Landscape Videos Are Now Here for IGTV
There’s a lot of different features Instagram has added to its platform over the years.
- Live
- Stories
- Highlights
- Option to sell directly from a post
With the surge of popularity with videos on social media, Instagram decided to launch IGTV, where users could watch TV like videos from their favorite accounts. Ranging from 15 seconds and capping at 15 minutes.
Longer form video was encouraged because Instagram wanted users to stay on their platform longer. This is true for every social media platform.
Battle of the Social Media Platforms
Just like when you see your competition doing something that is making them successful, you’re naturally going to want to steal it or replicate in hopes of success for yourself. Instagram is no different.
Instagram has pretty much destroyed Snapchat by adding Stories to its platform. Facebook has taken the hint too. Not only did they take the stories feature but they saw how popular the portrait mode, full-screen video was on Snapchat and built IGTV too.
The videos on IGTV only supported in portrait mode. Technically you could add a video in landscape mode but it wasn’t going to do you much good. Screen rotations aren’t supported by Instagram. Their videos were meant to be viewed with your phone upright. In turn, you had to make all your IGTV videos in portrait mode.
Instagram recognized that a lot of people preferred to watch longer videos in landscape mode so IGTV is now adding support for landscape videos. It’s only natural because the screen is bigger that way. Not only did users request this feature but creators wanted to add it as well. Gotta give the people what they want, right?
On top of looking better, it was also apart of their algorithm, to rank IGTV videos in landscape lower than those in the intended version of portrait mode. Before, if you added a landscape video to IGTV, it would look like a widescreen movie. Instagram liked the immersive aspect of portrait mode, having the entire screen filled with content.
Posting Natively is Key
At first, a lot of content creators were trying to upload videos straight from their Youtube channel so they wouldn’t have to make their videos again. That didn’t work as well because Youtube wants landscape videos and it wasn’t “authentic Instagram content.” Every single social media platform wants unique content to its platform.
Meaning, they don’t want you to copy and paste your LinkedIn post to Facebook or uploading a video to Instagram and telling it to share directly to Facebook. Each platform wants you to spend the most amount of time on their platform. The way they punish users who copy-paste is showing your “unoriginal” content to fewer people. So you could have the exact same post on every single platform.
Same graphic.
Same copy.
Same message.
But if you took the time to go directly to the “box” on Facebook and make the post, then do the same thing to LinkedIn, and same for Instagram, etc, your results would be much better because they treat it as original content. The longer you spend on their platform, the more they will reward you.
The more features you use on their platforms, the more people they will show your content to. So, if you’re only posting stories or content in your feed but not taking advantage of IGTV or Live, then your content won’t be shown to as many people. Same goes for every platform.
Every social platform will forever be adding, changing, swapping and doing all kinds of new things. They will always value original content and they will all want to stand out from each other. Stay tuned for more social media updates about your platforms and different strategies for maximizing your time on social media on the Keeping it Social Blog!
