Your name tag should always reflect your business name, not your own name unless your name is part of your business. Rule 1 is no numbers. The only time numbers are okay is if a number is actually part of your business name. Rule 2 is avoid using ‘x’s in your name. Rule 3 is to avoid underscores if you can. I know this isn’t always possible and sometimes can’t be avoided but if you need to be a little creative with your name tag try using full stops. First and if there is no way you can find an available option with a full stop, then and only then should you consider using an underscore.

Try to keep your name no more than 4 words, keep it short and snappy. If you’re struggling to find an available name tag add your location on to the end, so long as this doesn’t make your name too long.

Your bio name is actually a search term. Search terms are like gold dust for business owners, knowing where they are and using them effectively is imperative to driving traffic to your business.

The best way to use this little known piece of information to your advantage is to put what your target audience may enter into their search bar when looking for the service you provide. This is usually your type of business and your location. For example - Lash Extensions London, or personal trainer Nottingham. This will not only improve your exposure on instagram but on google too!

Instagram categorises people by their interests, when you go on your explore page instagram will show you popular posts from pages that it has categorised as an interest for you. This is why it is so important to ensure your instagram page is within the correct category, if it isn’t instagram will show your popular posts to an audience that aren’t really that interested. If it is correct you’ll make it to the explore page with your posts and then get further boosted because that post is being shown to people that are interested in posts like yours.

Your profile picture says a lot about your business, its the first thing that any potential clients see, but how do we get it right? How can we make it look professional and recognisable? How can we keep it branded? And how can we make it best represent your business?

Your alternative choice is to use your logo as your profile picture if your logo is clear enough to still be recognised as a small thumbnail. If your business isn’t so customer facing or if you have more than one person working in your business this is your best option. Your alternate choice for your profile picture is to use a picture of yourself. You should only do this if your face is an imperative part of your brand.

Generally when people are searching for a service or a type of business, they will search the business type, then their location. One of the most important aspects when a customer is choosing a business to spend their money with is location. People look for convenience and ease, help your customers with this by including your location on your instagram profile page, if its only on there once that’s not enough. You can put your location in your bio name, in your name tag, in your address part of your bio, you can add it as a location to your pictures and also as a # in your pictures.

Instagram does have a feature to add your street address to your page as a clickable link that customers can open in their maps app to see what the journey would be like to get to you.

Your bio needs to be clear, concise and easily readable. Using paragraphs is one of the best ways to do this, avoid using a block of text, short snappy brief bullet points are all you need. What goes here is completely dependent on your business but there are some categories that should definitely be included.

Firstly if you are the business owner, you run the account yourself, regularly speak to the camera on your stories and especially if you have a picture of yourself as your profile picture you should have your name here, your full name if you feel happy to put it. Keep it simple and use emojis to start each paragraph to make it colourful.

Other things to put here include:

Services you offer

Qualifications

Years in your industry (experience)

Location

Prices (if they’re simple)

Any rules you have

A call to action e.g. how to book

Highlights are great to have so that you can have more information on your profile that is easily accessible, however you need to build up the content to put in them to make them useful to your customer. Your number one priority is to have a price list as a highlight.

Other highlights you may want to consider are….

Policies

Availability

FAQ

Rules

Work showcase

Reviews

Qualifications

So now you have your highlights, how do we make them branded and pretty? You’ll need to go onto canva and use the background colours of your logo on a blank page with the name of each highlight in the middle and use this as the cover, this is if you’ve made your logo yourself. Alternatively to having the name of your highlight written, you can use an icon instead so long as they’re all in the same format. I have seen this done numerous times and it does look effective.

Profile themes are great, they add an aesthetic flair to your profile, but lord are they hard work. Before you decide whether to do a profile theme you have a few things to consider;

Are you able to easily make your own content with branding?

How fast are you at making your own content?

How creative are you at making your own content?

Do you have time to plan your posts in advance?

Do you mind being restricted to only posting certain types of posts?

The most low maintenance profile theme is for every other post being in the same category e.g. a picture/video, then a text image. This leaves you with as much creativity as possible with a profile theme, as the picture can be any picture or video you want and the text based image can be about anything you want so long as it has the same background. You can complicate this by adding different types of pictures for example ,for lashes; post 1 - a full face picture, photo 2 - a text based post and photo 3 - an eye close up picture. This then unfortunately begins to become restrictive but does look effective.

When choosing a theme make sure you keep the themes in the columns rather than the rows as if you keep it in the rows you’ll need to post 3 posts at a time to stop your profile looking messy whereas if you post by keeping the columns in the theme your profile will still look good after every post.

There are many benefits to adding your logo to your pictures - be it in the form of a watermark

or a tag in the corner. Firstly it adds to your brand recognition, every time someone that follows you scrolls past one of your posts they don’t even need to look at the name of the profile it comes from they will immediately know it's from your business.

The second benefit from putting your logo on the images you post are that it prevents others from using your image and claiming it as their own, all too often you see mostly new people in an industry posting others work claiming it to be their own. Don’t let this happen to you!

How you edit your photos is important for brand recognition, you’d be surprised how recognisable peoples' photos are by the way they edit them, the brightness, colourfulness, exposure and contrast of all your pictures can quickly become something your customers associate with you if you do the same thing consistently. Now the easy way to do this is to just use the same filter on every image, but often a specific filter may look good on one image and not another, so we need to get a little more technical.

The best app I find to use for photo editing is face tune, when we edit photos we are looking at smoothing the skin (unless you’re a makeup artist because that’s cheating!) We should be brightening the overall photo, making it more colourful, sharper, framing it correctly and making it stand out to the consumer on their social media feed.

Firstly you want to frame the photo correctly, is there unnecessary background mess? Could you zoom in to focus on the subject? Is the subject clear and in the middle of the frame? A top tip here, especially when posting on Instagram, is to make your image portrait rather than square. Instagram began allowing non-square photos around a year ago and if your photo is longer it’ll demand more attention on your followers' feeds.

Check your photos for unwanted shadows, you can fade these shadows out using the ‘paint’ tool. Next, if you have a face or skin in your picture, it's a good idea to smooth out the skin slightly using the smoothing tool and picking out any features like eye colour or teeth with the details tool. Once you're happy with this, swipe along to the ‘edit’ section and play with the contrast, brightness, light, sharpness and colour until your photo is light, bright and colourful enough for your liking.

Your three most important types of content are insightful content, discussion content and interactive content. These should each make up about 25% of your content on your social platforms.

Interactive content is usually using one of Instagram’s interactive options e.g. polls, Q&A, sliders etc. whereas discussional content invites your followers to respond to you with a more substantial opinion, be that by DM or on the comments on one of your posts on Facebook or Instagram. You should expect a good amount of response from your followers, especially for the ‘interactive’ content, your discussional content response will be slightly lower but should still get a good response if you’re keeping to a good topic that people want to talk about.

Insightful content is content that gives a little look behind the scenes or gives an unseen insight into your business, examples of this are a tour of a treatment room, introductions for you or your colleagues or more details about your products and what you use on clients. In terms of response to expect from this, I wouldn’t expect too much, insightful content doesn’t usually include a CTA (call to action) but this content type is about the long game. The more your followers get to know you and feel conformable with you, the more likely that they’ll feel comfortable enough to interact with your interactive or discussional type of content, or to message you in future to book.

Our fourth content type is educational content, educational content is incredibly valuable to your page, but there is a fine balance between giving away too much for free and not posting enough and losing the interest of your audience. Your educational content must be original and unique to you and it can be any content where you are giving away a tip, teaching a technique, or giving advice. These information bites should serve as hooks to your audience and ideally would make up around 20% of posts on your social media. You should probably expect a high amount of interaction from educational posts because you’re giving away information for free which everyone likes!

The final type of content to look at is promotional content. This should be kept to an absolute minimum, the more promotional content you post the quicker your audience will lose interest and it makes you look like you don’t have much to offer, you’re just desperate for a sale.

Who are your audience? Who is your ideal customer? What are their likes, hobbies, income and lifestyle? Once you have your ideal audience, put yourself in their shoes, what do you think they’d like to see from you? Are your posts being tailored towards them? If you're aiming towards a higher income ‘quality not quantity’ client, are your posts always ultra professional? If the opposite is true, is the language and content appropriate to that kind of audience?

If you have more than one audience and you’re not quite sure how to split your posts between the two, here’s a little tip. Have a look in your diary and work out how much PROFIT you made last month from each service/product, yes that’s PROFIT I’m talking about your margins, once you take off your expenses. Then you need to compare them, which did you earn more from and how much by? What’s the percentage difference? That’s the vital part, when you know your percentages you’ll know how much to post about each service. Here’s your formula …

Service 1 profit: XX (e.g. £250)

Service 2 profit: YY (e.g. £320)

XX + YY = ZZ (ZZ is your total profit)

XX/ZZ x 100 = Percentage of profit for service 1

YY/ZZ x 100 = Percentage of profit for service 2

Once you have this percentage you’ll know how much your posts should be made up of post aimed at each audience, I would recommend repeating this formula every couple months to see if anything has changed.

Keeping up to date with your industry should inspire you enough to create your own content, but often we can all get a little bit of a creativity block. When this happens, it can be super frustrating and sometimes tempting to recycle some old posts or even check out your competition and copy some of their posts. All I can say is recycling your own posts when you’re stuck is fine! Just don’t expect them to get as much interaction, especially if your pages followers haven’t grown substantially since you last posted that particular post. Maybe think about doing an ‘update’ or adding a little extra to it instead of just posting exactly the same thing to prevent this from happening. However, if you’re thinking of copying, don’t do it! As someone who has had their posts and ideas copied many times, I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to have someone take your idea and play it off as their own and don’t think the person you’re copying off won’t notice because they will!

Rather than copying, we can take inspiration from others posts and make it our own, an example of this may be if you’re a personal trainer and you see another personal trainer posting a video training with their baby as a weight, don’t do exactly the same, but instead do a video training with your pet and doing different exercises than what they demonstrated.

If you’re a local business, local hashtags are your absolute bread and butter and are exactly what you should be using to capture your local audience. You’d be surprised how many people search for the name of their local area in Instagram when searching for a service e.g. Harrow personal trainer or Bedford Beautician. You need to make sure that if they click on this hashtag your posts come up!

You can change these up to make sure you’re covering all bases e.g. #beauticianbedford #bedfordbeautician #beautysalonbedford #salonbedford #bedfordbeauty and then also some more specific service based hashtags e.g. #bedfordwaxing #bedfordbrows #bedfordlashes etc.. You may be tempted to use more general hashtags like #salongoals #lashextensions #beautufulbrows however these types of hashtags have millions of posts in them and the likelihood of yours being featured when people search for them is very slim. With that said, if Instagram likes your post and features you, then your post could end up going viral which will gain you recognition and potentially status in your industry. So it is worth including a few of these, but no more than 5 maximum and no more than 20 hashtags altogether.

Setting out your captions in paragraphs to make them easy to read rather than just a block of text is highly recommended. When writing your captions refer back to module 5 - audience and make sure you have your audience in mind when writing it. Don’t write formally, be relatable in your caption, write as if you’re speaking and it’ll come across much better to your audience.

On Instagram there are a few different analytics categories that are relevant to you, these are ‘top locations’, ‘Popular posts’ and ‘follower times’. If you are a local business the ‘top locations’ insight is very important for you, you’ll want the longest bar here to be labelled as your local area, this means that the majority of your followers are locals which is exactly what you want!

Seeing your individual post analytics can be really helpful for you to see what works and what doesn’t. Go to insights, content, then click see all posts. Usually your top 5 or so posts will follow a trend, see if you can identify it.

Similarly to finding your best posts this way, scroll down and have a look at your least successful posts, do they have anything in common? Are they text heavy? Do they have no call to action? Are the captions uninteresting? Pictures dark or unclear? With some self reflection you can learn a lot from this, make some notes for things to avoid for future posts, it’ll be different for everyone!

Going back to the audience tab you’ll see the most popular times your followers are online, you can toggle between times of day and days of the week here, but what’s most important is to note the most popular times and make sure that these are the times you’re posting - set an alarm if you need to!

There is this unspoken ‘prestige’ about having more followers than following, but when you’re running a business page this really needn’t be a worry. Yes your aim is to have as many followers as possible so long as those followers are made up of your target audience.

Your first concern will always be the quality of your followers and by ‘quality’ I mean how closely they fit your target audience, how much they interact with your page and how likely they are to purchase from you. With this in mind it is also true that the amount of followers you have can also influence your audience and persuade them as to how legit or prestige you are.

A common trap I often see local businesses fall into is ‘follower trains’ with similar local businesses. This may gain you 10, 20 maybe 30 extra followers, but if these followers aren’t your clients, what is the point in having them? Yes it may look good to have a few extras, but what will begin to happen is Instagram’s algorithm will recognise that you are being followed by other business accounts and conclude that this is your target audience, therefore it will show your account to other similar businesses.

Following on about your followers, does it really matter how many people you follow vs how many people follow you? The answer is potentially yes. Unfortunately in the world we live in where likes and followers = validity, prestige and popularity, yes the amount of followers you have can matter and the amount of people you follow vs the amount of people that follow you can certainly be something that a potential client may check and take into consideration when choosing whether to message you about a service or book a service with you. So how much different should it be? As a rule of thumb I’d recommend sticking to a minimum of 10% more followers than following. Ideally you’d have your number of followers start with at least 1 number above the amount of people you follow, For example; if you have 473 followers you’d want to follow 399 accounts or less, if you have 6285 followers you’d want to follow 5999 accounts or less.

This is a difficult number to achieve and to keep track I’d highly recommend downloading a followers app. There are many of these available and the ‘good’ ones appear and disappear regularly. All of these apps work in pretty much the same way, once you log into them it tracks who unfollows you, who you’re following that doesn’t follow you back and vice versa.

Go on to the tab where you can see who doesn’t follow you back and unfollow anyone that you don’t have a particular vested interest in, whose posts you don’t see on your feed or anyone who’s account is inactive/doesn’t have a profile picture. Likelihood is, if you haven’t done this before there will be plenty to unfollow! And don’t worry, these people don’t follow you anyway so if you unfollow them you won’t lose a follower back.

There are 3 main ways to find locals on Instagram, the first one is using local hashtags, if you search for a hashtag of your local area e.g. #watford and rather than looking at the top results, check the recent results and have a scroll to see if you can see any pictures that look like they’re from a private account of somebody that might be from your target audience.

The second way to find locals on Instagram is by looking on a geotag for your area, if you use the search bar to look for an area an option should come up that has a little location tag next to it. Click on this, select recent again (as you did previously with hashtags) and have a look for images that look like they’re from an individuals’ account rather than a business account.

The third way to find locals on Instagram and possibly the most effective way is when you know an individual that is local and check their followers and follow any that look like they may be your target audience, the only issue with this is the potential that you may end up following dormant accounts accidentally. Usually if an account has been recently liking others pictures they are an active account and more likely to follow you back!

Sometimes just following someone isn’t quite enough to grab someone’s attention or maybe you spot someone who you particularly think fits perfectly with your target audience and maybe has a large local following that you think maybe you could use to your advantage in the future. A good way to increase your chances of having this individual notice your account and follow you back is to use the 2 recent, 1 old method.

This is pretty self explanatory, you like their two most recent posts and then scroll down their feed and like a photo that catches your eye, you don’t have to stop here, you can continue liking other photos or even commenting on their photos, but in the interest of a time effective return 2 recent and 1 old should be enough to be effective.

Don’t put pressure on yourself to do this with every person, you’d be there forever and it’ll become a chore, you also might be flagged up by Instagram for spam which you really don’t want because Instagram will then stop showing your posts and stories to your audience. If you’re aiming to grow your Instagram quickly I’d recommend only doing this for 20 accounts a day and following around 100 accounts a day. If you’re not quite so worried about growing quickly maybe just do these two things a couple times a week.

You’d be forgiven for thinking - hold on, if I’m going to be following 100 people a few times a week, what about my follower ratio. Around 24 hours after you do a follower spree go onto your follower tracking app, check out who didn’t follow you back and go ahead and unfollow them.

If you’re doing this daily make sure you give accounts enough time to follow you back before unfollowing them, which to be reasonable should probably be around 24 hours. To keep on top of it I’d do your unfollows before following another batch of people.

The most direct way to get your new followers to book is to message them. A message thanking them for the follow and letting them know who you are, what you do, where you’re located and how they can book should they wish to should be sufficient. This technique can be effective but can also be spammy so use it with caution, you could get unfollowed or most likely ignored. But you may get more bookings than if you just did nothing!

A slightly more subtle way to do this is via a poll or a sign-up interactivity on your story, use a comment box or poll asking people to vote for this or that, asking people to comment on a particular issue that affects your industry. Then send a DM to all those that respond, this is an easy way to begin a slightly more natural conversation with a potential client, but be warned it can again be seen as spammy and may prevent people from interacting with your posts in future for fear of being ‘sold’ to. To avoid this I’d keep the message response to these accounts away from being ‘salesy’, maybe keep to discussing the subject being discussed in your post, by simply having a short conversation with someone they will begin to trust you more and think of you when they wish to have a service you provide.

Another way to speed this process up is by being active! Regular introductory posts, introducing you, your services and your workspace work really well to convert potential clients. Ask your current clients to give you reviews that you can post in your page, keep your page looking clean and professional and regularly post stories showing your face.

** CHECK OUT THE NEW ALGORITHM BONUS LESSON FOR EFFECTIVE WAYS TO INFLUENCE THE NEW INSTAGRAM ALGORITHM **

An engagement pod is a group chat on Instagram of accounts that agree to like and comment on each other’s pictures. When a participant makes a post they’ll share it to the group, all of the participants are then expected to click on it and engage with it. The participants of the group are all expected to do this with every post shared into it and in a timely manner, the quicker they do it the better, if it's not done within about 4 hours of posting there’s not much point.

These groups are difficult to keep up with, some can be strict, if you don’t do your bit expect to be kicked out or to have the other members not comment and like your posts in return.

To get any kind of benefit from engagement pods you’ll need to be a member of a large number of them and have the other participants responding to and engaging with your posts. This in turn will take up a LOT of your time, it becomes a chore to like and comment on every post that’s posted and don’t we all have much better things to do?

Further to this if the engagement pods aren’t made up of people that are your target audience Instagram’s algorithm will begin to show your posts to the wrong type of account so it actually could be detrimental! You’re best off sticking to creating engaging organic content for your target audience to engage with.

Almost every industry has a corresponding Facebook group, some have hundreds! The lash industry certainly does. Facebook groups can get overcrowded with spammy posts - like those looking for follow for follows, engagement pods, posts with the same questions over and over. There will often be absolutely amazing nuggets of information in there and individuals will post new findings, new techniques, new information, dividing opinions on controversial subjects, debates, discussions, the latest news and trends in your industry and hints and tips.

They’re worth joining and just following along, you don’t have to engage with the posts, just observe and you’ll learn a lot! As an added bonus often the debates can get a little out of hand and are pretty entertaining.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to keep up to date with your industry and become a name and a face that people know. This will gain you respect not only amongst your peers but also amongst your clients. Your clients will recognise your confidence, your knowledge and your achievements and even boast about them! You wouldn’t believe the amount of times I’ve heard of a client of mine telling a friend that their lash artist goes to Miami for training. Not only was the conference I attended in Miami amazing and I gained so much knowledge from it, it also gained me respect and boasting rights of my clients.

One of the biggest challenges for small businesses is looking ‘legit’ and professional, ensuring you always know the latest goings on and are constantly attending trainings, events and conferences will help this massively! A secondary bonus to this is content, interesting and new content for your story and for your posts. Talk to the camera about something you learnt at a training or a new trend you heard about at a conference. Give your opinion and open it up to your followers to give theirs.

Events, conferences and trainings can be expensive but make sure you do your research and I promise you they’ll be worth the cost.

Podcasts have been an incredibly fast growing trend in recent years and I can guarantee that there will be numerous ones that relate to your industry. Some podcasts do interviews of ‘influential’ people in your industry or people who have had an interesting journey in their business, others may offer industry specific tips, trends or controversial subjects, others may concentrate on the business or marketing side of your business. Whatever it is there is loads out there and they all provide some amazing insight.

It may take a while to find one you like, but once you do they’re well worth a listen, take time to listen while you’re at the gym, on a long drive, while you’re shopping or even while you’re drifting off to sleep. Whenever works for you! Podcasts can even sometimes feel like a free conference or a free training they’re a great resource so get stuck in!

In unit 3, module 6 we talked about unfollowing those that are in your industry to try to influence the algorithm to show your account to more of your target audience rather than those that are similar business accounts to yours. However, I would make some exceptions to this when an account is particularly useful with industry hints, tips, trends and knowledge. These types of accounts are great for giving inspiration to you for your own posts but do be careful not to copy!

Be aware not to follow hundreds of these types of accounts a small handful is enough, quality over quantity!

CONGRATULATIONS YOU'VE COMPLETED THE COURSE!

Changing your business name is a big decision and absolutely not one to be taken lightly. You run the risk of getting lost and potential clients who may be recommended to you using your old name being unable to find you. Follow these steps to make sure that doesn’t happen. Now before I start this isn’t for those of you that are changing just one character of their business Instagram handle, you can go ahead and do this with little to no consequences to your search, this is for those who are going for a full name change.

Step 1: Do a search for the name you want to change your business to and make sure there are no other similarly named businesses in your country or any very big similarly named businesses globally. If there is another in a different country but they are a small company with under a couple thousand followers, I wouldn’t worry about them too much just make sure your branding is very different.

Step 2: Tell your followers, I cannot stress enough how important this step is, go on your story and talk about your name change, give a specific date you plan to do the changeover and reveal your new logo. Also do a post about your name change on your feed for those that may have missed your story. Don’t be afraid to repeat this message on your story and even make a big deal out of it. Put up a countdown timer until the name change, make it into an event - make sure you shout it from the rooftops and everyone knows.

Step 3: Provided you don’t have any similar named strong rivals you’ll need to go ahead and change your name to one that’s available. Please refer back to module 1 unit 1 when doing this and don’t include any ‘x’s or ‘_’ and ‘.’s if you can, this helps it to keep it looking professional.

Step 4: Add a line in your bio saying ‘formerly @(your old insta handle here)’ and post about your name change again.

Step 5: Usually Instagram names get re-released 7 days (but it does vary) after they are not being used anymore, this means that your old Instagram name will be available for someone else to make an account with 7 days after you change it to something else. Make sure someone else doesn’t get it, make sure you do! Make a brand new account with this handle 7 days after you get rid of it. Make the profile picture your own logo, make a post about changing your business name to your new name and make the bio to say ‘business moved to @(new business name)’. Once this is done just let the second account sit dormant.

Follow these 5 steps and you shouldn’t lose any clients or get lost with the changeover! Good luck!

nstagram has released the perfect amount and types of posts you need to be doing to be shown to a larger audience.
If you follow their ‘perfect’ algorithm, your posts will be more likely to show on your followers feeds and also on the explore page.
The more people your post is shown to the more interaction it will receive so its important to make sure you are guiding your followers on how to interact with each post. Do you want them to simply like it? Or comment an idea, share a story or ask you a question?

Feed Posts
3 per week
Instagram has revealed that you need to do 3 posts per week on your feed to get maximum exposure.
Carousel (more than one image in a post) posts get the most amount of exposure and screen time as people will scroll along.
Your aim is to make people spend as much time looking at your post as possible to influence the algorithm further, so make sure they’re eye-catching and interesting.

Stories
8-10 per week
Stories are a hugely effective way to get in-front of your followers. They show up at the top of your followers feed and are the first thing most people flick through when opening their instagram app.
Use the interactive features on your stories to engage followers the more your followers engage with your story, the higher you’ll come up on their story carousel whenever you post.
A story post can be something as small as reposting something you’re tagged in or sharing a reel, IGTV or feed post to your story all the way to something more thought through like a quiz. You don’t need to stress to think thoroughly about your story everytime, so long as there is a post up there you’re on to something.

IGTV
1-3 per week
IGTV is a relatively new feature of instagram for videos of over 1 minute long. IGTV’s are ideal for longer videos like tutorials, longer explanations, vlogging, unboxing, tours, live’s etc. Think youtube videos.
You can group IGTV’s together into ‘series’ add subtitles and decide whether to add them to your feed or not. There is a separate app available for IGTV, check out the ‘Reels & IGTV’ bonus lesson for more.

Reels
5 per week
Reels are instagram’s other new feature along with IGTV. Reels are short snappy videos of no more than 15 seconds long. Think TikTok but even faster!
Instagram LOVES reels and will show them very high up on your followers feeds you can film them live or upload videos from your camera roll.
Common uses for reels are to repost snapshots of TikTok videos you have made or to post an old story to your feed. Check out the ‘Reels & IGTV’ bonus lesson for more.

Schedule
The best way to keep on top of your posting is to schedule it. Here is an example of a ‘perfect’ week of posting.

What are they?
IGTV and reels are new video upload features on instagram.
IGTV - 1 - 15 minute’s long
Reels - under 15 seconds
Instagram’s aim is to compete with other social video platforms like Youtube (IGTV) and TikTok (Reels), you would use Reels & IGTV in virtually the same way you would previously with Youtube and TikTok.

IGTV
IGTV is a pretty sophisticated feature for instagram. IGTV’s can be used in many different ways and instagram wants us to use more of them. Because its a new feature that instagram is trying to push if you begin to use it regularly your posts will stand out.
There is a new IGTV app to download to make it easier for you to make and manage your IGTV videos.
If you do lives and your page is on public your lives will also come up on the IGTV page within the instagram app as well as on the story carousel at the top.
You can decide whether you add your IGTV’s into series’ to group ones of a similar type together. You can also decide whether or not to have them show up on your instagram profile grid. Choose not to if it will mess up your profile theme.

Reels
On the new look instagram there is a button on the bottom menu bar to select to open your reels. In this section you will have video after video come up that you can scroll downwards through.
Reels are aimed at being short and snappy, humour goes down really well here as well as current ‘TikTok trends’ whatever they may be at the given time.
The way you film them you can film a couple seconds, pause it, then go back to film more - maybe you want to pause to change scene in a flash or maybe you’re doing a makeup trend where you want to speed the video just cut to the before and afters.
Just like IGTV’s you can decide whether or not to add these to your profile grid or not, so you don’t need to if it will mess up your profile theme.