How To Use The New In­sta­gram Video Fea­ture For In­creased Visibility

Busi­nesses have been us­ing so­cial me­dia to con­nect with cus­tomers for a while now, but the con­ver­gence of Face­book and In­sta­gram, and In­sta­gram’s new video fea­ture in par­tic­u­lar, opens up a whole new world of opportunity.

With video now in its ar­se­nal, all signs are point­ing to In­sta­gram as the new hotspot for reach­ing and con­nect­ing with consumers. 

But how can you use Instagram’s new video fea­ture to in­crease your brand’s visibility?

Let’s ex­plore this ques­tion in fur­ther de­tail and un­veil some tips and strate­gies that can be used to your busi­ness advantage.

Let Fol­low­ers Do the Work for You

In­sta­gram’s video fea­ture is very sim­i­lar to Vine by Twit­ter, ex­cept the videos come with Instagram’s unique fil­ters and last up to 15 sec­onds in length, rather than six sec­onds. Also, now that In­sta­gram is owned by Face­book, in­te­grat­ing the two so­cial me­dia plat­forms will be eas­ier than ever before.

  • A pow­er­ful in­te­gra­tion strat­egy in­volves con­nect­ing your Face­book and Twit­ter ac­count to your In­sta­gram ac­count and ac­tively en­cour­ag­ing fol­low­ers to use your busi­ness hash­tag to In­sta­gram rel­e­vant videos on your behalf.
  • When your fol­low­ers be­gin In­sta­gram­ming videos for your busi­ness and hash­tag­ging them with your brand’s hash­tags, your brand will au­to­mat­i­cally gain ex­po­sure amongst their fol­low­ers as well.

This is an in­cred­i­bly pow­er­ful way of com­bin­ing the best that Twit­ter, Face­book, and In­sta­gram has to of­fer. Due to the vast num­ber of peo­ple that can be reached on Face­book, your busi­ness has the po­ten­tial of reach­ing mil­lions of peo­ple by up­load­ing In­sta­gram videos to Face­book accounts.

instagram video app screenshot

Four In­sta­gram Screenshots:
1. Chose to make im­age or video
2. While record­ing video
3. Add Filters
4. Published

Add the Hu­man Element

Go­ing be­hind the scenes of your busi­ness by tak­ing videos show­cas­ing the em­ploy­ees and the work en­vi­ron­ment gives con­sumers an in­ti­mate look at your busi­ness and in­creases the con­nec­tion that they feel to your business.

This pro­vides a hu­man el­e­ment to your busi­ness, al­low­ing con­sumers to put a face to the brand and mak­ing your busi­ness much more re­lat­able. This is a proven mar­ket­ing strat­egy that has been em­ployed for years, but the unique fil­ters and shar­ing abil­ity of In­sta­gram and Face­book brings the po­ten­tial of this strat­egy to an en­tirely new level.

Cap­ture Com­pany Events

Be­fore the im­ple­men­ta­tion of video, most busi­nesses took pic­tures of events and posted them to their Face­book wall or twit­ter ac­count to give con­sumers a be­hind the scenes glimpse into the com­pany cul­ture. By cre­at­ing and shar­ing videos of com­pany events, con­sumers will feel more con­nected to your busi­ness and feel as if they are a part of the com­pany cul­ture themselves.

Noth­ing sells a busi­ness more than tons of smil­ing and happy faces hav­ing a good time at a com­pany party or event. By do­ing this, con­sumers will ob­tain a pos­i­tive opin­ion of your com­pany and feel more com­pelled to pur­chase your prod­ucts or be­come a brand ambassador.

Con­nect­ing with Locals

The geo-tag­ging fea­ture of­fered by In­sta­gram video pro­vides you with the abil­ity to tag videos based upon your business’s lo­ca­tion. This al­lows your videos to ap­pear in the search re­sults when­ever some­one per­forms a search for your par­tic­u­lar lo­ca­tion. This SEO ben­e­fit is an­other pow­er­ful way that In­sta­gram video can be used to in­crease your busi­ness’s visibility.

Hold Con­tests for In­creased Brand Awareness

Con­tests via so­cial me­dia can be used a num­ber of ways to pro­mote your busi­ness, but one pop­u­lar method is to hold con­tests that en­cour­age your busi­ness’s cur­rent Twit­ter or Face­book fol­low­ers to be­come In­sta­gram fol­low­ers as well.

  • Sim­ply give away free prod­ucts to those who fol­low your busi­ness on In­sta­gram and cre­ate the most cre­ative and rel­e­vant videos about your company.
  • This helps give a boost to your In­sta­gram ac­count and in­crease brand awareness.

There are a myr­iad of mar­ket­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties with Instagram’s new video fea­ture. As you can see, just uti­liz­ing these tips alone can sig­nif­i­cantly in­crease your brand aware­ness and cre­ate rav­ing, loyal cus­tomers. By be­ing cre­ative with your videos and your mar­ket­ing strate­gies, the vis­i­bil­ity of your busi­ness can reach an all-time high.

About the au­thor: Kyle Sanders is a co-founder of Com­plete Web Re­sources, a dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and SEO ser­vices firm based out of Austin, TX. With over 15 years of col­lec­tive web mar­ket­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, his agency helps droves of clients--large and small--im­prove their search place­ments across the web. 

[rms] Ralf Skir­r’s com­ment: Thank you for this great ar­ti­cle, Kyle. I ap­pre­ci­ate pub­lish­ing an ar­ti­cle from a ‘real’ au­thor. I al­ways find it silly when con­trib­u­tors make up au­thor bios nam­ing their au­thors Jack, and Jill and Jane - with no last name and no so­cial me­dia pro­file.

Here’s the of­fi­cial in­tro­duc­tion to In­sta­gram Video:

Mark Zucker­berg and In­sta­gram’s co-founder Kevin Sys­trom In­tro­duces Video on Instagram—June 20th, 2013.

I have long re­sisted In­sta­gram, but now I’m fi­nally cre­at­ing my own ac­count. Their video fea­ture is easy to use, and the length of 15 sec­onds makes it more in­ter­est­ing for busi­ness than the short 6 sec­onds you can post on Twit­ter’s video app Vine.

Are you us­ing In­sta­gram video for your mar­ket­ing, or do you plan to?

Let us know in the comments.