Social Media Overview: Part 1 - Instagram
Instagram is the third largest social media platform in the world, behind Facebook and Youtube.
It has 2 billion monthly active users, with the largest concentrations in India, the United States, and Indonesia. While it has a pretty even split between the genders, its users trend younger.
18-24 year olds make up 32% of the user base and 25-34 year olds another 31%, followed by 35-44 year olds with 16%. As of this year, the largest age group of males on Instagram were those between 18-24 years old. They made up 16% of the platform’s users. The largest age group of females were those ages 25-34, making up 16.3% of users.
How to Utilize
Instagram is best for visual brands. When you go to a company’s page it shows a grid of all of your recent posts. Putting your best foot forward requires special attention to the appearance of each photo or video you share, but also the look of the overall page. Restaurants, hotels, and other hospitality industries, as well as fashion, food, and art brands should post on Instagram often.
Targeted ads for products perform particularly well, where 58% of users have claimed to have become interested in a company after seeing their story. This primarily benefits brands that have a tangible product, because you can link directly to a shop and offer the item from a portal in the app.
Short form video content has been dominating social media for the past 5 years, so leveraging reels is incredibly important for brands. The rise in social media influencers is largely due to the popularity of TikTok and later Instagram Reels allowing creators to quickly churn out content by just filming themselves talking to their phone camera. For companies, this type of content isn’t always a viable strategy, but Reels can be utilized as a more dynamic marketing tool to highlight products and services.
Things to Consider
Lack of long form text options limit your ability to convey a lot of information and mean you need to link to a website. Because people primarily only scroll their own feed, clickthrough to a website is difficult to guarantee. You can advertise a link in your bio, but Instagram is best utilized as more of a billboard for your brand.
Social media has seen a huge increase in the number of targeted ads and Instagram is no exception. As more and more businesses focus their marketing efforts on the platform, users may become overwhelmed by the lack of organic content and unfollow accounts that lean too heavily into pushing their product.
Focusing on creating high quality authentic content and creating an engaging space to actually communicate with your followers is incredibly important. There is also a fine line for posting frequency. If you post too often, followers may become annoyed and disengage from your content, and if you don’t post enough, they will forget about your brand. The sweet spot for most brands is 2-3 posts per week.