Instagram has grown in leaps and bounds over the past years as more people express themselves and share important moments in their lives through pictures and videos. Businesses world over have also caught onto this wave and are placing their brands and products in front of their customers on this platform for maximum visibility.
Despite the growth in the number of businesses using this platform to put their brands out there, most have not yet found the sweet spot as is confirmed by this report which says that nearly 70% of all instagram users including businesses have less than 100 followers. So we thought it would be cool to share some key highlights from the report that could help you improve your Instagram marketing in 2018.
Here it goes:
- Engagement
According to the Instagram 2018 report, video posts receive 2.1x more comments than image posts on average and Video posts have the highest overall engagement rate (38% higher than image posts). A shocking revelation from the report is that using hashtags on posts does not increase engagement, though it has an effect on post-search-ability and visibility
According to the report, you can, however, increase engagement by tagging relevant users and influencers on your posts. The report revealed that posts with more tagged uses had more comments and likes.
My advice based on these findings is to skew Instagram marketing strategy towards video, tag relevant users and influencers on posts and focus on good content because hashtags will not save you.
2. Hashtags
The second most interesting highlight for me is on hashtags. The report says; In as much as hashtags do not increase post engagement, they do help search-ability of your content which increases views. Below are the top 10 hashtags for business posts on Instagram and you should consider using them on relevant posts.
3. Followers
Followers are a big thing on Instagram, who doesn’t want a tonne of followers? Well, the report paints a very gloomy picture when it comes to followers as nearly 70% of Instagram users have fewer than 1000 followers. A further 15.7% have between 1,000-10,000, while 5.7% have 10,000-50,000. So brands are increasingly turning to micro-influencers, typically users with between 50,000-100,000 followers, to promote their products. The report also revealed that the length of bios and use of hashtags in bios has no effect on the number of followers.
Though gloomy in the broader sense, this part of the report relieves a lot of marketers out there as we now know that we are not alone in the battle to hit the 50k follower mark. We, however, need to be smart and tap into influences quickly before demand goes up. These guys only make up 2.8% of the Instagram population making them very rare.
4. More random stats
I also picked up some random stats from the report which I thought could you shape your 2019 Instagram marketing strategy. Check them out below:
- Instagram has 800 million users, with 500 million using the platform daily.
- Instagram’s largest user demographic is 25-34-year-olds (25.2%)
- Mondays and Thursdays are the best for Instagram content, but not between 3-4pm.
- Major brands post 1.5 times per day, on average.
- 11am-1pm and 7pm-9pm are considered the best times to post your content
- 50% of Instagram users follow a business.
- The more you post on Instagram, the more likes you get.
Conclusively, this report puts a lot of pressure on marketers to develop genuinely engaging content which is not easy and expansive to do. The good thing, however, is that we now have a good sense of what it takes and we can develop digital marketing strategies that have a better chance of success.
Goodluck!