IGTV Tips & Tricks: How to use Instagram TV

IGTV is Instagram’s long-form video feature and it’s something they have invested a lot in.

As a part of my Instagram Marketing Guide, I will break down how to use IGTV and add some tips & tricks to increase the visibility of your videos.

These are the technical video specs for IGTV videos:

• Video length: 15 seconds up to 60 minutes. The 60 minutes videos are only available to verified or large Instagram accounts. The maximum video length for everyone else is 10 minutes.
• Video file size limit is 3.6 GB
• The file type is MP4
• Ideal video size: 9:16. You might want to crop your videos to 1080 pixels wide and 1920 pixels high.
• Video thumbnail/cover image: .JPG

Tips & Tricks for IGTV

While IGTV is still in its very early days, there are already data showing what makes a great IGTV video:

• Subtitles: Because IGTV is made for smartphones, a lot of the viewers might not have the sound turned on. So it’s a good idea to add subtitles to your video.
• Ideal length: Just because you can post a 10-minute video, doesn’t mean you should.
  Unless you have 10 minute worth of interesting content, I’d advice you to keep your videos around 2-3 minute videos.
• Vertical videos only: I see a lot of YouTubers reposting their landscape videos to IGTV. If you want to share a landscape video you already filmed for Youtube, you can scale the video to 9:16 and edit it for IGTV. While it won’t be perfect it might be watchable.

Promote your IGTV video

After you have uploaded your video, you can promote it with an Instagram Story. You can show a teaser of the video and add a direct link from your Instagram Story to your IGTV video like this:

Pick “IGTV Video”

Pick the IGTV video you uploaded (before promoting it of course)

Who will see your IGTV videos?

It works kinda like the Instagram feed.

When you post a new IGTV video, it will be promoted in the top of your followers feed.

The interface is pretty simple with three sections on it:

• For You – These section is for videos based on the content you engage with on Instagram.
• Following – Shows Instagram videos from people you follow.
• Popular – contains trending public videos from celebrities and other channels.

And I think it will be even more aggressively promoted by Instagram. You are already subscribed to certain hashtags and IGTV tagged with hashtags your follow, will for sure also pop up in your Instagram feed soon.

This is only my speculations of course.

Hashtags for IG TV

When you upload your Instagram TV video you can add a caption and a description.

In the description, you can add hashtags like you are used too for Instagram Posts. I’d recommend you to follow this hashtags recipe.

IGTV insights and statistics

Instagram TV stats explained

• Views: Amount of views your video got
• Likes: Self-explanatory
• Comments. Same
• Audience retention. This is interesting. IGTV will show you what percentage of people watch your video in its entirety and gives you an overview of how many percent view, how much of your video.
  This will give you a good idea of what part of the video makes people drop off.

Also, remember IG TV Videos are built for mobile. Which means videos are full screen and vertical (not wide or landscape mode)

They even built an iPhone App and an Android App for Instagram TV. But for now, it doesn’t really make sense to download the IGTV App since it’s basically identical to how it looks in the official Instagram App.

Learn all about Instagram tips & tricks read my post about Instagram Engagement & Instagram Marketing in my photographer’s guide to social media and marketing.