Uploading Shorts on Instagram and TikTok

So recently I tried uploading shorts on Instagram and TikTok. Initially I was thinking of just uploading some behind-the-scenes lessons that I thought were interesting to share with fans and only expect a small number of people who would be interested. Little did I know that those shorts now have more views than the actual video on YouTube itself and my Instagram profile just grew from 500 followers of mainly friends to now 8000 followers and counting. Here are a few observations I have.

Firstly, the community on Instagram is different compared to YouTube. My videos views are mainly from guys (80%-90%) and people come from all over the world, mainly US, Malaysia, Singapore, and major english speaking countries. The age curve also peaks around the 25-40 years old i.e. my generation of people which is great because I wanted to create videos for them. Whereas on Instagram, the country reach is about the same, globally diversified, and age bands are similar too, but I get more attention from females this time, about 50-50 split. This is interesting to me because now I have a new community of people who are interested in my content and they hang out mostly on Instagram only. I do have quite a few shorts ideas that I aim to upload over the next few weeks.

Last 28 days stats on Instagram

Second observation is that the conversion between Instagram to YouTube is low. I don’t get substantially more attention on YouTube just because my instagram reels blew up. As the saying goes, each social media platform is like a party by itself. You could hardly pull crowds from one party to another party just by telling them about it. People prefer to stay in the party where they’re at. But anyway it’s still a new community of people I hope to serve as I upload more snippets of videos. Initially the idea was to just make BTS out of the video project files before deleting them, so now seems like I could make a couple more shorts as requested first before discarding the project file, like Sarawak laksa which people want to see, even though I replied almost every comment that asked, that the full video is on YouTube. Also mentioned that in my bio, but such comments still roll in asking where’s the next laksa video. So again, my point is that the conversion between platforms is not that high, as people rather stay on one platform.

Last 30 days stats on YouTube