When you are starting a career as a blogger on Instagram, the first thing that you are eager to do is to gain more followers for your profile. Having a big audience is one of the key factors that lead you to success. However, it is no easy task for a beginner. One of the secrets to doing that is to get more views for your video content, because this sort of posts is predicted to rule the world in the near future. And it is not surprising at all, because such type of content has more potential to go viral, which is a clue to enlarging your number of followers.
Also, it is considered to be much more engaging and interesting to people, because it demonstrates us the live-action, which is more pleasant for human perception channels. No wonder that social media are using video to capture the attention of as many users as possible and for the longest time. Here in this text, we would like to highlight why you need more views on Instagram and how to get them.
A few years ago, the platform started subtly switching the preferred content type to video better than photos. And at the same time, the view counter was introduced, which now is considered as an equivalent of a like. But unlike the faves, which still require the action from the user (hitting the button), the views are counted in automatically as the user opens the video and watches it for at least three seconds. If he would hit the heart that would be good for you too, but if he did not – well, that would be his loss, right? Pretty much like this is happening on YouTube – whether you enjoy the content that you see or not, the algorithm still gets it’s metric to process. And let’s talk more about the algorithms!
On Instagram, one of the ultimate goals for any blogger is to show up on the Explore page, and a big number of views is just the tool you need. What you see on your Explore screen is a result of a complex system work that gathers and analyzes the data about your behavior online. Based on the information it gets, it shows you popular content that it considers to be interesting for you. The important accent that we are looking for in here is “popular”. And here we see the main impact of the view counter. Many views means popularity. Thus, bigger numbers increases your chance to appear in the Explore section and to reach more potential followers.
Making viral videos is one of the popular tactics for growth on social media. It is proven to work well for many spheres, and provide the three main principles of a good video squeezed in the shortest format possible. The principles of what a video must be like to hit the biggest audience are:
Educational
Entertaining
Informative
These are the whales that the world of video-making stands on.
The content can be called viral when it has a huge number of views, first of all. Another important factor is the quantity of shares of the original post. And with many views and reposts, again, comes the growth of your followers. When you manage to launch at least one successful viral video, that could be perfect enough to attract a freaking lot of people to your account. Sometimes videos can go viral even if their creators didn’t have such a goal. People just woke up the next day as an Internet celebrity. That is how many memes are born.
But remember one thing. It is not enough to lure people to your profile. You must retain them with further production of content that should be no worse, or at least equal to the one that you got to become viral. Otherwise, you will lose many followers in quite a short time, because they will be disappointed in your content.
When digging deeper into the mechanism of the views on Instagram, it becomes obvious that it is important who is watching your videos as well. It may not suffice for posted videos, but experimentally, some curious users came to the conclusion that there is an algorithm that prioritizes the viewers of your Stories.
The authorities of Instagram are not commenting upon this topic, so this is a clear personal experience and research of a bunch of people who want to crack the way this social platform works. In general, it is considered that when your Story hits the mark of 50+ users, Instagram starts changing the order of people on the list. Before that number, viewers are sorted in reverse chronological order (the last person to see would be displayed on the bottom). But after that, hypothetically, the order is changed, and the first one to be displayed would be users who are being the most active on your profile.
Although we cannot know for sure if this is true or not, and if it can be applied to the posted videos, it would not kill you to try using this information for your purposes. And your goal is to discover these people. Because basically, they are your target group – the ones who like your content the most. They may not be too active in comments or they won’t leave any extra like, but they are extremely important as they are bearing the precious data for you.
By finding out what your most loyal followers want, you will easily come up with ideas for the content to attract more new followers. Also, it would be good for you to communicate closely with these people. Having a strong community, which feels your support is also a good leverage for growth.
Just like everyone else, brand marketers are aware of the fact that video content is conquering social media, Including Instagram. And the obvious opinion is that they would prefer to work with bloggers who are providing video before photos. And who would the brand marketers probably choose for collaboration? That’s right, someone who has a big number of views to show off!
Without taking different circumstances into account, it doesn’t matter whether people like the video. It is important that they are watching it at all. And co-working with brands is one of the methods to gross new followers easily. This partnership is useful both for you and the brand, as they also can receive many new followers for their account.
By now it must be clear why does one need to get many views for a successful growth of following. And we come to the logical question, how to do that. We have a short guide for you:
Make high-quality content. Period.
Make your videos useful to people (meaning: either educative, informative, entertaining, or the combination of those)
Use all kinds of video content – Lives, IGTV, Stories, and posts.
Constantly research what topics are the most engaging and interesting to your viewers and concentrate on them
Though do not forget to dilute your content with an optional range of secondary themes
Watch your hashtags!
Post consistently.
These tips should be enough to build a basic plan for your growth. To get a better result, mind what niche you are in and what is your target audience (age, gender, occupation, profession, etc.) Depending on individual factors, increasing the number of views of your content is not the hardest task at all.
The silver line of this article is that the video content will overrun the images quite soon. And it is worth getting ready for that fact. As we know from the article above, increasing your views rate is very important for your overall growth. But of course, you must not forget that your main goal is to provide high-quality content. It cannot be stressed enough. It would be better for your rate to release one thoroughly edited video once in a few days than shoot one poorly done every day.
