Instagram: why Nike, MTV and ASOS show itâs not just for selfies

Instagram is a rapidly growing social network built around sharing photographs. A massive 100 million people use Instagram every month; a growth of 500% since the platform’s $1billion acquisition by Facebookin April 2012.

The service exists primarily as a smartphone app. The app, for iOS and Android, allows users to take photos from within the application and post them instantly. Instagram is also known for its photo editing toolset, offering basic crop and rotate functionality and, infamously, a range of effects and filters.

Though it is possible to interact with Instagram from a web browser by official and unofficial means, photos can only be uploaded through the mobile app. From this emphasis on smartphone usage, canny brands and businesses can deduce the following:

• Instagram users tend to be young adults
• Instagram users tend to be comfortable with technology
• Instagram users tend to be affluent, and in the market for luxury goods

The latest statistics from the Pew Research Center indicate that 13% of internet users use Instagram and that the service appeals primarily to adults between the ages of 18 and 29. Of the Instagram users surveyed, 17% reported a household income above $75,000.

The Instagram app is available worldwide and has been translated into 25 languages. Distimo’s analysis of iPhone app downloads in July last year, shortly after Instagram’s buyout, found that Instagram was downloaded more than any other social network app in countries including the US, UK, Canada, France, and Mexico. Instagram also outperformed Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest in Germany and Italy, beaten only by the WhatsApp instant messaging service.

Why should brands and businesses use Instagram?
Sixty-seven of Interbrand’s “Top 100 Brands” are on Instagram. On the surface this compares unfavourably to the figure of 76 with a presence on Pinterest, a similarly visual platform. Why dedicate time to Instagram as an alternative, or in addition to Pinterest? The 76 brands on Pinterest have a collective audience of fewer than 500,000, while the 67 brands on Instagram have more than 7,000,000 followers.

Furthermore, maintaining a presence on Instagram doesn’t limit your reach to the app’s 100 million active users. The app natively supports sharing content to Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, expanding your potential audience into the billions.

Instagram’s ties with Facebook have greatly increased the flow of content from one platform to the other. When a user “likes” a photo on Instagram, this activity can be automatically shared to their Facebook feed. This, of course, isn’t limited to pictures of someone’s pet, or what they had for lunch. If someone likes a piece of content posted by your brand, that user’s Facebook friends may also be exposed to your content through the Facebook feed. It’s because of this that 98% of all content posted on Instagram by the Interbrand Top 100 also makes it to Facebook through sharing activity by users.

Perhaps the most important reason for a brand to maintain an active presence on Instagram is that there will be activity around popular brands regardless of whether they have an official presence. If the Instagram community is sharing content related to your brand, wouldn’t you rather be the one to set the tone of the conversation?

A recent addition to Instagram’s feature set is the ability to tag a photo with the name of any Instagram account. You might tag yourself, or your friends, or you might tag the account of the restaurant you were in, or the brand that made the shoes you were wearing.

This is a gift to brands. When a user tags you in their photo you’ll receive a notification. If you like the way the user’s photo represents your brand then you can choose to share it from your own account in a “Photos of You” section. What a great way to collate and display user-generated content. If there’s a downside, it’s that popular brands may find themselves having to put a lot of time into processing this list of notifications. It might be the sort of task you’d like to outsource to an agency (wink, nudge).

Creative uses of Instagram
MTV has put a lot of work into Instagram, and the company has been rewarded with the second largest following on the platform (narrowly behind Nike). All photos posted on Instagram can be accompanied with hashtags. By monitoring six specific hashtags, orchestrated by MTV, it was able to use this functionality as a voting mechanism to decide the winner of a category at its annual Movie Awards.

On the night of the awards, MTV had a dedicated ‘Insta-razzi’ photographer posting content from exclusive areas at the event. Seventy-eight photos went up on MTV’s account that day, each averaging over 16,000 likes and comments.
Fashion brand ASOS engages its followers by encouraging them to share their style through themed hashtags, and making examples of the best submissions. Not only is this a good way to establish a two-way relationship between the brand and its followers; a savvy brand could use this technique to find out more about their customers’ interests. A radio station might ask its followers to post the cover of their favourite album, giving insight on the genres and artists their listeners are interested in.

At the time of writing, Nike has posted on Instagram only 575 times but has amassed 1.5million followers. That hardly seems fair. How has the company done it? Apps like Nike PHOTOiD haven’t hurt! PHOTOiD is a web app that lets users choose one of their own Instagram photos to use as a colour palette to customise a pair of Nike shoes, which they can then buy or simply share with their friends.

Measure your success
Surely the mark of a serious, established social network is its ability to spit out reams of numbers and charts. Though Instagram itself offers little in the way of analytics, third parties have stepped in to fill the gap. Some of Instagram’s biggest brands use Nitrogram, a paid tool with a monthly fee scaling based on your number of followers. It starts at £89 per month for up to 50k followers, £249 per month for up to 200k followers, and all the way to if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it for its unlimited “Big Bang” package.

Nitrogram offers some good insights, including this nice heatmap of your followers’ locations, but you might prefer a free alternative like Webstagram or Statigram. Both of these free services position themselves as web interfaces for Instagram, rather than purely as analytics tools. They do, however, have some functionality for monitoring popular photos, tags, and users. Statigram is perhaps the more fully-featured of the two, offering follower growth charts and information on when your posts get the most attention.

Should your brand be on Instagram?
If you have eye-catching visual content at your disposal, Instagram is a great place for it. Pinterest is certainly a great platform, but it’s hard to argue with Instagram’s enormous brand following stats. Instagram appears to be an environment where users are happy to engage with brands and participate in their campaigns, and the ease by which content can be shared to other platforms creates great potential for reach. Time to put those iPhones to work!

By DMA guest blogger Jesse Coombe, Community Manager at eModeration

This blog first appeared on www.emoderation.com