Instagram is on Fire and Brands Benefit
Brands, including Taco Bell, Hollister and others have embraced Instagram's potential to help build their businesses, and Instagram only rolled out advertising for select advertisers six months ago. The brands who are embracing Instagram are seeing results as the platform's community shows that it values advertising when the content is right, which means Instagram is just starting to show its potential for brands.
Paying for Results… And Getting Them
Instagram is in the process of testing paid ad units with select partners, but they're already seeing some pretty impressive results:
- Taco Bell saw a 29% gain in ad recall, and paid promotions saw 400% higher engagement than organic posts, while its followers increased 45% during a month-long campaign.
- Michael Kors is seeing 60% higher engagement rates for organic posts after running paid promotions.
- Hollister's ad recall increased 32% after executing paid Instagram promotions.
Instagram's paid ad offerings are delivering results when it comes to ad recall and engagement, KPIs many marketers use to evaluate their efforts on Facebook and Twitter.
Instagram's ad offering is new, but its test shows what high-quality brand content with dollars behind it can do on the platform. The bar has been set high, so as Instagram unrolls paid ads to more advertisers later this year, we'll have to see if it can maintain these levels of success.
Perhaps, what's most interesting, however, is what Instagram is doing for brands without paid promotion.
An Audience Ready to Engage
Instagram users stop, view and consider content in their feed. After all, that's what they're there to do — view beautiful content. That mindset with the added benefit of a mostly uncluttered environment gives brands on Instagram a far more engaged audience than Twitter followers and Facebook fans. Forrester found that 4.21% of Instagram followers engage with brand posts, dominating Facebook's .07% and Twitter's .03% engagement rates.
This could of course change and go down as more brands enter the platform, but for right now, Instagram's users have shown their readiness to engage.
Getting Visual
Instagram is young compared to the likes of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks advertisers have embraced. Still, it has 200 million active users each month. Its proving its value from both a paid and engagement perspective but remains largely uncharted ground for many brands.
People want and respond to visuals. It's not enough to just tell as a story—we have to show it. The visual web is here, and consumers are ready for it. Is your brand?