Snappy online marketing success – with Instabranding!

Why are more and more companies using the increasingly popular photo and video sharing app Instagram to promote their brands? Because it works. If you want to get the most out of your branding strategies, you might want to consider it too. Let’s have a quick look at just why Instagram is proving so effective for online marketers.

If you thought Facebook had the highest level of user engagement of any social media platform, you’d be wrong. According to a variety of sources, from studies to Instagram itself, user engagement on Instagram is as much as 15 times that of Facebook. The average number of photos uploaded every day is 55 million and to date around 16 billion images have been snapped and shared on Instagram.

Other key facts about the service include a robust level of daily use – 57% of people with Instagram accounts open the app daily, and 35% more than once a day. Most post engagement is in the form of Likes, coming in at around 99% (other functions include direct messaging among users).

So what, exactly, are companies and their brands up to on Instagram? It turns out that 72% of leading brands are posting videos about themselves, as well as an average of six images a week. Instagram reports that photos of brands are more popular among users than videos – up to 1.5 times more user engagement when images are posted by companies.

Some great ways to use Instagram to your branding benefit include posting photos of people using your products, giving users a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on at your company and running fun competitions with highly desirable prizes.

Instagram has an entire portal devoted to helping companies get the most out of their branding efforts by using the app. It’s at instagram-brand.com, and there are lots of helpful tips and resources. Like this: using “insta” or “gram” as part of a hashtag – perhaps “cakegram” for a bakery – can result in lots of sharing by users and is an effective call to action.

You can also find out on the resource site how to integrate Instagram into your own website, something 14% of top brands are currently doing, and more than half (54%) are now linking to their Instagram account from Facebook. We’re told that 92% of prestige brands use Instagram – proving that there’s no time like now to get snapping for digital marketing success.