Listen Brand Marketers (VPs of Marketing, CMOs, Small Business Owners), it's never going to stop. 🙂

The amount of platforms that your business needs to pay attention to in order to stay relevant, that is.

I've been WAITING for the day to see the first 8 words of this headline - "Instagram has Launched a New Long-Form Video Content App Called 'IGTV'

...meaning, I've been expecting Instagram to lengthen the video limits of 15 seconds on stories and 30 seconds on posts.

While I'm still holding out hope that will happen soon, THAT ISN'T WHAT THEY'VE DONE.

Instead, first, they've decided to launch a completely separate app called IGTV, which feels a lot more like their version of YouTubeTV or Facebook Watch, than anything else.

IGTV feels like a platform marketers need to familiarize themselves with ASAP, as it's highly likely to dominate the attention of the current middle school demo and compete to be the platform that young adults 8-10 years from now grew up watching.

This means that over the next few years, it will also skew older and older, and become a platform marketers will need to advertise on.

Content will need to be solid in order to convert.

I've started using it. Here's what I see...

WHAT IGTV IS:

• A really freaking simple way to watch TV and video content. It's slick AF.
• It currently (two days after launch), looks exclusive to publishers that have content deals with IGTV
• A content creation platform like Instagram or Facebook
• Find out how to create your channel!

WHAT'S NEXT FOR MARKETERS ON IGTV:

• The ability to advertise content on the platform, which I'm predicting will come through both Facebook Business Manager and Instagram Business Accounts (native iOS app).

So, my call to action to all marketers - don't just read the headlines - download IGTV today.

With every new app launch comes new opportunity to create content and grow your business.

You can bet there's more to come on this.

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

Paul Hickey, Founder / CEO / Lead Strategist at Data Driven Design, LLC has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.