Instagram is a popular marketing platform for marketing related to categories such as Fashion, Entertainment, Celebrities, Food, Automotive, Education, Tourism, Non-Profit and Beauty etc. It has now become a place for brands as well as businesses especially related to the categories described above. Out of the 800 million Instagram members, 25 million are businesses (Business, 2018). Whenever companies want to reach out to their customers, increase the level of their sales, or try to build awareness for their brand, they use Instagram. If you are reading this, you might also be interested in reading the case study of Dunkin’ Donuts  (Instagram and Branding). However, as Instagram is growing and expanding its member base, while on one hand, it offers a great potential to the businesses for using it as a marketing platform, it poses many challenges to them too.  There are certain problems which need to be overcome.  For example, it becomes quite difficult for smaller businesses to get the visibility of Instagram they would desire especially when the comparison is made to the visibility available to the big businesses on this platform. Therefore, to successes knowing the tools well enough is not enough. A proper Instagram marketing strategy is required.

Strategy on Instagram

A successful business strategy can only be created if the marketer has the right benchmarks, deep insights, as well as a comprehensive understanding of ‘trends’. It is, however, important for the marketers to fully understand as to what the current benchmarks and trends are. After a careful analysis of the 2017 trends, postings, and hashtags, it was found that after analysing accounts of 790,000 members, and 3,706 brands from 9 different industries that on the average, more and more of the Instagram users are converting their member profiles to business profiles.  Interestingly, while the video is the most popular technology these days, photos or pictures seem to get the most engagement from the users.  It has been observed that on Instagram, most of the brands post on Thursdays whereas  the geolocated contents are concerned, carousels lead the rest. (Hubspot, 2018). For further reading about this report, click here.

Statistical trends in 2017

2.3% of all Instagram accounts are business accounts while 79.98% accounts are personal and 17.7% are private accounts.  In the last year, there has been a sudden growth of business profiles. Only from July 2017 to November 2017, there was a 66% increase in the business profiles (Business, 2017) which shows a sudden awareness among the business users of the potential and efficacy of Instagram for business and marketing & promotion. In 2018, the trend is not just likely to continue but is expected to grow even faster.

As far as the content types are concerned, it is true that videos are generating enormous interest, however, pictures still rule and with 86,5% of all the posted content on Instagram consists of a single photo only. The share of the videos is 8.9% while carousels take another 4.6%. Stories have been extremely popular in 2017 and over 300 million people are known to be engaging with stories every day. Interestingly, from the point of view of the marketing professionals, one-third of all the stories come from various businesses. In terms of the engagement exhibited by the Instagram users for the various content types on Instagram, photos were the most engaged content.  The engagement rates are simple to calculate.  The sum of the likes and comments are taken and if the profile is a business profile then the saves are added to this sum as well. The total is then divided by the number of followers.  It has been estimated that for a single photo posted, the median engagement rate appears to be 2.7%. Lower rates of engagement for videos and carousels have been observed which are 1.9% and 21.7% respectively (Hubspot, 2018).  To read the complete detail of the other interesting trends please  click here.

Brands on Instagram

498 Fashion brands, 308 from Beauty, 497 from Sports, 486 from Food, 495 from Entertainment, 498 from celebrities, 148 from Education, 209 from Automotive and 130 brands from the Non-Profit sector were analysed with the data being based on Iconosquare Brand Index.  The figure below shows the popular brand practices on Instagram in regard to their industries. The total number of the brands classified above was 3,706.

Figure 1 shows Brand Trends on Instagram  (Hubspot, 2018).

Brand-wise trends

Fashion has the largest space on Instagram. At least 805,204 followers follow it  and giving 16,616 likes and 102 comments per single post. These brands are the most frequent posters as well as they post at least 24 times in a month. Beauty Industry has thrived on Instagram. The two have their sense of aesthetics in common. Beauty brands are getting 68 comments and 4,071 likes per post and the number of followers is 609,502. Beauty brands on the average are posting with a frequency of 17 per month. The following shows the rankings of the Beauty brands measured in terms of the number of followers. For the complete report, click here.

Figure 2 shows Beauty brands ranked in terms of number of followers in millions on Instagram  (Statista, 2018).

Among the Fashion brands, the following is the status of the rankings of brands on Instagram as per Statista. The followers are recorded in millions. For the complete report, click here.

Figure 3 shows Fashion Brands ranked on Instagram as per the number of followers in millions (Statista, 2018).

Engaging Millennials

63% of millennials say that they are more likely to engage with a brand if it approaches them on social media. Instagram is a popular larder of social media and with time the purchasing power of the millennials is rising, and it would continue to do so as they start to get more and more positions of responsibility and authority. Brands are engaging them more and more as they often reply to comments of their followers and even feature them in stories. As Influencer marketing is getting stronger, the big influencers are getting more expensive for brands to hire so micro-influencers are gaining more and more importance. This trend would continue.  In fact, 70% of the young YouTube subscribers prefer to trust influencer opinions as compared to celebrity opinions thus, Instagram is going to be even more important for marketing for brands in the future with passage of time (Lifestyle, 2017). For a complete video on Instagram and Influencer marketing, please watch this video.

To conclude, as with any sort of marketing, it’s all futile until the point that you find what works best for your product and customers. You could read the best practices but you get results only through testing.  I wish you best of luck in creating the best content for your Instagram.  Also, I have attached a link to an interesting journal article for further readings. Please feel free to share this blog, leave comments and suggestions.  

Further readings:

Instagram Photography for Place Branding

Bibliography:

Business, I., 2017. Celebrating a Community of 25 Million Businesses. [Online]
Available at: https://business.instagram.com/blog/25-million-businesses
[Accessed 10 February 2018].

Business, I., 2018. Businesses Love Instagram. [Online]
Available at: https://business.instagram.com/a/toolkit
[Accessed 10 February 2018].

Hubspot, 2018. Instagram Marketing 2018 Trends & Benchmarks Report. [Online]
Available at: https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/456580/IG%202018%20Report/Instagram%20Marketing%202018%20(final).pdf?t=1517318235523
[Accessed 10 February 2018].

Lifestyle, A., 2017. INSTAGRAM PREDICTIONS FOR 2018: INFLUENCER MARKETING, LIVESTREAM TOOLS, SHOPPING TAGS, s.l.: YouTube.

Lavoie, K. 2018. Instagram and Branding: A Case Study of Dunkin’ Donuts. Strategic Communications Elon University 2018 [Online]. https://www.elon.edu/docs/e-web/academics/communications/research/vol6no2/08_Kally_Lavoie.pdf [10 February 2018].

Statista, 2018. Leading beauty brands ranked by a number of Instagram followers as of December 2017 (in millions). [Online]
Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/536991/leading-beauty-brands-instagram-followers/
[Accessed 10 February 2018].

Statista, 2018. Leading fashion brands ranked by a number of Instagram followers as of December 2017 (in millions). [Online]
Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/483738/leading-fashion-brands-instagram-followers/
[Accessed 10 February 2018].

Thelander, Å. and C. Cassinger. 2017. Brand New Images? Implications of Instagram Photography for Place Branding. Media and Communication 5(4): 6 [Online].