Social media marketing has witnessed a remarkable increase in its importance and influence over the past few years. What used to be a mere platform for interaction and communication, has now become a hub for marketers who find it extremely influential and inexpensive to market their products/services.
The figures below justify the sudden rise in the importance of social media marketing.
Subsequently, social media marketing is now an integral element of mainstream digital marketing strategies, throughout the world.
Instagram’s Importance & Remarkable Growth
Instagram’s popularity has swollen by a great margin over the past couple of years, along with the number of users. Apart from a socializing platform, Instagram has also emerged as a highly promising platform for businesses and brands. Companies have already started leveraging Instagram for marketing purposes, and the importance of Instagram as a marketing platform is only bound to grow.
Instagram’s growth has been remarkable. This social networking platform gained around 300 million monthly active users in barely 12 months. As per official figures, the number of active monthly Instagram users soared from 300m in 2015 to 700m in 2017. The number of daily Instagram users also quadrupled from 75 m in 2015 to an overwhelming 300m in 2017.
Significantly Higher Engagement
The engagement and responsiveness on Instagram are other factors that contribute to its importance as a platform for businesses. Instagram provides the highest rate of engagement amongst its most notable competitors. As per studies conducted by Forrester Research Inc. back in 2014, the rate of user interactions with brands’ as a % of brands’ followers offered by Instagram was about 128 times greater than that offered by Twitter and around 58 times greater than the rate offered by Facebook.
These studies suggest that Instagram is the ideal platform to engage and interact with existing and potential customers, making it an extremely promising prospect for businesses.
The figures related to activity over Instagram indicate that Instagram is a significantly active platform. As per the statistical analysis by various agencies, over 4 billion posts are liked on Instagram daily, and around 95 million posts are shared on Instagram every day.
Moreover, as Instagram allows graphic content only, the posts on Instagram are way more appealing and draw greater engagement and interest from the audience.
Accommodating Algorithms
Previously, marketers used to base their social media marketing strategies around Facebook as it was the most accessed social network by a significant margin. Even though Facebook is still the most accessed social networking platform, it isn’t the ideal choice for marketers anymore. To cater the increasing amount of traffic on Facebook, the developers behind this networking giant amended their algorithms.
Facebook’s recent algorithms do not display all the posts and hide some posts to manage the content on a feed and prevent flooded feeds. Subsequently, a lot of posts/adverts may go unseen by the users, forcing marketers to opt for paid advertising and find other green pastures.
Fortunately, the content traffic on Instagram isn’t overwhelming as yet. Instagram’s algorithms ensure that all of the content posted is displayed to the users, extending greater convenience to marketers.
Assistance by Third-Party Tools
Marketing on Instagram is greatly assisted by third-party online marketing tools. There are tons of third-party marketing tools that can be leveraged to aid your Instagram marketing strategy. Tools such as Like2Buy and Shopseen can be used to turn Instagram feeds into shoppable galleries, allowing consumers to explore and shop products directly via a business’s Instagram page. This makes it extremely convenient for shoppers, boosting revenue and ROI.
Third-party Instagram marketing tools can also be used to purchase followers and engagement to give your Instagram profile a great start. Tools such as Vibbi can be utilized to purchase followers, likes and views for your Instagram pages. This can be used to gain followers on Instagram fast and increase the credibility of newly established Instagram profiles.
Instagram also enables you to utilize third-party tools to increase engagement on a profile, establish relationships and analyze the growth. There are tons of tools out there that can be leveraged to schedule posts and check statistical analysis for certain posts, followers and the profile itself.
Instagram Business Tools
Instagram’s fairly accommodating behavior is another factor that makes this platform social media’s rising star for businesses. Instagram recently launched an array of tools, aimed at assisting Instagram marketers. The tools provided by Instagram are divided into three domains.
Instagram business profiles is perhaps the most notable of them all. Instagram has enabled tailored profiles for businesses operating over Instagram. These profiles offer greater convenience to the business itself and its customers. Switching to Instagram Business profile will enable a contact icon in the profile. The contact icon will enable customers to contact you via Phone, email or message and will also provide a DIRECTIONS option.
Instagram Insights is another useful feature provided by Instagram. Instagram Insights provides statistics about your posts including top posts and engagement around specific posts.
You’ll also be provided with actionable information about your audience including their age groups, location, and gender.
Instagram’s advertising tools are worth mentioning too. Aimed at assisting businesses in creating highly-responsive adverts, these tools are extremely handy. Instagram now lets you turn any popular post into an advert, as lengthy as you want.
Introduction of Instagram business tools is a significant step towards extending convenience to Instagram marketers.
In light of current trends, analysis, and statistics, Instagram can be declared as Social Media’s rising star for Businesses.
