Instagram is a powerful tool that brands, advertisers, businesses, and content creators can use to broaden their reach and create their image. It’s a very visual tool that started with just images and now branched out to making videos.
You might notice when you log into your Instagram account that the platform focuses mainly on making things more visually interesting. If you want to see beautiful flat lays of products, picturesque sceneries, and reels that tell a visual story – this is the platform for you.
Getting the viewership you need on Instagram is not always easy though. If you are here, you are probably looking for ways to amplify the number of views on Instagram videos to make them more visible or even viral. There are a lot of strategies, both paid and organic, to get you there and the key is using both these strategies to help you get the results you are looking for.
Understanding Instagram’s Reach
You might have heard of the term “reach” before and wondered what it means. It basically refers to the unique people who engage with your account such as viewing your videos and leaving messages. There are different ways to measure reach and that is checking the reach for one post and a separate one for your entire profile.
If you are running a campaign, you can also check the reach for it. Doing this will help you understand what you are doing right and determine if there are changes that you need to make to your social media strategies.
Reach versus Impressions
It’s easy to confuse one over the other. People think that their Instagram impressions are also tantamount to their Instagram reach. But impressions refer to the number of times your videos are seen. This could be from the same person watching your videos over and over again while reach refers to a unique individual.
Instagram reach rates are only counted to the people following you while your impressions can also include the people who don’t follow you. Your reels and videos could show up on the explore page so even non-followers can find you.
Knowing your Instagram reach rate will help you create a strategy that will improve results. To determine your reach rate, calculate your total reach and divide that by the number of your followers. Multiply the results with 100 and that will be your reach rate.
Instagram Video Views and Visibility – What You Should Be Aiming For
How do you know your Instagram visibility is good enough? How do you know you are on the right track? The thing about this is that there is no one-size-fits-all. This depends on your niche because some niches perform better than others. You can’t compare your results to the results of someone else in a different niche.
Content creators with 500 to 2000 followers generally have 200 to 300 views on their feed videos and that is already considered a decent number. The viewership for their reels can go as high as 1600. This goes to show that the more followers you earn, the higher your chances are of getting more visibility in-feed or through reels.
Tips to Boost Your Video Views and Visibility
Did you know that videos are more likely to have a broader reach than regular picture posts? You should leverage this to propel your business.
But making a video alone isn’t enough. Remember that you will be competing with thousands of other videos out there. To make sure that you reach your target market and maximize the viewership of your videos, here are the things you should do:
1. Make Your Videos Attention-Grabbing
If you are like most people, you have probably experienced just mindlessly scrolling on your Instagram feed, not even stopping for a few seconds to watch a video. This happens a lot, which is why you need to grab the attention of your viewers during the first few seconds they land on your videos.
You only have a couple of seconds to pique their attention so make sure you don’t waste that doing a lengthy introduction. Go directly to the point or if you prefer to lay down a story first, have a few seconds of teaser to let the viewers know what’s in store for them.
Come up with a hook idea. There are so many different ways to do this. You can start your video with a trick or a tip. Another thing you can do is to identify the problems or struggles of your viewers and start by empathizing with them. Follow it up with useful tips that will help them overcome their problems. Talk fast and add captions so your viewers don’t get lost in translation.
If you see a video on Instagram that really captured your attention, don’t just keep on scrolling. Save that video so that you have time to go back to it and assess what made you stop and watch the video. Study what they did and emulate it.
2. Use Popular Audio
What’s great about Instagram is the multitude of audio options. While you can certainly make your own audio, you can also make it easier by using audio that is already popular. It helps increase your visibility and your videos will be discovered much faster. Instagram’s algorithm boosts videos that make use of popular audio.
To find trending audio, check out the Explore page. You can save the audio you like and want to use in the future. You can even use the audio to give you fresh content ideas.
3. Take Advantage of Reels Templates
Ever wondered why some reels just look more visually appealing than others? Chances are, those content creators used templates. Using templates helps you create cinematic videos that tell a story without you having to learn the basics of video editing. There are now many editing apps that will allow you to piece together a couple of short clips and images to create one video.
You can look for a free editing app and try their templates or you can pay for the app and take advantage of more professional-looking templates that practically do all the work for you. You might need to spend a bit more money to create visually appealing videos.
4. Be More Consistent in Posting
With how fast people consume media today, it’s easy to forget accounts when they aren’t posting regularly. If you want to leave an impression and make sure your brand sticks, you should have a steady online presence.
Try brainstorming content ideas first. Decide when you should post and how often. Once you know the frequency at which you should post, you can come up with content ideas that you can keep on standby so you always have something to post.
Also, watch out for new content trends that you can also get behind on. If you want to ride the popularity of these trends, you need to get on them before the hype dies down.
4.1 Stay on-brand
It’s good to try trends but you also need to make sure that you stay on-brand. That means you should identify the image you want to project first. Decide what tone to take. Do you want to be seen as a creative brand? Do you want to establish the reputation of being the authority in your niche? Do you want your brand to be seen as informative and helpful?
Knowing what image you are sustaining will help you decide what content to churn out.
4.2 Utilize text overlays and make sure your captions are also informative
Many viewers watch videos without audio. The text overlays will help capture the attention of those who choose to watch sans the audio.
Additionally, text overlays and captions also help with your social SEO. Social media platforms like Instagram also have SEO and this can be used to broaden the reach of your videos.
One way to further maximize the potential of Social SEO is to include your targeted keyword in the text overlay or the captions.
So how long should your caption be? This is interesting because very long captions and very short captions tend to perform best. A study recently conducted says that videos with long captions such as those with more than 2000 characters tend to do well on Instagram.
You can reserve this for videos that need additional information or if you want to elaborate on the topic you have introduced in the video, that can be done in the caption as well. Know when to use long and short captions because you don’t always have to have very long captions for all your videos.
5. Know When to Post the Videos
You don’t want your viewers to miss the videos because they are using the platform at a different time. Do some research to know when your viewers are more likely to go online. Use the Analytics reports to understand the behavior of your viewers. When do you get a spike in your views? What day and what hours of the day? That will help you determine the best time to post your content.
6. Engage with Your Followers
It’s also important to gain the loyalty of your viewers so they are not just viewing one or two of your videos but will also actively wait for new content. You also need to build rapport by responding to their comments or viewing and liking their videos.
7. Share Your Posts on Other Platforms
You can automatically share your Instagram reels to your Facebook now. You can set it up so that every time you post a reel or a video, it posts on your Facebook feed as well. That way, you don’t have to do it separately, thereby saving you more time and effort.
What is great about posting on other platforms is that you can direct the followers you have there to your Instagram page. You might have followers on other platforms that are still not following you on Instagram.
Conclusion
Gaining traction on Instagram is not going to be an overnight process. You need all the help you can get and you need to try different strategies to get the results you are looking for.
But if you post consistently and you create quality videos each time, you should be able to gain more followers and get a broader reach. Keep track of your results so you know what to change and what strategies to keep on using.
