After years of turmoil in the broadcast media industry, we could be seeing a wave of change that will disrupt the social media landscape.
After a growing buzz, Instagram finally launched IGTV less than a week ago. It’s still early I know, but it might already be time to think what this update may imply for other social platforms, and for us marketers.
So far, it seems like this was a move orchestrated by Facebook to hit YouTube in a moment of weakness. The Google platform has been heavily criticised for making it too difficult to get your organic and paid content in front of the right audience, and for de-monetising content creators.
Obviously, the battle for who owns the biggest slice of the digital marketing cake is far from being won and I’m sure there’s a lot to follow, but first, let’s look at some data.
First of all, right after the launch of IGTV, active Instagram users have grown to a whopping 1 billion. YouTube is still in the lead with 1.5 billion, and just to put things in perspective, there’s only 7.6 billion of us on earth.
So why is long-form video so palatable to us marketers?
After losing millions from major brands, YouTube definitely needs to fix their business relationship. Meanwhile, Instagram is taking advantage of this situation letting users upload long-form videos in the 9:16 format, that can be monetised.
Sure, for us marketers it’s not available for paid media yet and it’s mobile only, but it can already be used to create influence and trends, in short, new engaging love stories between consumer and brands in a whole new format.
For example, if you have a blog, you might create a video episode for IGTV that re-links to the blog post. You can run un-boxing episodes of new products on the market or showcase your client portfolio or latest release to push your sales or build awareness.
Sure, it’s not optimised for us yet, but it’s already a powerful instrument for brand new content creation.
