Over the past couple of years, Instagram has worked so hard to occupy the No.1 place in the social media world. Instagram overthrew Facebook to achieve the honor. This leads us to the question of what quality makes Instagram so special that Facebook lacked. Why are the recent marketers making Instagram their top chosen platform for the campaigns?
According to an Influence Marketing study conducted by Greenroom, we asked the brands which social media platforms do they consider crucial to their campaign.
“94% of the brands want Instagram to be their key player”
with Facebook, Youtube and individual blogs following the platform in terms of preferability. Twitter and Snapchat were given the least focus by the marketers.
Instagram has grown from the title of Facebook’s billion dollar purchase to a powerhouse for influencer marketing. What started out as only a photo-sharing platform, it has evolved into something beyond its own primary vision. Instagram is now challenging the video-sharing platform with the introduction of stories and IGTV. Facebook has been and will emphasize a lot on Instagram by adding in more tools and options for users, smartly designed to make users stay on-platform for a longer time and give optimal attention in order to increase the revenue potential. Let’s look at some of the features that have been introduced in Instagram ever since the beginning and how it has helped influencer marketing along the way.
Instagram Stories for Marketing
The growth and gravitation towards Instagram stories is a delight for the marketers considering how well it works. At the beginning of the last year, Instagram Stories activity alone surpassed all of Snapchat’s usage.
Instagram Stories after launch was immensely successful in terms of acceptance by the users. The platform has recognized this and keeps updating the features. Varying from filters to hashtags inclusion, Instagram Stories is a great tool for brand outreach. Instagram Stories have paved the way for users to share pictures that a user might not want to remain on their profile permanently. Instead, these stories are shared with followers at the top of the feed and only last for 24 hours. While you may be familiar with the usage os Stories, here are some tips on how you can leverage this feature.
Repost content from your Stories to your feed
Let’s say you are about to have an event. Stories are a fun way to relay what is happening at the event. It would work to also post an announcement image to your regular feed ensuring that your followers are on the lookout for your upcoming Stories.
Think your Story is great and you want to let it be permanently on your feed? No problem! Right before you post it, make sure you press the “save” button so you can repost it later as a regular post on the feed too. Do note that if you’ve posted more than one image, it will save as a video slideshow.
Go Live
Not a lot of brands use this feature extensively. When you have interesting content, make sure you go live. This can reach a lot of people out of the brand’s usual potential too.
Hashtags
It comes as no surprise that brands extensively use hashtags on posts. What about your stories? A story that is shared using hashtags actually has a huge potential to reach a lot of followers. If you are worried about the clutter of text in your Stories, use this tip: Instagram allows you to change the text color to any color matching in the photo. Write the text and click on the crayon below your photo and it lets you copy whichever color you click.
This gives an illusion of a hashtag-free story but with the benefits that come along with it.
Mention people
Social media thrives on the fact that people love attention. Mentioning customers, followers or even other accounts that inspire can bring followers of many accounts together. This is a form of affiliate marketing that comes as a boon in the age of digital marketing. This sends a notification to the user who will more than likely see the content.
Using polls
Polls are a great way of knowing what your customer wants. Pose the questions in a fun way and your followers will flock in to voice their opinion. Brands use polls as a great form of customer engagement and even market research. For eg, a brand before launching a new food product can check with the customers to see what their preference is. “Would you like to try our new matcha cheesecake or coffee cupcake?”
This feature is how it beats other advertising channels because you can actually put an outgoing link and see if people ended up on your website and who did.
A constant evolution
Apart from the above, Instagram has been constantly evolving its features that have been friendly towards marketing. Geotagging, a countdown for events and dates, face filters are some of the interesting updates from the platform. The new update is that Instagram is working on a feature to make your saved posts public but creating common themes. This feature could completely take down Pinterest’s model of pinning photos in albums and sharing it.
Do let us know what you think about Instagram and its evolution down in the comments or peek into our website, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram pages to reach out to us.
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