We don’t see Instagram slowing down anytime soon. There are approximately 300 million people using the mobile-friendly online photo-sharing service.
For marketing on social media using visual content, it has replaced all other platforms as the go-to social network.
1. Instagram’s visual content as a tool for advancement
Everyone would agree at this point that Instagram’s popularity is starting to exceed that of even Facebook. Instagram has quickly become the most widely used platform specifically designed for sharing photographs.
According to research conducted by Forrester, the average engagement rate for an Instagram post is 4.21%. Instagram posts, in other words, attract 120 times as much interaction per follower as Twitter ones, and 58 times as much as Facebook ones.
Apps like Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, Tumblr, and Snapchat emerged because their creators recognised the market potential of visual content. These networks are likely to grow much more thanks to the current trend of social advertising.
2. Secondly, you should be financially ready
The organic reach of your Facebook postings has been all but eliminated in the past year, thanks to Facebook and other social networks, leaving you with little alternative but to pay for visibility (or pray for shares from your diminishing reach).
A “free ride” on social media does not exist in modern society.
Practically every social media platform is now actively seeking advertising partnerships. Advertising solutions have been tested in 2014 on several platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Snapchat (promoted pins, video-ads, twitter cards, you name it).
Day by day, Instagram becomes more potent. In 2015, ad expenditure will increase on other platforms as they roll out their own ad offerings. Instagram will try out new forms of advertising, and companies will pay to have their images featured on the platform.
Despite criticism, the new in-feed video advertising have been well received by businesses hoping to reach Instagram’s millennial and wealthy user base. Instagram now offers a paid option for advertisers to narrow the audience for their 15-second videos down to certain demographics like age, gender, and location.
3. Third, establish a connection
Powerful new methods of connecting social advertisements with businesses’ rich datasets and social media platforms will emerge in addition to the trend of social advertising, allowing for more precise targeting.
You may expand your business through social advertising in countless ways if you use reliable behavioural data from your brand’s website, email campaigns, online forums, etc., and if you link all of these channels and social media sites together.
Users will feel less manipulated by your social media advertisements if your data is well connected with your other marketing tools. There will be an explosion of visual material (photos, graphics, gifs, short videos, etc.), with the most pertinent and targeted messages taking centre stage.
4. Fourth, broaden your presence in the realm of social video.
Instagram’s popularity will increase as it moves into the social micro-video market.
Differentiating themselves from one another, Vine, Snapchat, Hyperlapse, and Instagram all aim to become the most popular video-sharing platform, but they all approach this goal in somewhat different ways.
Instagram will soon surpass Vine in popularity in 2015.
The rising popularity of social videos presents exciting new possibilities for companies seeking to tell engaging tales through moving images and sound.
In addition, it provides a fantastic channel through which to reach your target demographic by means of the influencers, vloggers, and micro-vloggers that generate so much interesting user-generated material on platforms like Instagram.
5. Mobile fifth
Since the percentage of Facebook users who exclusively access the site from their mobile devices surged by 34% in 2014, carriers allocated a much larger portion of their retail real estate to smartphones with displays measuring 4.7 inches or more.
As a result, it appears that mobile is no longer a supplementary device. More and more people are turning to it as their go-to TV station. “Mobile-aware” has to be “mobile-first” in 2015. It’s important to consider how your social media presence may be optimised for mobile users.
This trend has already been established by major platforms like Facebook, which has developed its own Messenger app and acquired other mobile apps, including WhatsApp, Karma, and Instagram.
Use Instagram now, when organic reach and interaction are strong, if it is a good channel to reach your audience. Obviously, there are a lot more Instagram fads than just these. Please share your forecasts for 2018 with us!