Gain 100 followers a day with IGTV
The 8 Step Strategy to Getting 1 Million Views on IGTV
You might wonder at this moment:
is Instagram a bad place to grow your audience in 2020?
No, Instagram is not a bad place to grow an audience.
And yes, there are ways to work around the death of organic growth.
How?
Easy: IGTV!
In this video, I want to share my easy strategy to get 1 million views on Instagram via IGTV
even if you’re not an Instagram expert, or have a large following (in fact, I only had 5,500 followers when I posted this video).
I encourage you to stick till the end as I will explain step-by-step how you can utilize IGTV the best way possible and how you also can get 1 million views with a single video on IGTV.
We are going to split this video up into 3 parts:
- Firstly we’re going to talk about why you should consider using IGTV
- Then we talk about why this strategy works
- And finally, we do a deep dive into the strategy in detail by showing you some examples and how you can incorporate this strategy for your own IGTV channel
If you’re already familiar with IGTV I encourage you to skip to step 3, where I explain the strategy in detail.
Before we dive into IGTV I just want to say thank you so much that you have been watching my videos and supporting me here on the channel and being completely awesome because of you rock!
The joy that I get from publishing videos like this is just immense!
And if this is your first time watching, You might want to consider to hit that subscribe button: because you know: that’d be appreciated!
Let’s jump into IGTV!
1. Why should you use IGTV?
If you haven’t used IGTV yet, you should consider so because of 3 powerful reasons:
- 1) Not only can you record, upload and share long-form content to your Instagram channel, but you can also now connect, engage and grow your brand on Instagram by sharing your story and message on a whole new level.
Allowing you to upload up to one full hour of video at a time, you can leverage your social media strategy even more with IGTV and it’s custom search feature, connecting you with potentially millions, no, billions of other Instagrammers worldwide
- 2) A lot of influencers and agencies are saying this for a long time: Instagram is slowly killing the organic reach on their platform.
Speculation around an algorithm change was dispelled by an Instagram spokesperson, but it’s left a question mark over what caused performance drops.
But it does raise the question of how we as content creators can claim more watch time from our followers and boost our organic reach.
Luckily IGTV can really help with that! Because I noticed a huge boost in organic reach when using IGTV. I wondered if this was a one-off success so I tested it on several accounts of mine and they all showed similar results.
Instead of the usual 10-20% organic reach you can organically reach up to 60% of your followers via IGTV, how mind-blowing is that!?
- 3) Last but not least: Go viral
using IGTV is maybe the easiest way to make your content go viral and reach millions of people, without spending any $ on ads!
IGTV is here to stay, and just like me, I hope you now see how powerful this tool can be for your social media strategy.
What if I told you that only 2 months ago I hit 1 million views on IGTV, while I only have 8,000 followers?
And this is not a one-off successful video. After this video another one hit over 600,000 views, a second one 320,000 views and last but not least the third IGTV video hit 705,000 views.
This success was done without spending any dollars on ads, and today I want to share with you how you also can hit over 100,000 views with a single video.
But…before we dive in: please let me know in the comments what you prefer:
- landscape videos
- or portrait videos
I hope it’s clear WHY you should use IGTV for your social media strategy, so we can now dive into the fun part: my strategy how I got 1 million views with a single video via IGTV!
2. Why this strategy works
Instagram really tries to push IGTV as much as possible, and they do this with subtle changes to their native app.
- Sharing IGTV content via preview to your feed
Instagram introduced sharing your IGTV content to your feed via previews…! And this is very important for making your content go viral.
- Sharing IGTV content via Stories
And recently when you share your IGTV content to Stories the video is no longer a silly still photo, but it actually starts to play the video in your stories: how cool is that!
- Place where the magic happens ?
IGTV is being skyrocketed in the explore page, and this is THE MOST IMPORTANT place where the magic happens.
As a content creator, you want your content to appear on the explore page. On this page, you can reach millions of people without spending any $ on ads.
The explore page is Instagram’s nifty trick of keeping you on their platform.
How do they do that? Again with the “ALMIGHTY” Instagram Algorithm.
I’ve made a full video on how the Instagram algorithm works. If you’re interested in this video you can find it “HERE” or you can click the link in the description down below.
But back to this video about IGTV and the explore page.
The explore page serves 1 purpose: keep you for as long as possible on the Instagram platform.
They do this by showing you compelling content you absolutely would love to see (or at least, they think you would) which is based on your previous behavior on Instagram.
And there is more good news for IGTV. This feature gets promoted like crazy. And for IGTV it means they get highlighted like crazy. For example, on the explore page they have a dedicated button, and the video highlight is taking up 4 tiles instead of the usual 1 tile.
That’s 4 times more exposure for you, for free on the explore page → FOR FREE!
Let’s quickly sum up why IGTV is so powerful:
- Your organic reach goes up
- Very easy to go viral
- Instagram favors IGTV above other content in the explore page
- It’s very easy to reach new hyper-targeted potential followers
- And you can post content longer than 1 minute, making it ideal for content creators who love video (like me)
Is there a secret formula to go viral via IGTV? I don’t know, but what I do know is that I have an easy 8 step strategy I always use for IGTV and which has given me over 1 million views with a single video.
Which I’m going to share with you now.
3. The strategy I used to generate over 1 million views on IGTV
What are the key ingredients for making content go viral on IGTV?
For every video on IGTV, I use the same strategy or method, whatever you would like to call it.
The strategy you are about to learn is easy. Trust me its not rocket science, and if I can figure it out, you can figure it out!
You don’t need any special tools or Instagram hacks to reach that 1 million views.
So without further due, here are my 8 steps to getting 1 million views on IGTV:
- 1) Only post content you are passionate about (even if it’s user-generated-content)
- 2) Know your audience: why are people following you?
- 3) Share compelling content
- 4) Have a good cover photo (or still photo)
- 5) Post a Preview on your newsfeed (this is crucial)
- 6) Have a Call-To-Action (CTA) in the title
- 7) Use relevant hashtags
- 8) Last but not least: don’t forget to share the IGTV video on your Instagram Stories
1) Only post content you are passionate about
Why is it important to only post things you are passionate about? Social media is about resonating with each other’s values. If for example, I’m not a huge fan of hitting the gym. But I do like to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Instead of posting tons of gym exercises I post a lot of nutrition info and healthy food ideas to my followers. This is where I get my energy from and this is where I can thrive. If you do not post content you are not passionate about you won’t last long and you will get bored.
2) Know your audience: why are people following you?
Social media is a two-way street. People follow you because they want to identify with your values, but if you truly understand why people follow you and on which content they resonate the most with you can provide them with the right content at the right moment.
If you want to know more about finding out why your followers follow you you can read a blog post I did. I will share the link in the description below.
3) Share compelling content
When doing masterclasses I always ask my students: are your followers interested in another photo of you having breakfast, or can you actually provide value to them?
An easy way to do this is by sharing what you are eating, and why. For example, if you try to lose weight why are you having a healthy smoothie at breakfast? What’s in that smoothie? What are the benefits of that smoothie compared to having American pancakes and last but not least: how can I as a follower make that smoothie to make my life easier and healthier?
4) Have a good cover photo (or still photo)
Having a good cover photo can mean the difference between day and night. Without a good cover photo, your audience might face difficulties watching your content.
A common problem is that my clients choose the first frame of the video as the still photo. This can mean that your cover photo is fully black. Trust me, this will kill your engagement by 100% and it happens more than often.
How can you fix this? You can either choose an interesting cover photo from the video, or you can make an interesting cover photo and add it to your video on IGTV.
Extra tip: to really boost your engagement you can use the center square space as your main image. When sharing your content as a preview on your feed (which I will talk about in step 5) you also have a great still photo there which screams to be clicked and watched by your audience!
5) Post a Preview on your newsfeed (this is crucial)
Engagement is key for getting your getting to viral. Luckily you can now share a 1-minute preview to your Instagram feed. If your video is longer your audience will get a pop-up to watch the full content on IGTV.
I highly recommend sharing your content via the preview of your feed. This has provided me tons of engagement on my content and given me over 1 million views with a single post.
6) Have a Call-To-Action (CTA) in the title
Like said in step 5, engagement is very important to make your content go viral. An easy way to get engagement is by adding a Call To Action (also known as CTA) to your IGTV content.
For example, in the video I shared earlier I simply ask my audience to write “Mango” in their own language in the comments. But you can ask any other questions, for example:
- do you like mangoes?
- would you eat this?
- tag a friend who would eat this
- YEAH or NAH? Comment below
Just by adding this little question at the start of your caption (or as the title of your IGTV content) you can boost comments with over 1134%!!??
7) Use relevant hashtags
Hashtags are still very important to make your content go viral and reach millions of people who are looking up hashtags for inspiration and motivation. To this day I still hear a lot of people saying that hashtags are dead, and maybe you’ve heard the same.
Let them talk: this only means that there is only less competition for you and me out there on Instagram.
But with using hashtags you have to understand that you should only use relevant hashtags. Instagram’s algorithm is really smart, and it not only scans your hashtags and captions: but also your photos and videos. The machine learning knows it’s a mango on the image and not an apple.
Also, stay away from spam hashtags like follow4follow or likes4likes. I usually use 5-15 hashtags in my posts which are all video related.
8) Last but not least: don’t forget to share the IGTV video on your Instagram Stories
Recently there has been a new update for Instagram Stories where IGTV content plays automatically in the Stories. With over 500 million users Stories is really interesting for any brand or content creator out there to share content with. Since the dimensions for Stories and IGTV (Both 9×16 in a vertical setting) are the same the user experience for the viewer is the same.
I highly encourage you to share your IGTV content to Stories to give it that extra boost and make it go viral.
Final Note:
So is IGTV one of the easiest ways to reach more organic followers, and new potential new followers?
I believe so.
After running tests on over 7 of my accounts and posting more than 100 IGTV videos I can say it worked out for me pretty well, and thus I highly recommend it to you too.
Thank you so much for watching. If you liked the video please give your thumbs up. If you haven’t subscribed yet please consider doing so (I will leave a link in the description). If you like this stuff please leave any questions in the comments and I’ll answer them as soon as possible. Thanks for watching and see you in the next video, bye-bye!