You might not like what Gary Vee has to say, but 7 million people on Instagram do.
Gary Vaynerchuk is a well-known entrepreneur, New York Times best selling author, speaker, and internet personality. He’s known for giving advice as is, he doesn’t sugarcoat anything. He has countless videos on YouTube and millions of followers on many platforms, including Instagram. His personal Instagram account has over 7 million followers and his team account has 363K followers. IGTV has been his latest way to interact with his followers. He constantly posts videos and content giving advice to rising entrepreneurs and other 20-somethings who are hopeful to emerge into greatness. One of his strengths to communication is that he uses an interactive loop tool to engage his followers.
What is an interactive loop? You might ask. Using Gary Vee as an example, he might engage his followers to ask him a question online or at an event. Then he will respond to either the most popular questions or the best questions in a podcast, show, or on IGTV. The followers’ contributions become the content and the “loop” is completed when the followers hear the answer to the question they submitted, which in return makes them want to interact again with Gary.
He has this new tool he uses often where he puts up a number on a screen and asks people to text him. He puts this number on Twitter and Instagram quite frequently. Then he does take some of the most common questions and turns it into content on IGTV. This is an example of an interactive loop.
For example, one of the latest videos I recently watched on IGTV was “Should I be taking risks in my 30s?” He put his answer in this video: "What do you have to lose?"
Another example of a video on IGTV is titled, “I’m listening to your WORDS and this one scares me the MOST.” "When I hear that word or anything like it, I know it's going to be…
Interactive loops are an amazing way to drive people to other channels and to create and build content. Often, I see a teaser or a video clip in an Instagram story leading to an IGTV video or to a YouTube video. It makes you want to click to continue to watch or to see if your question was included. The effect this tool has is that it makes followers want to continue to engage and interact with influencers like Gary Vee. They feel included in the conversation and therefore continue the conversation. They might even share these clips with their own audience because they feel compelled and invested in this piece of content. With so much going on in the world and with so many distractions on the internet, the interactive loop is a great way to capture an audience’s attention.