How & why you should focus on video content on Instagram

You probably already know how powerful and influential Instagram is in regards to your ecommerce sales, and video content is the future of content marketing on Instagram. With the attention span getting shorter, dynamic videos force the audience to stop scrolling and watch. It keeps the audience engaged longer, and the chances of making an impact increase.

Instagram’s popularity has rapidly changed consumers' shopping habits. As a visual sharing platform, it has become a great marketplace for customers to discover and explore new products.

The Instagram community counts to 1.16 billion active users today, and it just keeps on growing. 500 million users access Instagram daily, 64% of which are under 34 years old. Also, 72% of Millennials are active on the platform.

According to Instagram themselves, researchers have found that time spent watching videos on Instagram is growing by 80% year over year, and the number of videos produced per day has increased by 4X since 2019.

Studies show that videos drive more engagement than static photos. The study also found that only 18% of the posts on the network are videos. Publishing more videos will also help you stand out in the feed.

Here are your top three reasons why you have to start use Instagram videos:

Users prefer videos. 59% of today’s users want to see more video content from brands. Use Instagram videos to increase your customer satisfaction and increase their engagement.

Videos help your customers learn more about your product. 72% of customers prefer learning about a product or service through a video. Create an Instagram video that helps your target audience to learn more about your product and turn your viewers into customers. Here, you should use a combination of stories and in-feed posts to see which ones drive the most sales.

Customers online want to see products in action. Dynamic videos show the product from all sides and in live action which can help the customer feel more secure in making the right purchase.

So, now that you want to start making Instagram videos, how do you do it?

There are five different social media video formats that work best on Instagram:
· Feed posts
· Stories
· Reels
· IGTV
· Livestreams

Instagram’s video length varies from 3 seconds to 60 minutes, which means that every business can find the right video type to achieve their business wants and needs on the platform.

To inspire your video creation process, here are six tips and ideas for you to use:

Use thumbnails. If users have their autoplay turned off, adding a captivating thumbnail can help you get more views. This doesn’t even have to be complicated – you can simply add the title of the video as overlay text. An intriguing thumbnail will raise curiosity and encourage people to click and watch. Thumbnails can also help your videos generate views when people are browsing through your account page since the videos don’t play automatically there.

Use subtitles. 83% of people watch videos with the sound turned off, and 50% of people want captions so that they can watch videos on mute. Adding subtitles also makes your content more accessible as it automatically includes the hearing impaired & deaf community, who otherwise wouldn’t be able to take part in your video content as easily.

Create a catalog using highlights. a great way to get the most out of Instagram stories is by creating a catalog. create a carousel story where several videos promoting different products in a collection have been bunched together in a different slide; then set it as a highlight for people who visit your website. 

How-to and tutorial videos. A study found that how-to tutorials are the most preferred form of video content. So, create how-to videos that meet the needs and wants of your followers. Short videos will work best for in-feed post, while longer videos are better for stories. This is because you can upload an unlimited number of slides to your carousel stories. 

Run a live Q&A session. Instagram Live (livestreams) allows you to maintain a direct line with your followers and easily connect with your community in an authentic way. Running a live Q&A where you receive comments and questions from your customers in real-time is a very meaningful tool for building a strong connection between your brand and your customers. Before running your live Q&A session, create an Instagram post with all the information about your online event to tell your followers about it in advance. After the livestream, share it on IGTV so that those who missed it get a chance to see it.

Include user generated content (UGC). UGC is a great way to engage your community, and while most brands focus on images when working with user generated content, creating UGC videos is essentially combining the best of both worlds. We at Flowbox happen to be experts on UGC, so if you want to learn more - click here!

As you can see, there are several Instagram video ideas that allow you to show off your products in a way that best suits your brand and turn your viewers into customers.

Take a look at the list above of Instagram video ideas to get your inspiration flowing and start creating videos. Because at the end of the day, Instagram videos are the future of content.

More information:
Olivia Carloni, Marketing Intern, Flowbox
olivia.carloni@getflowbox.com