It's no secret that our social media feeds are becoming more and more video-based; and Instagram, one of the most popular social networks around, is no different. Ever since stories have been introduced to the platform, their popularity skyrocketed quickly now, stories are viewed by over 500 million users everyday. What's more, videos are becoming so popular on Instagram, that the social network recently introduced a new platform, just for short form videos: Reels.
Plan and Research Your Instagram Video Content
There are numerous types of videos that you can create to help promote your brand and products on Instagram:
- Product videos: videos highlighting and promoting your products and what makes them amazing.
- Tutorial videos: videos that highlight how to use your products, how to leverage certain features and how to use your products for different reasons.
- Branded videos: videos that showcase your brand and help spread brand awareness.
- How to videos: videos that provide value to your target audience and engages them by showing them how to do something(for example, how to cook a recipe, how to create something and so on)
- Behind the scene videos: show glimpses of behind the scenes of your business and events.
- Live streaming videos: great for live Q&As with your audiences, interviews with interesting and relevant influencers and thought leaders, live product tutorials.
Whether you're creating a regular video to post on your profile or an Instagram reel, most of these formats will work beautifully (except for live streaming, of course). Take the time to plan and research your videos ahead of time:
- What are you social media marketing goals? What do you want to achieve with Instagram's help? Based on these goals, consider which types of videos will help you achieve these goals (for example, if you wanted more engagement, you'd need to create more how-to-videos, behind the scenes videos and live streams, or if you're using Instagram to boost your sales, then create more product and tutorial videos).
- What topics interest your audience? Use content research tools like Buzzsumo or Answer the Public to research target keywords and see what content performs best or what questions are most asked online - this will give you an idea of the topics that would work best as subjects for your Instagram videos (particularly non-branding/product videos).
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As for planning your calendar and scheduling your Instagram video content- there are a few useful tools that allow you to do this easily and quickly - and save you a lot of time in the long run.
This is a very useful feature for those with active Instagram accounts (especially if you're managing different accounts) as you wont have to schedule each video yourself; set up a queue, set time slots for your queue (i.e all the times when you want to publish a new story or reel, for anyway of the week) and then simply add the video content to your queue to let the tool do all the work for you.
Plus you also get a bunch of other useful features for Instagram management, such as a social inbox where you can see your messages, a hashtag listening tool and the ability to connect your ad account, among others.
Then, you can use the visual content marketing calendar to start actually planning your updates, including videos and Instagram story with drag and drop functionality.
Just like with the previous tool , you can use Later to publish and schedule your updates directly if you have an Instagram business profile, instead of getting a notification and publishing the content by yourself via the smartphone app.
Apart from posting and scheduling your Instagram content, later also offers a UGC (user generated content) tool for reposting other users' content more easily, as well as Instagram analytics.
See Also: How To Generate Sales Leads In Your Small Business
Creating Your Instagram Video Content: Useful Tips and Tools
As for how to create beautifully and engaging Instagram video content, there are a plethora of truly great - and easy to use - tools to help.
However, if you want to make sure the videos you shoot on your phone look (and sound) great, you should invest in a few gadgets:
- A tripod for stabilizing your videos.
- A microphone for making sure the audio on your video is crystal clear.
- Lightening to make sure the videos you shoot look great (especially important for indoors videos) also useful for taking better pictures which you can use in your story and reels.
That said, there are plenty of tools that will help you put together an amazing looking video with little effort (and little talent or editing knowledge needed).
From there, it's a simple question of adding text overlay, trimming your scenes (each video and photo you add counts as a scene) and adding music and voila, your video is ready to share on Instagram!
Oh and you don't need to worry about the Quik logo; you can remove that by selecting the last scene (the Quik by GoPro scene) and disabling it to remove it from your video.
It's also worth getting the Hyperlapse app from Instagram which allows you to create beautiful time lapse videos (although we have that free of charge on our Iphones now); as well as Instagram's boomerang which essentially does the opposite: short, GIF-like looming videos (remember to save any boomerang you love; I've lost too many boomerangs because I forgot to click the save button before taking another one!).
Video is currently exploding across platforms and
Instagram is certainly at the forefront. If you want to make the most of
video marketing on Instagram, make sure to plan and research your
content ahead of time, leverage tools and smartphone apps to help you
create better and more engaging posts and Reels and save time by
using management tools to publish and schedule your content more easily.