Cracking the Instagram code
One change is all it needed
Of all the content platforms on which I publish content, Instagram has been the hardest to grow - hands down.
This isn’t the fault of the platform itself. The content we’ve published on Instagram has been all over the place; ninety-five percent chopped up and reframed YouTube videos, and five percent me picking up my phone and moaning about something in one take.
Some of the content hit. Some of it didn’t. But that follower number has remained painfully stagnant. In four years it has slowly grown from zero to just over 3,000 - not an insignificant number of people, but rather pitiful, given how much content was being published.
Then, we made a simple(ish) change and added to that existing follower count by over a third in a little over 30 days.
At the time of writing, the Mark Ellis Reviews Instagram account sits at 5,076 followers. In the last thirty days, it has encouraged 1,235 people to hit the ‘follow’ button, and we’ve had our first reel sail past half a million views. You have to scroll for quite a while to find a video with three-digit views. Something is working.
That something, we think is the fact that we have focused on creating Reels that are specifically shot and edited for Instagram. No reframing from widescreen content, and no creative cutting to avoid the absence of narrative from the long-form video from which the reel was taken. Throw in the obligatory unboxings (again, shot specifically for short-form format, vertically) and the numbers have started to increase rather predictably.
Don’t get me wrong - as noted earlier, some of the reframed, chopped-up content we published previously had done well, but it was so hit and miss and it never felt right. Cheating, almost.
I have no way of proving that Instagram prefers content which has been shot specifically in a vertical format, but the audience appears to be rather fond of it.
The problem I’ve always had with Instagram is how hard it is to turn views into follows. This isn’t the case on YouTube or even TikTok (on the latter, we’ve just surpassed 35,000 followers and it has been fed pretty much the same content as Instagram) - if you get big views on a video on those platforms, the followers usually, erm, follow. When people tune in on Instagram, encouraging them to hit that button is a much harder task.
That is, until you start making videos specifically for the platform, it seems.
I’ve seen this with Mark Ellis Motors, our new automotive content venture. We’re publishing videos for that niche specifically on TikTok and Instagram and have grown the following on the latter to over 815 people in a little over a month. The content is shot nearly exclusively on my smartphone, barely edited, and tightly focused on one or two topics. It seems to work.
Doing this on the Mark Ellis Reviews Instagram account is challenging. There’s so much going on in this business, and so much to focus on in terms of YouTube video production that the thought of shooting additional footage purely in vertical format - and editing it specifically for a separate audience - isn’t particularly palatable. However, Instagram is an important asset for content creators for one very simple reason: brands love it. There are serious partnerships to be had if you have a big enough following, and given how much easier it is to make a 90-second reel versus a 12-minute YouTube video, it’s a bit of a no-brainer.
This is why I’ve been so keen to find a way to grow that audience. And I think we’ve found it. The big question is: how are we doing it?
The one limiting factor in this business is my time. I’m the one who, generally speaking, needs to be on camera and who usually has to shoot the footage. To give myself as much time as possible to do that across multiple platforms and niches, I’ve had to delegate. Big time. Those who have followed this newsletter for a while will know what I’ve been doing to buy back my time. Email and calendar management, brand relations, publishing, scheduling, admin, and quite a bit more have all been handed over to others. It’s an expensive endeavour, but it has worked and I have absolutely loved building what is an incredibly talented, fun team. They’re brilliant, and I now have more time to do the things that ‘move the needle’ (sorry).
However, there was one last thing on my desk that needed to go: video editing.
I’m doing it. I’m handing over the baton. It’s a bit of a wrench, I won’t lie, but there have already been a few videos on the Mark Ellis Reviews YouTube channel that have been edited entirely by someone else, and one or two others that were a joint effort. The person in question is Niall, my right-hand man, and the person who is also responsible for brand partnerships. He just happens to be a fantastic video editor, too, and we’re developing a solid process for making these videos together.
By handing over the video editing, I can focus purely on shooting stuff. Yesterday alone, I managed to film not only a full YouTube video but three short-form pieces, as well. With all of that footage uploaded to Google Drive and ready for Niall to pick up and edit, I can simply move on to the next piece of content. It’s incredibly liberating, and exciting.
The moral of the story is simple: let go, and focus your attention on areas where you can make a real dent in your business.