Instagram: Stuck with Your Followers (For Now)
Originally published at linkedin.com on July 29, 2015.
Facebook’s little child, Instagram, quickly climbed the ladder of social media. Within less than 5 years since launch, it has garnered over 300 million monthly active users. This app, which is parented by Facebook, has gained its rather unique audience.
Instagram is innovative: it allows anyone to be a great photographer. With its 24 (and growing) filters and various adjustment features, it’s as interactive as it gets with user content. Thanks to its exclusive features, it is no surprise many companies have taken to advertise via this platform. One of the featured companies is Disneyland.
Filters are the essence of Instagram; these are what help you sell your content to followers. Applying the right filter will make your picture more pleasant for the user and the most likely they’ll be motivated to comment (which usually is tagging a friend to look at your content!). However, how do you reach those not in your fan base?
Carousel
On March 2015, Instagram has launched its paid advertisement project: Carousel. It is displayed to the user as a normal post would, but it features a slideshow, much like you would expect from a carousel:
Carousel allows the user to upload more than one photo per post and certain ads are shown to a specific demographic (target audiences with certain interests). For example, the gaming app Knights and Dragons is a current user of Instagram’s Carousel that has pushed its creative use to its major extent rather than just uploading different pictures of a shared topic. The ad also includes a “Sponsored” badge as well as a clickable “Learn More” link that redirects you to the advertiser’s page. Below is their three-slide ad as displayed on any Instagram feed.
While their Carousel showcases a whopping 62k likes, the rest of the account’s content is found with an average of 309 likes per post. Undoubtedly, Instagram’s Carousel has reached a lot of people, but its retention rate is pretty low given that the account’s followers are almost 4k (15.5% of its peak reach). However, Carousel, considered an “ experiment” by its creators, is still in development and is currently only available to a select few big companies.
Organic Reach
Hashtags
Almost ten years ago, Twitter introduced the use of hashtags (#) to categorize topics of discussion. Instagram was quick to adapt the already established trend but its use is rather different. With Instagram, there is no “character limit” as in Twitter. This allows for users to add as many hashtags as they please, but there is an unwritten agreement as to how many hashtags following your posts are adequate (maximum of five after your main post). Hashtags are a strategic way for marketers to get their content to new audiences. Is your company more focused on electronics? If you play your content and hashtags right, you could post a summer-focused image and include #Summer to be able to join the 236 million posts and possibly reach a brand new audience that had not discovered your company.
Third-Party Apps for Sharing
Perhaps the biggest limit Instagram has for its non-paid advertisers is that it does not provide a share function. Users have no way of sharing the content they see on their news feed other than tagging every single friend, and that would be asking too much in social media today.
In the Android PlayStore alone there are currently (at least) ten popular Third Party apps that are devoted solely for the ability to repost an image/ video within Instagram. These ten apps accumulate an estimate of 570k active users. The functions of these apps are not something out of the ordinary for Instagram: they take a posted content, add a layer with a banner that says “Reposted from @[user]” and it’s ready to go.
The problem with the lack of the share feature in Instagram is that, even with these third party apps aiding Instagram users, it does not have a direct button to engage the new audience with the Original Poster’s profile. The likes generated on the repost in no way attribute to the original content’s creator. This is vastly seen when individual pages repost off TV shows and/or celebrities.
The likes and comments reposts generate are completely lost and do not appear on the company’s content. Facebook certainly counts with a sharing feature of its own, so why has Instagram not done it? Instagram could implement a sharing feature, such as Facebook has added the “Like Page” link when a new page is exposed to a user, to further expand their users’ reach.
Instagram is great for users to edit & submit their own content. With the many provided filters, Instagram users are sure to take awe-inducing photographs to share with followers… but only to their followers if they don’t play their hashtag game right. For the companies not selected to join the Carousel experiment, there is only organic reach available. If you have great content but not a strong fan base, the current repost system might be hurting your business and limiting your reach. Although your content does technically receive more views through a repost, your profile would not be directly credited but instead simply mentioned on the reposter’s post. Sharing is inevitable in the social media world, and Instagram should strengthen their strategies in the field by implementing such feature.
Got any thoughts to add? Tweet me @juliangumbo or comment below!
Julian Gamboa is a UC Berkeley graduate with a focus on marketing. Julian was selected as a LinkedIn Top Voice for Marketing and #Social Media (2017) and a Course Instructor of the marketing and digital publishing course Digital Marketing Today at the Haas School of Business. He is also the founder of Digiviewpoint, a millennial publishing account.
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