As social media increasingly becomes the tool of choice for millennials, is it sensible for brands and marketers to base their marketing strategy around user-generated content on these platforms and not invest any money into their strategy?
According to Rohit Sharma, founder and chief executive of Pokkt, a mobile video advertising and app monetisation platform for game developers, he tells The Drum that even though the millennial generation is extremely plugged into social, many companies are plunging headfirst into social without understanding that social simply cannot function as a standalone strategy as it must be incorporated as part of an integrated strategy.
“It is akin to functioning with tunnel vision, or with blinkers on – you end up overlooking other channels that could deliver greater reach, engagement, and which ultimately drive the bottom line,” he adds.
Sharma believes that social is prized for how easily it lends itself to native and while there are channels that might do this just as well, or even better. For example, he says by engaging the user in a mini-game within a game, in-game advertising is the perfect example of native, with a far higher guarantee that the user will actually see and interact with content, instead of simply scrolling past as they might do on a social feed. “Furthermore, the nature of the games in question often allow for short, predictable breaks – easy spaces for advertisers to communicate their message without being annoying or interruptive,” he adds.
However, there are some brands who buck the trend by putting their trust into social media. Take GlampingCity for example, a company that combines glamour and camping for people who want a hotel-style accommodation, but with the feel of outdoor camping.
Its entry into Singapore was initially met with scepticism, but the trend slowly caught on when the company started posting picturesque photos on its Instagram page, taken by its staff and local social media influencers that it collaborates with.
Aside from its Instagram page and a website, GlampingCity does not have any budget allocated for ad spend and marketing strategy, according to founder Ryan Lam, adding that glamping caught on fast in Singapore through word of mouth and social media because people were posting about their experiences with it.
Lam, who was speaking to The Drum on the sidelines of the 2017 ACI Asia Business Summit in Singapore, also reveals that 50% of the photos on the company’s Instagram page is from his own team. “This business is very new, so we have not approached anyone (influencer) yet, all of our collaborations and partnerships, it all came naturally. I spent zero dollars on marketing. I only spent on logistics. The publicity came naturally.”
“I don’t plan to pay influencers, the genuine ones, maybe, not those that are looking to do it for their own benefit,” he adds.
Bart Mroz, co-founder and CEO of Sumo Heavy, a ecommerce consulting company, tells The Drum that he agrees with GlampingCity’s social media heavy strategy as he feels that social should be a main priority for the production, distribution and syndication of content when it comes to marketing to millennials as they are changing the ways brands market.
Brands like Sephora and Nike, have also been successful in marketing to millennials by using Instagram to post visually stunning photos that clearly reflects brand identity and draws users in, according to Mroz, noting that Nike has become the 19th most followed account and the fifth most used hashtag, while Sephora has increased its engagement rate and now boasts nearly 13 million followers.
Mroz however, adds that in order to effectively use social media, brands still need to put money into these platforms. “You won’t see the needle move much if you don’t invest. Marketers need to shift their spending from traditional channels like TV, print, and PPC to social media. For example, Facebook and Instagram are both strong channels because of their high engagement rates, robust targeting options, and popularity with this demographic.”
Noting that 41% of millennials use Facebook every day, which makes it still the number one marketing channel, and that Instagram and Snapchat are catching up because the platforms are very different in style and have features that attracting more millennials, Mroz says: “Therefore, brands should still focus on Facebook, but pay much more attention to platforms like Instagram and Snapchat to better engage with this target audience in the long-run.”
Feature Image: Ryan Lam, founder of GlampingCity. Photo by: Institute on Consumer Insights
Shawn Lim is a reporter at The Drum, covering industry news around the Asia Pacific region with a focus on Singapore and Southeast Asia. Based in Singapore, he has worked across photography, video and online, covering a range of subjects including current affairs and sports.
Before Game of Thrones, he was a huge Breaking Bad fan. He does CrossFit and yoga to stay healthy.
An Insta-grandma called “Baddie Winkle” says she has been stealing your man since 1928.
By Nicole Buckler
Hotels.com have got together with a bad-ass granny who calls herself “Baddie Winkle” to encourage people to go travelling (staying in their hotels, of course). Using the hashtag #BadAssBucketList you can follow her adventures and even contribute yourself to the hashtag should you be a granny looking to feel up some prime young beef. I’m only in my 40s and I’m ready to join the squad.
Don’t touch, Weinstein
Baddie is promoting Hotels.com Rewards program, which gives players a one-night freebee in a hotel for every 10 stayed. She says, “I have always wanted to party in London, go to the Moulin Rouge in Paris and watch cheeky volleyball players do their thing on a beach in Brazil!” Now as a micro-influencer, she can unlock the “Perve Level: Brazilian” and other treasures on hotel.com’s dime. Which is nice work if you can get it. All the Insta-grandma has to do is to flit around a number of hotels, staying there and showing fans what she gets up to inside them. Baddie wrote on her Instagram page last week; “I’m international baby!”
International indeed. The 89-year-old microinfluencer even has her own celebrity fans, including Miley Cyrus, Khloe Kardashian and Nicole Richie. Perhaps they will be watching with glee as she mixes rooftop cocktails in NYC, rubs shoulders with NFL players, and helicopters over The Grand Canyon. It’s a tough life, but someone’s Nana has to do it.
Hmmm… slutty but hot.
It’s not just the rather wealthy grandparent market hotel.com are going for. According to the astonishing results of a recent survey, one in five people under 30 have confessed that their travel plans are inspired by their favourite oldies. Who knew that oldies could be travel inspirators? The marketing people at Hotels.com knew. Oh hell yes, they knew.
Damn she’s bad.
Baddie is bringing her granddaughter along on the trip, and this seems to fit in with accusations that millennials are a bunch of home-loving family-stalking squares. The previously-mentioned survey shows that 40 percent of millennials would prefer to complete their bucket lists with their parents or grandparents – that’s more than celebs (11 percent), siblings (28 percent) or on their own (25 percent).
What the….?
One in eight confessed that their gran (or nana) was cooler than them and travelled more than them. I am ashamed of millennials. Stop protesting over stupid crap and go and see the world you wasters!
Squad goals: Polyamory
And for those of us in marketing? Let’s remember that the best micro-influencers might be someone you haven’t considered before. Like grannies in leather dresses. Who are on their way to steal your man. Now would be a good time to panic.
HOW people use social media is more important than the time they spend using it. Let’s stop the moral panic.
By MediaStreet Staff Writers
There has so far been no evidence supporting the view that the amount of time spent on social media affects mental health in young people, says Chloe Berryman of the University of Central Florida. In fact, she says that there are very few links between different aspects of social media use among young adults and possible mental health problems such as loneliness, decreased empathy and social anxiety.
“We do not deny the potential for some online behaviours to be associated with mental health problems, rather we propose that research focus on the behaviour of individuals rather than assume media is the root cause of all socio-personal problems,” says Berryman, who compared the response that some people have to social media to a form of ‘moral panic’ such as that surrounding video games, comic books and rock music.
Berryman and her colleagues analysed the responses of 467 young adults to a variety of questionnaires. They were questioned about the amount of time per day they spent using social media, the importance it has in their lives, and the way they used social media. Their current mental health state, levels of social anxiety, the quality of their relationship with their parents and the amount of social support that they could count on were also assessed. Aspects such as general mental health symptoms, suicidal ideation, loneliness, social anxiety and decreased empathy were also considered.
The only worrying trend found had to do with ‘vaguebooking,’ which refers to a person’s tendency to write social media posts that contain little actual and clear information, but are worded in such a way as to solicit attention and concern from potential readers. Young people who tended to often write such posts were found to be lonelier, and to have more suicidal thoughts than others.
“Vaguebooking was slightly predictive of suicidal ideation, suggesting this particular behaviour could be a warning sign for serious issues,” says Berryman. “It is therefore possible that some forms of social media use may function as a ‘cry for help’ among individuals with pre-existing mental health problems.”
“Overall, results from this study suggest that, with the exception of vaguebooking, concerns regarding social media use may be misplaced,” she adds. “Our results are generally consistent with other studies which suggests that how people use social media is more critical than the actual time they spend online with regards to their mental health.”
There you go, readers. Go forth and Facebook obsessively… it’s all good.
Well, Instagram is trying to rein in the trolls in its corner of the internet
The Facebook-owned photo sharing app introduced a comment-control tool this week in a bid to grapple with harassment on its platform and curb online vitriol.
Individuals with public Instagram accounts will now have a handful of filtering options for comments. They can allow comments from: Everyone, people you follow and your followers, just people you follow, or just your followers. Comments can also be blocked from specific users.
While it may seem like just another service update, it is important step in the broader context of social media’s big online harassment problem. And it is, in fact, a huge issue for internet users.
Pew Research Center recently reported online abuse is as rampant as ever, with four in 10 U.S. adults saying they’ve been harassed online. Meanwhile, 18% of that group said physical threats, stalking or sexual harassment were part of the harassment.
The ability to filter commenters on Instagram won’t eradicate the internet’s trolling problem. But some experts say it’s a step in the right direction.
“As lawyers for individuals targeted by trolls, perverts, as*****s, and psychos, we’ve known how rife the Instagram comment section is for our client base,” Carrie Goldberg, an attorney who specializes in sexual harassment crimes, told CNN Tech.
The new tool could stave off harassment before it starts, according to Goldberg. “The company does not have to spend its resources moderating abuse when users can curtail it before it happens in the first place.”
Zoe Quinn, a game developer who wrote about her personal experience being harassed online in a new book “Crash Override,” says she’ll take advantage of the feature.
“I’m relieved to know I can finally do something about a few bad actors on my own account,” she told CNN Tech, adding that giving people “granular and specific control over their privacy settings is great practice in general.”
Instagram’s tactic for helping users filter their feeds isn’t exactly groundbreaking.
The strategy is one parent company Facebook also uses.
Facebook users can filter who sees their profiles and posts, as well as who is able to comment. Facebook, as well as other platforms like Twitter, rely on users to report misbehavior. A team of moderators then investigates claims that have been submitted.
The comment-control tool isn’t a panacea. Experts say there are drawbacks because it places the onus too squarely on the user. Others say it could create a false sense of security.
Brianna Wu, another game developer who has been a frequent target of online harassment, including death threats, explained to CNN Tech that if an Instagram account is dedicated to “doxxing” women — a term that refers to publishing the private or identifying information about someone for malicious purposes — blocking that content doesn’t prevent it from existing and spreading.
“The danger is going to still exist. You have to have user oversight,” she said. “It’s also psychologically exhausting to curate death threats and rape threats yourself. You can block them, but new accounts spring up like weeds … It’s my experience when you draw a boundary with someone, they often double down.”
Soraya Chemaly, a writer and director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project, agreed.
“I know that they try hard to make sure users have tools at their disposal that enable them to develop more privacy which I think is a net good,” said Chemaly, while adding that the tools themselves don’t really protect anyone. “It just makes the experience a little more pleasant.”
Instagram also provides the ability to filter comments in a few other languages. It added the ability to block select offensive comments in English in June. This week, the company said that’s now available in other languages, too: Arabic, French, German and Portuguese.
Chemaly said the issue of online harassment on social platforms is complicated.
“There’s a question of, what’s at the root of the hostility, that no one really addresses … It’s a larger issue of social and emotional learning.”
So, while Instagram may be sending a message to trolls that it’s platform is getting a little less friendly to their vitriol, “there’s really no stemming the firehose of awful human beings online,” added Chemaly. “It’s like playing whack-a-mole.”
Danielle Citron, a cyber-harassment expert and law professor at the University of Maryland, said the comment-control tool is similar to those used by some blogging platforms, where people can delete or block individuals who are abusive or off-topic.
If privacy and safety folks collaborate with engineers when building a product from the ground up, features like this might be available from the get-go “rather than trying to tack on privacy and security later,” Citron said.
With over 600 million users globally, Instagram is the fastest growing social media network and one with the highest interaction rate per follower. Over 300 million people use it daily, making the platform an ideal place for brands to interact with their potential and existing customers. Instagram’s visual nature and mobile functionality is great for digital storytelling, allowing you to share in-the-moment experiences and tell your brand’s story.
Create a visually consistent profile
According to WebDam 60 percent of the top brands on Instagram use the same filter for every post. By having the same filter your style will become recognisable to your followers. You can use additional filters or editing options via photo editing apps like VSCOcam or Enhance and import your edited photos into Instagram. Create a visually consistent profile that aligns with all your other visuals such as your website and any other marketing collateral related to your business.
2. Use hashtags
Posts with at least one Instagram hashtag average 12.6% more engagement than posts without a hashtag. Hashtags work in a same way as search terms when you are looking for information via the search engine. They help your content to be found by new followers and create brand consistency. Using relevant hashtags means that users will be able to find your post and profile without following you and it’s an effective way organically grow the number of followers.
3. Add location
If your business is located at a specific address, add the location in your posts. Similar to your hashtags, it will help new followers to find you and it’s very helpful for places such as shops, cafes, pubs and restaurants as it makes your posts visible in local searches and helps your potential visitors to find you.
4. Repost other users content
If your followers or customers are posting photos relevant to you, repost their photos. Showing engagement and interacting online will give your Instagram brand extra exposure, especially if combined with hashtags and location. Tag the person who originally posted the photo (using the @ sign) and add a hashtag that indicated this is a repost – #regram or #repost are good ones to use.
5. Use Instagram stories
Instagram now let’s you publish a short video that shows up on the top of your follower’s feed. Stories are used by 250 million users daily, both individuals and businesses and their disappearing nature means they are perfect for live broadcasting and attention-grabbing visuals.
6. Add link to your latest content in bio
Many users add the link to their promoted content as part of their post descriptions – but Instagram doesn’t allow hyperlinks as part of your post so unless your followers manually copy and paste the link, they can’t click on it. A good way around this is to update your bio with the latest link and mention it in your post description – something like: ‘link in bio’.
7. Time your posts
You will find that specific times work best for engagement. It’s important that you keep your posts regular, even if not too frequent. Different times work for different brands and industries, so keep an eye on how your posts are performing and do more of what works well. Sprout Social have a great guide for timing your posts and their general guidelines say that Monday through Friday are the strongest days to post. Monday tends to drive the most engagement out of the week and the most recommended posting times include 2 am, 8.am and 5pm.
With more than 700 million people scrolling through their feed each month, prices have been hitting serious highs. According to Forbes, an account with over a million followers can earn upwards of $50k for a single sponsored post. When Buzzfeed analyzed sponsored content by the top 50 celebrities on Instagram, they found that nearly half were part of long-term brand collaborations, which can earn celebrities millions over the campaign’s lifetime.
Marketers have noticed that once an account is over a certain size, however, fewer people bother to engage. The ratio of likes and comments to followers peaks when an account has around 1,000 followers. Get more than 100,000 followers, and engagement starts to flatten out; users just aren’t as keen to interact with a celebrity as with someone they can relate to more closely.
Enter the micro-influencer: accounts with followers in the tens rather than hundreds of thousands, and usually working a particular niche. These users are reckoned to represent a more authentic and creative voice than famous influencers, and an ever-expanding set of agencies, tools and services is appearing to help them and brands get the most benefit out of each other.
Takumi, an app which matches brands with users, is vying to become a leader in the field. Co-Founder and CEO Mats Stigzelius says: “Influencer marketing is still in its early stages but will grow into a major marketing channel over the next five years. Brands are increasingly leveraging social media influencers to reach their ideal consumers more organically.”
Takumi’s founders say they wanted to replicate sharing-economy companies Uber and Airbnb. “We thought this is just obviously the way to do influencer marketing. Through real people and an efficient marketplace.”
Takumi joins agencies like Dovetale and Fohr Card which use differing degrees of automation to match and manage influencer campaigns. Other apps, such as Liketoknow.it, pay influencers based on the amount of interest they generate for the products they feature.
The bar to entry can be surprisingly low. Spread It, a Hong Kong-based start-up which offers micro-influencers in-kind rewards rather than hard cash, invites sign-ups from users who get an average of just 50 likes per post.
Previously, the route to monetizing even a large follower base was far less clear. Either businesses had to reach out to potential influencers or Instagrammers had to pitch their promotional services to brands on a case-by-case basis. Not everyone who’s good at taking photos can also sell advertising; successful marketing departments are rarely a one-person show.
Dan Chizzoniti, a menswear and fitness influencer from New York who also works for an influencer marketing agency, says these services make the experience more streamlined. “From a blogger standpoint I just have to sign up and they send me things that would work for me. They do all the heavy lifting that I would be spending hours and hours trying to do. I don’t have to worry about sifting through Instagram; I can focus on strategy and doing more for my brand.”
After years of building a following on different platforms, Dan says he earns “a few thousand dollars” a month for 10 to 15 hours spent on his Instagram each week.
As Mashable recently reported, it is still surprisingly easy to game the system using bots, fake followers and stock photos. But the industry is finding ways to weed out the scammers to satisfy their clients’ demands for authentic engagement. “A lot of these influencers don’t know that it’s coming, but brands are getting smarter and getting new tools to show who has fake followers,” says Dan.
Brands are also paying more attention to the strengths and weaknesses of each influencer, and spreading their budget across different accounts – especially important on a platform where the average user misses an estimated 70% of the posts in their feed.
All of which means that as influencer marketing professionalises and grows, you’re going to see much more #spon and #ad on your feed. The number of brand-sponsored posts – and the amount of money spent on them – is projected to double in the next two years.
Yet, not everyone is comfortable with leveraging their account to sling merch. “I’ve been offered to promote products, but it wasn’t worth the money to upload some ridiculous mirror selfie in a piece of clothing that I’d never wear,” says Mathilda, 26, a former fashion model turned photographer from Sweden with a sizable Instagram following. “It’s already hard enough to be taken seriously as a young female.”
As more start-ups and agencies enter the game, it’s reasonable to expect a lot of the cash, and recognition, to flow to influencers who are most comfortable with corporate advertising. That might be great for them, but not so great for the creativity which made the platform so appealing to brands in the first place.
If you are marketing a travel destination, you only need one mantra: Deliver an ‘Instagrammable holiday’ or go home.
This conclusion is based on the findings from Travelzoo’s Autumn Travel Trends Survey* issued today. (Never heard of Travelzoo? Neither have we, but the organisation has 28 million members! What?)
The survey reveals that how a holiday photo will look on social media platforms is an important consideration for 55% of those born after 1996 (Generation Z). The appeal of social bragging declines going back each generation. Millennials (those born between 1987 and 1995) are highly focused on the photogenic appeal of their holiday choice (42%), but just 10% of both late and early Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1965) consider this when booking a holiday.
Joel Brandon-Bravo, Travelzoo’s General Manager in the UK said, “It’s mid-August now and peak ‘posting season.’ Most people’s social media feeds are full of images of friends and family enjoying the sunshine. Let’s face it, when you’re stuck in the office on a rainy day those feeds can become irritating. But there is a holiday show-off in most of us and many hoteliers are getting wise to the power of making their properties as ‘Instagram-ready’ as possible.
“Some restaurants and hotels Travelzoo works with tell us they are starting to train staff in how to take great photos for social media as they are seeing how guests love to share their experience in real-time and want to be part of that process. Our research shows this focus is not misplaced and the importance of how photogenic a hotel, restaurant or destination is should not be underestimated. The tourist of today sees where they travel as a way of expressing themselves and this will only increase with future generations. Being seen in aspirational destinations that photograph well will become one of the most significant considerations a person will make before booking.”
In terms of the power of social media to influence holiday bookings, the generational split is vast. Almost two thirds of Generation Z use social media for inspiration on what to book, but only 10% of older Boomers (those born from 1946–1954) say social media has an influence on their decision making. For Millennials and Gen Z, Facebook and Instagram are the most powerful channels, with Facebook marginally more influential for Millennials.
Savvy hotels, restaurants and resorts are realising how important it is to enable customers to create the best visual impression of their experience. Thomas Cook recently opened a new line of resorts called Casa Cook, which have been designed with features that will photograph well and appeal to a younger demographic.
Travelzoo works with London restaurant Galvin at Windows, whose General Manager Fred Sirieix says, “Our image online is very important. We take great care in the imagery we post and how we appear.” Staff at Galvin receive training in how to take photos that are suitable for Instagram and other platforms because they understand how important it is for their restaurant. Sirieix stresses that while the online image is managed carefully it is important to be authentic. He believes in the importance of not appearing too “manufactured” in your online imagery and explains how “our Instagram is loaded with fun videos in order to show our personality.”
Generation X (those born from 1966–1986) is the most concerned of all generations about privacy online and limit posting on holiday because of this. Millennials are the least concerned about their privacy being compromised through social media but this group are the most aware (34%) of the pressure to project the image of the ‘perfect holiday’ while they are on a trip. Authenticity is a trend most noted by Generation Z, with one in four saying they think people are doing less obviously touristy activities on holiday.
While the appetite to share the holiday experience on social media shows no sign of abating, the survey also reveals an awareness of the benefits of switching off digitally – and this is true across all generations polled. Despite their love of social media 53% of Millennials and 45% of those born after 1996 say the idea of totally disconnecting digitally on holiday is appealing to them and over 60% of Generation Z say switching off from social media and emails would help them recharge more on holiday.
About the Research *Travelzoo’s Autumn 2017 Travel Trends Survey was conducted among 1000 consumers in the United Kingdom, who completed an online questionnaire sent out by third-party research agency One Poll. The questionnaires were completed between 21–24 July, 2017.
How Kevin Systrom got over minimalism and snapped into building mode.
Toward the tail end of 2015, Kevin Systrom, the CEO of Instagram, came to a realization: The photo-sharing app he had founded five years earlier was straying too far from its roots.
Instagram was growing, yes, and finally generating some serious ad dollars — which Facebook had been waiting for since it bought the company for $1 billion back in 2012.
But its user base was also growing, and it wasn’t all good growth: Instagram feeds that were once dominated by photos from friends and family members were becoming more impersonal.
Brands, celebrities and publishers had arrived en masse, and with them the pressure to capture and share that perfect photo — the one that made you and your weekend hiking adventure look as cool as humanly possible — had escalated. User feeds were riddled with what some saw as over-produced or inauthentic depictions of people’s lives. The feed was becoming a digital game of keeping up with the Joneses.
“It became a place where people kept raising the bar on themselves in terms of the quality of what they had to achieve to post,” explained Kevin Weil, Instagram’s head of product, who has been working to fix this problem since joining Instagram from Twitter in early 2016. “We didn’t want that.”
That pressure on users led to pressure internally at Instagram. Users started sharing less frequently, according to a June 2016 report from The Information. And Snapchat, the hot messaging app from LA that Facebook tried to buy but couldn’t, was offering young people the kind of experience that Instagram was not: A low-pressure way to share photos and videos that don’t stick around online.
Instagram needed to evolve. Systrom did that by looking backward: He refocused the company around priorities he says Instagram held in its early days.
“Your connections with your friends and your family are the thing that make Instagram work,” Systrom, 33, explained from Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters late last month. “All the data supports that if you follow more friends and engage with your friends, your activity goes through the roof. If you just follow more celebrity content or more interest-based content, that doesn’t move the needle at all.”
That realization led to a massive product push in 2016 designed to make Instagram more authentic, encouraging users to share with friends in places outside of the traditional feed.
The list of major updates since May include:
Instagram Stories — Montages of photos and short videos that users can share with their followers. Stories expire after 24 hours.
A feed ranking algorithm — A computer model that surfaces the posts Instagram thinks you’ll like, not just the most recently published content.
Live video broadcasting — The ability to stream live video directly to your followers, who in turn can send you messages while they watch. The video feeds disappear after they’ve ended.
Ephemeral messages — A new messaging feature that erases the photos or videos you send friends after they’ve been opened.
Ask Systrom for the “aha” moment that prompted such a rampant product revival and he won’t be able to name one. He won’t comment on Instagram’s sharing decline (though he doesn’t deny it either), and says Snapchat “motivate[s] us in the sense that I think that they’re really innovative.”
Not exactly a rallying cry.
Instead, Systrom chalks up Instagram’s busy year to a combination of changes, both structural and philosophical.
For starters, Instagram got much bigger.* The company’s engineering team, which had long been run by co-founder Mike Krieger, hired a new leader in fall of 2015: Jim Everingham, a former Yahoo VP who oversaw engineering for Yahoo’s homepage. Then Everingham went on a hiring spree, doubling his team’s size last year to more than 200 people. (Krieger is still at Instagram as CTO, but focused more on big picture issues.)
The product organization grew, too. The key hire was Weil, the former product boss and longtime exec at Twitter who oversaw the company’s ad products through the IPO. Weil was known inside Twitter as a good operator; he left the company in early 2016 after a year and a half as Twitter’s highest-ranking product executive.
Weil now has the same role at Instagram, where he’s tasked with turning Systrom’s visions into reality. The duo have known each other for a decade — Weil’s wife Elizabeth went to Stanford with Systrom — and Weil says getting the chance to work with Systrom at Instagram was a huge draw.
“[Systrom is] absolutely one of the best product thinkers I’ve ever met,” Weil said in December from the company’s new office, a three-story complex a short bike ride from Facebook’s main headquarters. “Probably the best I’ve ever worked with.”
Even with that growth, Instagram is still small compared to its peers. It has just north of 450 employees despite a product with 600 million monthly users and 300 million daily users. Twitter, for comparison, has more than 3,500 employees for 317 million monthly users, and Snapchat has more than 1,500 employees for a daily user base half the size of Instagram’s.
That’s not a completely fair comparison: Instagram has the luxury of tapping into Facebook resources like data centers, content moderation teams and advertising technology — things that its competitors have to build and support on their own.
But Instagram is still taking advantage of its nimble staff.
“You can turn the ship much more quickly with smaller teams,” Weil explained. “When we decide to do something, the time difference between us making the decision and doing it is very small. And that’s different if you have a multi-thousand person organization.”
Weil says that Instagram Stories, the company’s most significant product launch of the year and a direct copy of a Snapchat feature with the same name, was the first big product he worked on after joining Systrom at Instagram. Concept to launch took just four months. (Of course, it’s also faster to launch a product that’s nearly identical to one already on the market.)
Stories lets users share with their friends a montage of photos and videos that expire after 24 hours. The feature has been a hit with Instagram’s users: 150 million people use Stories every day. That’s as many people as Snapchat’s entire user base.
One reason people likely use Stories is that you can’t really miss them. Instagram added the new feature at the very top of the home screen, so it’s the first thing you see whenever you open the app. (In Snapchat, the app opens directly to the camera, prompting you to share something, but not necessarily something to Stories.)
“There’s no more bold move you could have made,” Weil said about the new product’s location. “And [it happened] without the kind of existential debate, because the founder and the CEO says this is the problem we need to solve.”
Stories, for example, was never tested outside of Facebook’s walls. In other words, it was a feature Instagram’s top brass wanted, regardless of whether or not its user base was on board.
Systrom cites Stories, Instagram’s ranked feed and even its decision to abandon square-only photos back in August 2015 as examples of “false constraints” that were holding Instagram back.
“[There was] a change in philosophy internally of not being too precious about what got us here,” Systrom explained. “I learned a lesson from watching other companies who held onto things too long. If you look at the history of companies that have succeeded and the ones that have failed, there’s a pretty clear pattern that the ones that have succeeded typically morph every couple of years into something new. And that change is fairly uncomfortable.”
Stories, in particular, was a change targeting the pressure around sharing that Instagram executives had noticed in late 2015. Stories disappear after 24 hours, meaning the bar for what qualifies as “post-worthy” is usually much lower on Stories than what you’ll find in your feed. It’s a lot of the same stuff — food shots, sunsets, selfies — just less manicured.
Instagram doesn’t deny that it borrowed the idea for Stories. Weil says the feature was “built on a format that Snapchat invented. It’s because they were solving the same problem. It’s a format, [and] we believe that format will be universal.”
Admitting to borrowing an idea is one thing, but neither Weil nor Systrom will admit that Snapchat’s rise in popularity is pushing Instagram to move faster. (Multiple former Facebook employees say that Snapchat is indeed a driving force — and Instagram’s spate of very similar product launches seems to confirm the same.)
“They motivate us in the sense that I think that they’re really innovative. I think that they execute really well,” Systrom said. “I think we run different companies and I think we have different goals in mind, but we share a lot of the same aspirations.”
Casual sharing is certainly one of those aspirations. Instagram also launched disappearing private messages, another Snapchat innovation. And when you create a live video broadcast on Instagram, the video disappears as soon as the broadcast ends. It doesn’t stick around as part of your profile.
These kinds of changes seem to be working for Instagram. The company added its last 100 million users in just six months, the fastest growth rate in company history. The sharing problem from 2015 seems to be fixed, too.
“In the last couple months, with ranked feed and Stories, people are sharing more now than ever on a per-person basis, and more people are sharing [in] total,” Systrom said, without providing actual numbers. “We have more people sharing every single day than ever before.”
That’s good news for Facebook, which seems to be betting on Instagram to not only fend off Snapchat but boost Facebook’s sales.
Research firm eMarketer estimates that nearly three quarters of U.S. companies over 100 employees will use Instagram for marketing in 2017, more than the number that will do the same on Twitter. Credit Suisse, meanwhile, estimated back in April that Instagram would bring in more than $3 billion in revenue in 2016, though other analyst firms offered more conservative estimates. (Facebook doesn’t yet break out Instagram’s financials.)
That growth will no doubt be challenged by Snapchat parent company, Snap, which is gearing up for an IPO this year. Snapchat had the original Stories product and has emerged as Instagram’s largest (and really only) major threat.
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Instagram is offering marketers and advertisers credits for and free trials of its ad products, according to Business Insider.
Further, some existing Snap advertisers are starting to question the value received from running campaigns on the platform.
As Instagram quickly duplicates Snap’s most successful features and rolls them out to its wider audience, it’s important that Snap clearly differentiates its offering to advertisers, and pricing may have to come down.
Snap was already offering discounts for its ads. Back in May, Snap was offering discounts to agencies and brands to lure them onto the platform. Instagram’s free trials and ad credits can drive Snapchat to give even steeper discounts than it already does.
Snapchat’s lack of organic reach metrics as could drive advertisers to Instagram. Publishers know exactly how many followers each of their Instagram accounts have, and how many times a user has interacted with a certain post. Snapchat, on the other hand, is something of a black box. While the company does have ad metrics available for its clients’ campaigns, advertisers can’t actively track the number of people they reach organically through the app.
Discounts encourage experimentation with new ad formats. Offering discounts is a common practice for tech giants when rolling out new products — Facebook, Google and Twitter have all offered them in the past.
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Facebook is favored, but YouTube, Twitter and Instagram may see increases in video ad spend
More marketers currently invest in video advertising on Facebook and YouTube than on Twitter and Instagram. But they’re increasing how much they spend on all four social media platforms.
More than two-thirds (67%) of US marketers run video ads on Facebook, while more than half (51%) do so on YouTube, according to an April 2017 survey from cloud-based video creation company Animoto. By comparison, only 25% of marketers surveyed are spending on video for Twitter, with the same percentage buying video ads for Instagram.
But that doesn’t mean Twitter and Instagram are falling completely by the wayside. In fact, half of marketers said they plan to increase their investment in social video advertising on Instagram in the next 12 months, and 52% plan to do the same on Twitter.
Marketers are more confident in video content on Facebook and YouTube when it comes to driving views, engagements and purchases. But videos placed on Instagram and Twitter are not that far behind, Animoto found.
For example, 83% of respondents were confident in Facebook videos for driving purchases, while 67% were similarly assured in videos placed on Instagram.
Investment in social video advertising will likely grow if platforms can prove their units are effective. Just last week, IPG Mediabrands reported on a study of video ad units on Twitter commissioned by the microblogging platform. The research revealed that Twitter’s “First View” video ads, which appear at the top of users’ feeds, were on screen for significantly longer periods of time than standard, in-feed video ads.
If marketers get more insight into the performance of video ads on social media platforms and like what they see, the dollars will follow.
