Chart of the Day: The Fashion and Sports Industries are getting the most out of the Instagram community
Instagram's popularity seems never ending, and every time a new feature is released the opportunities for brands to reach audiences keep growing. In the last year, Instagram has introduced us to Stories, Instagram Live, Stickers, Mulitple photos and video in one post and much more. While the top followed accounts are dominated by celebrity accounts with Selena Gomez leading the way (if you discount the official Instagram account) top B2C/retail brands have been able to capitalise on this too.
If you are new to Instagram or even if you're not The Rock's account is a personal favourite, it really shows how a personality has used the platform to promote himself as a brand.
In todays chart of the day, I ranked the 10 most followed brands on Instagram excluding celebrities.
At the top of the…
Live video now available to everyone on Instagram.
Instagram announced another update their platform this week. Instagram Stories will allow you to broadcast live video to your followers as well as being accessible via Explore.
Live Video for Instagram Stories is being pitched as a way to help you connect with your friends and followers who are there to share a moment with you. It is interesting that once you've stopped recording any trace that you were there will have disappeared, which may help the more camera shy of us use live video. I'm looking forward to seeing how brands adopt this new way to communicate with their audience.
Going live couldn't be easier - Just swipe right to access the camera and hit "Start Live Video". The only limitation you have is that you can only broadcast for up to an hour, which should be plenty for even the most seasoned influencer or brand. Instagram…
Instagram is letting select brands advertise via its 'Stories' feature
Importance: [rating=4] (For Social Media Managers)
Recommended Source: Instagram Blog
Instagram has just announced it is beginning the processes of letting advertisers make use of the large audience its newish 'Stories' feature has been able to generate since its launch back in the summer of 2016. Again taking the lead from Snapchat, it is introducing the ads in a mid-roll format- that is they will appear between stories the user has elected to see. In a way this is not dissimilar from TV advertising, where the user accepts the ads between content he or she wants to see. The format will however allow for the skipping of ads, so as to not degrade the user's experience.
Instagram reports that over 150 million people view stories content every day. Combine this with the fact Instagram users tend to be young, tech savy and have…
Example of how to harness Instagram to capture new audiences and convert that attention into sales
Instagram is one of the most effective ways to boost your e-commerce marketing. In a recent Yotpo survey of over 165,000 e-commerce businesses, 75% of them reported being active on Instagram. Customer research data is on their side. In fact, the research found that:
Traffic from Instagram is the most engaged: this means that visitors from Instagram stay on a site for an average of 192 seconds – that’s longer than visitors from every other channel, including Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
30% of Instagram users have bought something they first spotted on Instagram: meaning the potential for the browsing conversion to sales is high.
83% of Instagram users reported that they were influenced by friend’s posting about a brand on Instagram: meaning Instagram is a powerful megaphone for your brand’s messaging.
…
How you can replicate the success of the most engaging brands on Instagram
When it comes to social media marketing, Instagram continues to be one of the most successful platforms available to brands. But with so many users and so many different brands using it, some more successfully than others, it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. In this blog post, I’m going to share with you some of the best examples of successful brands on Instagram and what you can learn from them to improve your own Instagram presence.
Oreo: speed drawing
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Chart of the Day: Top 20 Instagram Mobile App Advertisers in the USA
This week saw Instagram release a bunch of new features to their increasingly popular Instagram Stories. They announced what they called 'the biggest update to Stories since launch in August'. The app now allows you to tag your friends and integrates Boomerang, so you can add the 'wacky' looping videos into your stories.
Notice how the Disney account has tagged the Mickey Mouse and Good Morning America accounts - Oh and Happy 88th Birthday Mickey.
A unique feature released just for verified users (the ones with the blue tick) is the ability to add links to websites. This has always been a downside for marketers and influencers using the platform to promote their brands. Before this update, you could only add one link to your profile unless you were willing to invest in advertising spots. This…
Are you making any of these 5 common Instagram marketing mistakes?
300 million active users! 1.2 billion likes per day! 1000+ comments per second! Who would have thought that the Facebook-owned app could drive such a massive amount of social media engagements within a short period of its inception!
Humans love visuals, and that has played a key role behind Instagram's huge popularity. Instagram unveiled itself to the world of social media in 2010, and since then it has become one of the fastest growing social channels with more than 300 million active user count.
Instagram's impressive growth rate has made many online marketers, entrepreneurs and social media influencers to realize the huge potential that it presents. As a result, more and more businesses today are taking the advantage of Instagram's extensive reach to engage their target audiences like never before.
Being a fairly new platform on the marketing scene, there are some rookie…
One algorithm to bind them all
In March this year, Instagram continued with its plans to change its photo and video feed model to one which is algorithm-based rather than organic. This is not on the cards just yet – the plan is to introduce it over the next few months – but for a platform which supersedes the others in level of social network engagement and interaction, this move is very interesting indeed.
It is also one which is going to have a marked impact on brands, users and consumer behaviour. See this Gifographic for the statistics on Instagram growth. Like it's parent, Facebook, this new structure will now see images slotted into streams based on user actions, not in reverse chronological order. For the A-List it probably means very little indeed. For the rest, well, there…
How and why you should get started with Instagram advertising
Did you know that since September any business could buy and place adverts on Instagram? Better still, they could do this easily using Facebook's existing Ad tools with no new system to learn! Sounds good, right? But what does this tell us about Instagram?
The significance of this news wasn't lost on me at the time Instagram rolled out ads to every advertiser, yet even to this day it seems to have been largely glossed-over by mainstream social media news sources. Even Instagram's own announcement back in September was sketchy on exactly what businesses could do, let alone how they could do it. Since then Instagram have continued to release new features for advertisers but still few are aware of the possibilities or how easy it is to have a dabble. But most importantly, there's little real understanding of why businesses might now consider advertising on Instagram.
I've unpacked the key points, the different ad types, plus a brief…
How and why brands should embrace Instagram for marketing
In most countries, Facebook is both king and queen of social media. According to the latest statistics from Pew Research, 72% of American adults use Facebook. But that growth has been relatively stagnant over the past 3 years. When you consider Facebook's organic reach of 6%, the potential audience size becomes much smaller. Organic reach on Instagram, on the other hand, is growing rapidly. Early indications also suggest that Instagram users are more receptive to branded content. Given Facebook own Instagram, it's hardly a competition. However, it does matter which is more effective when it comes to deciding where your time and marketing budget should be spent.
According to this infographic from EcommerceCEO, now is the perfect time for marketers to consider Instagram. Engagement is 58X higher on Instagram and brands can reach 100% of their followers. Only 36% of marketers currently use Instagram,…
