV video is 1080 x 1920, vertical. This is because people are using their cell phones constantly.

The vertical video works well on your cell phone as it fills up your entire screen and you don’t have to rotate your phone.

Get posting!

Like I’ve said a million times, Video is here to stay and it’s what people (read customers and potential customers) are watching!  Make sure you’re posting videos on IGTV. It’s something new, people are just starting to do it, so you want to be ahead of the curve.

Your Facebook Live videos are also primarily filmed vertically as well. It’s a good idea to re-purpose some of them on IGTV.

When you go into your Instagram app, there is the IGTV icon at the top right.  Simply click on that and get your account set up and start posting!

Take advantage of Google and Facebook’s war going on online and use IGTV video for your business!

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