The battle between the platforms
Amongst the plethora of upcoming and existing social media platforms, giants like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram still take the cake when it comes to brand marketing. Facebook has a number of last recorded 1.3 billion users – which to put it in perspective, is bigger than the population of China. YouTube currently has a billion users and has a success rate of one billion hours of streamed content every day. Instagram seems to have caught up to the number too over the past couple of months also hitting the one billion number.
With brands advertising and doing increased influencer marketing, one of the toughest decisions faced is the decision of choosing the platform. Before we contemplate our specific choices, we’d like to create a go-to list for you before you choose your platform for the campaign. Here are some steps to follow:
Who is your audience?
Being as specific as possible in this step will go a long way in the process. Ask yourself these questions:
What kind of customers usually approach you?
What is their age?
Which sex brings in the highest sales?
Apart from demographics, look at the socio-economic statistics too. What is the average income and financial status of your typical customer?
What are some other interests of your customer? (This doesn’t have to do specifically with your product or service)
This is the minimal template you should have when you spot your audience. You can add some customized questions to this list too.
Check if the platform matches the tone of your business
Does the platform satisfy the needs of your brand? What is your goal here with the platform? Build a brand image or rebrand your existing business? Drive more sales? Traffic? Have clear goals before you look at the platforms.
Who uses this platform?
Does your demographic audience use this platform? Let’s consider your target market age lies between 50 – 70 year-old men, Instagram isn’t a likely platform for you to market on. However, if you are selling contemporary fashion for the age 14 – 25, then this would be the perfect platform for you.
Expanding too much?
Ask yourself this: Do I actually post relevant and consistent content on this platform? Spreading yourself thin will enable you to do just a poor job trying to keep up with several platforms and doing a quality job with just one. It is better when you channel all your resources where they matter and give good results.
Instagram and YouTube
Let’s dive straight into the numbers and comparison.
YouTube and Influencer Marketing:
YouTube is the second most popular page in the world right after Google. Boasting of over 1.5 billion users monthly, it has a diversified content like fashion, food, tech, media, travel etc. Well, you name it and it is there. The platform has 1 billion hours of video watched every day and has almost become evergreen in the field of videos. According to Medium, video marketing consumes nearly three-quarters of the internet traffic.
Do note, that due to its reliability and being a consistent success, producing content on YouTube will cost more than doing similar content on Instagram or Snapchat. But hey, if YouTube is what works for you, then why pay less and post content on other platforms? And one key difference is that the content on these platforms is very short-lived when compared to YouTube.
Let’s talk YouTube numbers!
As with any influencer marketing platform, YouTube users also have a high relativity ratio with the YouTubers whom they trust over other celebrities who endorse brands.
A YouTuber with one to three million subscribers’ income is somewhere around an average of $125,000 per post.
24.6% of a survey’s respondents said that they prefer using YouTube to follow any kind of sponsored content.
Instagram and Influencer Marketing:
Instagram has seen an exceedingly accelerated growth, especially among a young audience. Instagram used to rely only on photos for conversation. As a result, this platform works really well for visual-based businesses, like art, food, retail, and beauty. The platform has been consistently used for generating leads because the reach is wider in the age group.
Let’s talk Instagram numbers!
The top 50 most followed Instagram influencers have a combined follower count of 2.5 billion.
Instagram is currently figured to have 15 million sponsored posts.
The estimation is that tens of millions of people make money off of Instagram. Top Instagrammers make up to thousands of dollars, some even going to $500,000 per post.
48.4% of respondents in a survey comprising 20000+ consumers use Instagram to engage with influencer content.
Now that you have the numbers and facts, let’s also look at some of the examples of brands choosing their social platforms well.
Audible.com
Audible, an Amazon company, is popular for its audiobooks. The brand’s primary goal was to convert users into sign-ups. Some of the other goals were to increase brand awareness and drive engagement. They decided to use social media in the form of YouTube for word-of-mouth advertising.
The brand chose to work with influencers in different niches like gaming, entertainment, and animation, and more. This social media campaign turned out to be terrific for the brand which collectively reached out to atleast an audience of more than 132 million and has amassed around 83 million views to date.
One of the YouTuber who was a part of Audible’s influencer marketing campaign was Grace Helbig who has close to 3 million subscribers. She has been regularly creating Audible book videos along with reviews and attaching a link with every review she uploads on YouTube.
Here’s one of the videos for you:
OnePlus 6
OnePlus recently launched their premium flagship phone the OnePlus. As part of the promotional activity, OnePlus adopted a fresh take by inviting stand-up comedians to do an unboxing video of the OnePlus 6. As a part of the campaign, the brand worked with a very popular stand-up comedian in India Aravind SA for the OnePlus 6 unboxing video. Aravind SA, who is known for his unique style of comedy, created a YouTube video as most of the unboxing videos are available and quite popular on YouTube.
Fab India
The Fabindia Indigo Trail campaign aimed at showcasing the process of Indigo dyeing. Fabindia zeroed in on two fashion influencers Aanchal Goel & Vrushika Mehta who were given the chance to explore and understand the process of dyeing from the indigo farms at Pipar, a village near Jodhpur. They also interacted with the people who work on the indigo plantations. They created content about the indigo farms directly from the location itself and shared it on Instagram.
Greenroom collaborated with Fabindia in choosing the right set of influencers and worked on planning the content and also choosing Instagram as their primary social handle. This educational take on the brand was quite popular and received huge traction on Instagram.
A post shared by Anchal Goel Batra (@mymultifaceteddiary) on Jun 21, 2018 at 7:22am PDT
A post shared by Vrushika Mehta (@vrushyy) on Jun 24, 2018 at 6:15am PDT
Your thoughts
The whole idea is not to choose a platform with just the existing features. For eg, it is not advisable for brands to hop on the YouTube bandwagon just because of the video requirement. Instagram has also come up with IGTV which could be a big competition. So, have you had trouble choosing the platforms? Anything we can help you with? Also, do tell us about your experience with such campaigns. Check our Instagram page for our campaigns or talk to us over comments below or Greenroom’s Facebook and Twitter .
Co-authored by Kaushik A
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