Social Media Managers, Community Managers, Media Planners: Instagram gained the attention of all the marketing roles. Why is this social network becoming so important for digital marketing strategies?
Instagram was launched five years ago and is currently used by approximately 300 million people sharing more than 70 million images every day. And every day the content posted on the social network is “Liked” about 2.5 billion times. These are insights that no brand can underestimate: this is the moment to integrate Instagram into your digital strategy for brand communication.
Instagram’s focus is image-sharing. Pictures can be enhanced using a series of pre-set filters (they have played an active role in Instagram’s success). Instagram users can create hashtags to describe and categorize their images: as hashtags are searchable using the internal search engine, they enable users to access content and the interactions related to it. And interaction on Instagram is very high: according to a comparison run by Forrester, Instagram is the social network with the highest engagement rate among the big players: 4.1% versus 0.07% on Facebook and 0.3% on Twitter!
This is the main reason for brands to adopt Instagram as a useful platform to share their content and achieve important goals such as raising brand awareness, creating digital PR, hosting social media events, and lead generation as well as product-selling. In fact, the latest Instagram features and updates should facilitate turning Instagram’s engage rate into a direct increase of companies’ revenues. Let’s look at some of the changes:
First: Instagram is now opening its doors to sponsored content (i.e., advertising) in main markets like the USA, Germany, Italy and other European countries.
Second: Instagram has improved its internal search engine, allowing users to search for places in addition to other users and hashtags.
This aspect is crucial because the users can activate searches directly on the platform. For example, if a user has written “London” on Instagram search, he will have the opportunity to look all the photos, tags and places in which the word “London” is used. This is a great step towards location-based businesses!
Third: Instagram is finally introducing active hypertext links throughout the application. Hypertext links are the only way to drive followers from the social network to the company’s website. Until recently, Instagram had only allowed one active link in the “bio” space of the user profile page – a location that is rarely visited by users, who primarily focus on the pictures.
With this new feature, digital marketers can finally link their websites or landing pages to each company AND keep track of all the traffic flow: in this way Instagram has become an improved communication channel, but more importantly, a new sales channel. Tracking also allows marketers to understand who are the most influential users, what are the most used hashtags and which places the users tag or search the most.
In conclusion, these new features will help brands get more value from their posts and campaigns and obtain much more data on reach, impressions and engagement. For example, an advertiser will now have access to a real-time campaign summary and data showing how their target audience is responding to each of their sponsored photos.
ROIALTY is a platform based on this data and introduces an objective knowledge of the audience’s interests and social behaviours, offering tools to enable real-time profile-driven and behaviour-driven actions. Reaching the right people, with the right content, via the right channels motivates customers to engage in high-value activities that lead to brand loyalty and greater lifetime value.
Using ROIALTY, brands will be able to spot the users that are actively engaged and create the right, personalized, high-quality content for each of them. Moreover, brands will be able to profile Instagram users according to their interests and interactions and use this information to create personalized digital strategies.