How to Use Longer Instagram Video Limits

Instagram is the social network most business marketing people are discussing at the moment. It's growing more quickly than other social networks, and is hugely popular with 16-34-year-olds. And Instagram will now allow longer videos to be posted on both personal and brand profiles. The Instagram video length limit was just 15 seconds, which led to some innovative approaches, but the limit will now be 60 seconds. That means there is a lot more opportunity to get your message across.

The first person to post a longer length video appears to have been pop star Selena Gomez, who currently has 72.5 million followers on Instagram.

Businesses can learn from the popularity of celebrities and pop stars on Instagram. Rather than posting a clip from an existing music video, Gomez gave a 60 second insight into what was happening backstage at a recording session.

That's a much better approach than simply repeating video that you may have used elsewhere. You need to grab attention quickly, including ensuring you have a great video thumbnail image and title. But you also have to take into account that most people will see the video without sound as that is the default auto-play setting. So unless there's a good reason for someone to turn the volume up, they will be seeing visuals only.

Video is an area of huge growth for Instagram, similar to parent company Facebook. Time spent watching videos on Instagram has increased 40% in the last six months, and adding video to a campaign will drive more responses than simply using photos. So if you're considering paid Instagram advertising, you will get a better response rate by adding video, without needing to increase your budget. And you'll be better enabled to learn what works as View Counts are coming to Instagram videos in the near future.

You don't have to run a company with the size and resource of Red Bull to create great content and benefit from video on Instagram. For example, this UK fitness tutor mixes a range of instructional and demonstration videos in her Instagram feed showing sample exercises and people enjoying her courses - both of which will encourage future sign-ups in addition to building brand awareness.

It's easy to film high quality video on any recent smartphone, and you could include product guides, demonstrations, testimonials and more. And Instagram can be linked to post to your other social media accounts, adding images and video across all your profiles.

If you're looking for help and advice setting up Social Media and Instagram for your business, why not contact us for a helping hand?