It’s no secret that social media has become one of the best tools for marketing, Instagram being one platform that can reach millions of people within seconds of posting. The struggle can be choosing platforms and understanding how to implement aspects of it to boost your own following, bringing more attention to your business. Over the past couple of years, Instagram has made incredible advances towards working with brands, companies, and businesses to assist in creating features that will benefit all parties involved. Last year, Instagram added a business Instagram profile option.
This new profile option has additional contact and location features, not available with the typical Instagram profile. These new features allow for the audience to quickly get into contact with you, view your product, or be directed to your website. Overall, Instagram is a platform that has the capability to reach millions of people, and can seriously transform the way you market your company. Here are 20 reasons why you should consider adding an Instagram marketing strategy, and some tips and tricks to keep your audience engaged:
- Instagram has 500 million monthly active users and counting!
- According to Instagram, users now share an average of 95 million photos and videos per day!
- 80% of Instagram users are from outside of the U.S. According to International Business Times, Instagram is estimated to bring in $1.53 billion in global mobile ad revenue in 2016, which would be a 144 percent increase year-over-year and would amount to 8.4 percent of Facebook’s global mobile ad revenue.
- Instagram is used by 48.8% of brands and that number is only growing.
- Top brands post nearly 5 times per week on Instagram.
- 60 percent of the top brands on Instagram use the same filter for every post. Keeping a consistent look throughout all of your posts is attractive to the audience and can contribute to keeping your numbers going up.
- 75% of Instagram users take action, such as visiting a website, after looking at an Instagram advertising post. Most advertising posts are embedding with a link to either the product or website. The response rate on these are too good not try out!
- Posts with at least one hashtag average 12.6% more engagement.
- There are 15 million registered businesses using Instagram business profiles.
- Instagram has 1 million monthly active advertisers.
- B2C marketers are significantly more likely (6%) to increase Instagram activities than B2B marketers (48%).
- This year, 70.7% of U.S. companies will use Instagram for marketing, edging out Twitter for the first time.
- 60% of users say that they have learned about a product or service on the platform.
- 50% of Instagram users follow at least one business.
- The best time to post on Instagram for the most engagement is at 5 PM on Wednesdays.
- Engagement rates on Instagram are 15x higher than Facebook and 20x higher than Twitter.
- Products were the top content types for the top 200 global brands in terms of engagement, at 60% in 2015 beating the lifestyle category by over 20%, according to Hootsuite.
- Posts tagged with another user (56%) or location (79%) have significantly higher engagement rates, according to Simply Measured.
- Instagram first began testing sponsored posts in late 2013 in the U.S. “The first Instagram ad from Michael Kors received four times the usual number of likes compared to non-promoted posts… It also reached a global audience of 6.15 million and the company received 33,000 new followers, 16 times more than usual.”
- Instagram is one of the most engaged-in social media platforms out there! “Focusing purely on the top 25 most engaging brands, the average post engagement rate is 3.31% on Instagram compared to 0.07% on Twitter.”
