Social media takes a crucial part of people’s everyday lives everywhere in the world. A wide range of social media applications exist, all serving different purposes. If asked to choose a favorite, I wouldn’t be able to decide. If you run a page on Facebook then you ought to have received a few emails from Facebook business asking you to boost your posts with just a few dollars. I would be lying if I told you I didn’t find the emails captivating.
Amidst all this lies what one would call the undiscovered oil of social media marketing: Instagram Marketing. Instagram today possesses over 800 million active users each month and this figure is expected to reach a billion by the end of 2018. This is more than double the monthly active users of Twitter and three times that of WhatsApp. Facebook on other hand holds a record 1.13 billion daily active user. This doesn’t take a genius or mathematician to tell you that Facebook delivers the biggest audience.
But did you know that an estimated 71% of US businesses use Instagram? You may be wondering why. Below I explain a few reasons that will have you start using Instagram differently.
If we take an example of Facebook that has got the highest daily active users, Instagram beats this by providing ease of navigation. A single window of Facebook on the web has got lots of things happening at the same time. This makes your advert less visible though reaching a bigger audience.
One can easily get distracted while navigating the different items a Facebook window offers. Instagram’s lack of a website makes its interface easy to use and provides better user engagement and content sharing. This simply means having the same post added to both Instagram and Facebook would reveal more likes, more views and more comments on Instagram against Facebook.
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If you haven’t yet been impressed with Instagram’s ease of use and user engagement, I will go ahead and entice you with its excellent targeting capabilities and algorithm.
Instagram’s algorithm had been kept secret until recently when the team decided to let out some clues about how all the magic happens. We have had a couple of researchers start writing about the algorithm and below are the three main factors that determine what one sees on their Instagram feed.
Interest: Instagram considers what one engages with frequently and ranks content of that genre higher on their feeds. Meaning what you like is what you see.
Timeliness: Content that is recent is considered more relevant and ranks higher on the Instagram feed.
Relationship: Instagram also considers the people you relate to more often, those whose posts you like or those you directly message and ranks content from such accounts higher on the feed.
To sum it all up, Instagram’s algorithm shows you what you want to see making every view of an advert worth it. However, Instagram is always a good option when marketing to the younger audience like people below 28 years of age. Facebook has stayed around for a longer period of time has mostly adults over 29 years of age.
Instagram is also good for a certain genre like food, art, and graphics, interior design, etc. and such businesses benefit most.
A few strategies to consider:
-Use hashtags
-Keep images in line with your brand
-Grow your followers
-Post a variety of engaging photos and videos.
Related:
Social media algorithms, how they work
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