The content in this briefing was originally included in Econsultancy's Social Media Platforms Overview. It covers the following topics:
- What type of presence is right for your brand
- Setting up an Instagram account
- Attracting followers
- Ways to build a successful visual brand on Instagram
- Instagram Stories, Instagram Live and IGTV
- Instagram Shopping
- The rules of engagement
What type of presence is right for your brand?
Instagram has experienced impressive global growth following its acquisition by Facebook in 2012 for $1bn and has been a massive success story.
A mobile-first, visual social network, originally with a user base of professional and amateur photographers, it surpassed one billion active users in June 2018.
Brands were quick to jump on board and create content for users hungry for photos, images and videos. Magazine publishers, with their beautifully shot image libraries, quickly created a massive following in a short space of time. According to Facebook, the growth was “two years ahead of Facebook”.
National Geographic and Vogue are two of the top global brands on Instagram with 128 million and 26 million followers respectively (December 2019).
Not all brands or organisations can command those follower numbers. But, with its seemingly unstoppable growth, Instagram is now a must-have presence for brands targeting consumers. However, there must be a commitment to creating platform-suitable, interesting, timely and highly visual content.
According to research by social customer service platform Conversocial, Instagram’s engagement rate for brands is 58 times more per follower than Facebook and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter. Half (50%) of comments are posted in the first six hours of a published post and 75% posted in the first 48 hours.