The Rise of Instagram.
Why?
Since 2010, Instagram has proved itself to be the fastest growing social media platform around! It has a user base of around 300 million and that is set to rise further. So why is this seemingly simple app growing so quickly? Well it all comes down to creativity really, Instagram have found new ways of sharing content across its platform and making users experience more seamless. For example, Instagram stories were launched to rival snapchats, allowing for users to provide disappearing pictures or videos.
Sounds simple right? Well that’s because it is. Instagram now has more sway over all its users who may have been using snapchat in tandem to its own app, reducing the need to use both and stream lining these users to its own services.
This aggressive tactic has paid off as Instagram has surpassed snapchat in users. Instagram stories also encourage more sharing of content and giving it a chat element to its app, allowing it to compete with all the other direct messaging platforms. Innovation like this is the reason for Instagram’s sudden growth.
What’s all the fuss about?
Instagram is the perfect app to share content via visual imagery. Its audience are young, educated and very into shopping. This makes content creative, exciting and fast moving. It has a different feel to platforms like Facebook and Twitter, with focus on visuals rather than words. However, studies have shown that, like Facebook, it is used daily, this makes for a loyal and highly active user base.
This ability to capture a younger more creative audience is sounding the alarm bells of major companies looking to advertise on social media. With high usage, there will surely be increased interest in advertising on the app. However, competition will be ripe and businesses will have to find creative ways to out compete their rivals in the visual world of social media.
How can You use it for Marketing?
Of course, if you wish to use this to market your company or a product, then one must consider how. This is a visual platform and thus products are in general easier to market that services. But services are not impossible to promote on the app, finding exciting ways to bring to life your service will catch the eye of the Instagram user.
Hashtags are frequently used on Instagram and getting in on trends or even starting your own is a sure way to engage an audience, in a similar way to Twitter. However, one must be careful to match the hashtag to the visual content you provide, so it isn’t as simple as other apps that use this technique.
Instagram is predominately a mobile app, so content must be easy to read and continuously updated for a mobile data, hungry demographic. Only new and fresh content will attract attention.
Finally, Instagram stories are a great way to personally engage with your audience, lasting only 24 hours. Stories should be used to keep potential customers updated daily on your business and reveal behind the scenes content to make the user feel like they are part of the company.
Instagram can be used to market almost anything, with a creative mind and a committed team, you can create quite the buzz around your brand!
The Future
With a young, educated audience using the app on their mobiles daily, one can only predict sustained growth and loyalty from its users. There will be increasing opportunity to use this app for business purposes and the advice from this writer is to get in while its hot! It will only get bigger so get into the market place before it gets even more crowded.
