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Travel Marketing: The Rise of the “Instagrammable Holiday”

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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.

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Inside Instagram’s reinvention

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By Kurt Wagner.     

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.

In April of last year, a study from investment bank Piper Jaffray found that Snapchat had surpassed Instagram as the “most important” social network for teenagers, a title Instagram had held the previous two years. Another study by RBC found the same, that teens would choose Snapchat over Instagram as the one social network they’d choose if they were trapped on a desert island.

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.

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.”

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.

Instagram’s ad revenue has become more crucial to Facebook, which is starting to run out of places in its News Feed to put advertisements. Instagram, though, is still just ramping up a business that analysts think could be huge.

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.

Instagram just recently started selling the same type of full screen, vertical video ads that Snapchat has popularized, and the two apps will be fighting to win marketer budgets.

And, of course, fighting for your selfies and messages, too.

“Our mission is to strengthen relationships through shared experiences,” Systrom said. “And we’re going to be best at that in the world.”

By Kurt Wagner

Sourced from recode  

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Instagram’s new incentive to marketers is a major blow to Snapchat

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This story was delivered to BI Intelligence “Digital Media Briefing” subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

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.

BI Intelligence, Business Insider’s premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on U.S. digital media ad revenue that:

  • Forecasts US digital ad revenue through 2021.
  • Highlights the rising popularity of digital media with consumers and brands.
  • Explores why digital video advertising growth will exceed all other formats over the next five years.
  • Outlines emerging technologies that will help propel ad growth in the next decade.

To get the full report, subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and more than 250 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you’ll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. » Learn More Now

You can also purchase and download the full report from  research store.

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Sourced from Business Insider UK

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More Spending on Social Video Ads Is Planned

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Sourced from eMarketer.

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.

US Marketers Who Currently Spend vs. Plan* to Increase Spending on Video Ads on Select Social Media Platforms, April 2017 (% of respondents)

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.

US Marketers Who Are Confident in Their Ability to Create Video Content that Will Drive Views, Purchases and Engagement on Select Social Media Platforms, April 2017 (% of respondents)

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.

—Maria Minsker

Sourced from eMarketer

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Instagram – Boost Your Social Media & Digital Marketing

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Social media – who doesn’t know about it? In this digital tech savvy world, social media has gained a massive toehold. Various social media platforms are explored in-depth for digital marketing. No doubt, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are the most receptive social platforms for business; however, various platforms, including Instagram, are preferred for various marketing activities; they are:

 

Facebook dominates among all social media marketing platforms as a source of social traffic and sales.

Instagram is one of the fastest growing social media platforms. The name Instagram is derived from a combination of “Instant Photo” and “Telegram.” Instagram, an incredible social media platform for sharing pictures, was launched in the Spring Season of 2010. In a less than decade, this platform has grown into a powerful social media force, not to be overlooked.

Since 2012, Instagram is owned by Facebook. This acquisition of Instagram by Facebook shows where the digital marketing trends are heading. Since both social media platforms are owned by the same owner, you can easily connect these two to boost your digital marketing strategies.

In the recent past, Instagram has literally competed extremely well with the dominant top four platforms viz. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. Instagram has more than 500 million users.

Instagram is a great platform for online marketing since it is more popular on mobile; moreover, mobile is gaining huge traction day by day by both users and search engines.

People are prioritizing visual content over plain, and hence, Instagram is considered as one of the most effective social media marketing platforms for the coming days. As a business owner, you should use Instagram to market your products and services. Apart from product images, you can also share videos. Its ‘LIVE recording and sharing’ feature is getting way popular bit by bit.

Explore Instagram as a social media marketing platform

Social media management starts with the base of your followers and followings. To boost your Instagram marketing, first of all, you need to boost your followers on a constant and stable basis. The more people are aware of your brand, the greater your chances are to potentially reach your target audience.

Let’s run through the tips and tactics how to explore Instagram as a social media marketing platform to make your brand more popular.

1. Hashtags – use unique, crisp, meaningful, and attractive

Hashtags are not only important for Twitter; they also play a prominent role on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google plus.

According to Dominique Jackson, the beauty of hashtags for Instagram is they make your content discoverable and increase your chances of engagement.

It’s a big way of how users can find you through their mobile Instagram searches. As compared to Twitter, here you’re not restricted by character count. You can include a few tags in your posts to get connected. While deciding on hashtag for branding, it is advisable to create brand specific hashtags. Try to keep it as unique and crisp as possible.

Make usage of both sort of hashtags; brand specific hashtags and community specific hashtags. Brand hashtags help you to popularize your brand and community hashtags help you to become more discoverable.

Try multiple variant of hashtags such as brand specific hashtags, general hashtags, and trending hashtags, to get noticed in searches.

Examples of brand specific hashtags are:

#PutACanOnIt—Red Bull

#ShareaCoke—Coca Cola

#SpeakBeautiful – Dove

#TweetFromTheSeat—Charmin

#OreoHorrorStories—Oreo

#WantAnR8—Audi

An ideal general hashtag should be prepared with two words over a single word to make it meaningful e.g. rather than #QL, #AskQL is a better hashtag.

2. Emojis – use the right Emojis to keep your audience engaged

In any sort of online communication, Emojis is the best substitute for the absence of facial expression, tonal inflection, and body language.

Nearly 50 percent of all captions and comments on Instagram now have an emoji or two.

 
The same source has mentioned that posts with Emojis bring 17% higher interaction rates on Instagram.Based on the fact that 80% of smartphone users regularly use Emojis in their daily communication, their use has been quoted as the highest growing ‘language’ in some of the countries across the globe. Worldwide brands are obviously energized and enthusiastic to cash on this new form of communication.

3. Interaction – consistently interact with your followers

Once you get follower/s, do not shy away to stay engaged. Constantly post impressive content which your followers find relevant to their interest and business. Avoid throwing random posts, i.e. once in a week or ten in a go, as far as possible. At least, twice a day posting is requisite. Once your followers start increasing, you can start posting three to four times a day. Consistency matters most!

According to Anthony Carbone, “If you stick to a niche and show authenticity and passion in your posts, you will find a strong following”

The more people you can dynamically involve and persuade to comment on your content (images/videos), the better for you. Since, it will inculcate the interest for others who want to contribute or comment on your content as well.

A good example on how to stay engaged with your customers is well set by Starbucks. It is considered as one of the top brands on Instagram. Starbucks often appreciates their followers / customers by giving a shout-out with cool images. This is how they had updated their Facebook cover image using Instagram post.

4. Networking – create a positive community

Once you will have an active profile, you will surely start getting followers of your niche. But the main question here is retention! You need to retain them as your dedicated followers.

This is, in fact, the most important, most tricky, and most significant matter for any social media account. You need to build a network of your domain and keep them engaged. Interact with them, share their posts, give opinion / comments on their posts, ask them relevant questions, reply to their questions, and keep having all such sort of communication. In addition, stay away from controversial posts. It can badly impact your brand value. Build a vast network of your industry and create a positive community through your posts and engagement.

Follow your followers and work hard to turn your following into followers.

5. Amount of information – do not bore your audience with information overload

No doubt consistency is inevitable, but if it lacks harmony and relevancy of content, it results in either spamming or information overload. Keep your frequency correct and consistent. Rather than preaching them, engage with them. It’s better to ask sometimes, they should feel being valued. Dig out meaningful interaction from them.

The ideal proportion of posts based on followers suggested by industry experts are:

6. Free tools – make the most use of Instagram marketing tools that are free

Instagram also provides free analytics tools for business profiles; prudently and sensibly make the most use of them to market your products and services.

For example, “insights”, an analytical tool, provides you access to engagement data. If your account is initially signed up as a personal account for your business, do get switched to a business profile. That’s how you can cash advantage of the free tools that businesses use to track the shape of their brand on Instagram. ‘Insights’ assists you understand your audience, provides you data on posts with most impressions, engagements, and shares. Ultimately, you will conclude which posts are effective and which ones are not working well with your audience.

With SocialBakers, you can get a FREE report on the most engaged Instagram posts. If your Instagram followers are below 25,000, you can use Simply Measured to check your highly popularized posts.

Alternatively, there are many other scheduling tools available. With the help of tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Autogrammer, and others post your content when your audiences are online and earn more engagement.

7. Promotion – utilize cross posting function

As a business, one normally stays active and present on all possible platforms. Now, practically speaking, not all your Twitter followers are your LinkedIn buddies and not all your Instagram followers know about your presence on Google Plus.

Here, to expand your relevant reach and knock your target audience from all possible angles, you need to do cross promotion of your own posts.

A research conducted by Harvard Business School reported that retailers using cross-media marketing are more profitable than those that use only one channel for promotion.

Invite your followers from other networks to visit your Instagram profile and build your network. Whatever posts get better engagement on Twitter or Facebook, repost them on Instagram too and vice-versa.

8. Content – repurpose content from other related sources

As stated in earlier paragraphs, effective and successful Instagram marketing

needs consistent posts related to your products and services. It is well obvious that every time coming up with creative and engaging posts is not as easy as it seems. That’s where re-purposing content or curating content offers a hand of help.

As per Amanda DiSilvestro, Content repurposing is your hidden online marketing gem.

It’s absolutely fine to use others content which is relevant to your products and services provided you either have tagged or mentioned the original poster. Tagging is the best way, you need to give the credit to the original creator; and that’s how it becomes a completely ethical marketing practice and does not fall under the black clouds of plagiarism.

Tagging provides you with another major benefit of engagement. You may receive like or repost from the person whom you have tagged and your post can easily reach to their audience. You need to ensure that the posts which you wither repurpose or curate are relevant to your followers.

9. Engage with influencers – you need them!!

According to KISSmetrics, 70% of Instagram users have already looked up various brands on the platform and actually want to consume their content

Here comes power of Instagram influencers in the picture. Instagram beats all other massive social networks like Facebook and Twitter when it comes to influencer marketing. This is because the other platforms share information whereas Instagram is about sharing experiences with the help of visual content.

Your content shared, acknowledged, or praised by any influencer can embark a real positive image on your followers.

To reach on peak in no time, we suggest you make a use of tool, Revfluence. The Revfluence platform enables you to create original content with influential content creators that can drive new customers and followers for your brand.

Closing thoughts

If you have online business, why can’t you have a strong social media presence too? Social media marketing via Instagram can assist you achieve your targeted business goals with much of the ease.

Instagram has very dedicated users, who often use it daily. It provides a great social media marketing platform to reach potential customers across the world. Use Instagram extensively and appropriately, and grow bigger!

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Sophie helps QL Tech look good on the online platform and helps the company reach out far and wide in the online realm. Being a SEO Professional and a part-time blogger, she is responsible for producing content that is optimized to ensure maximum reach. With over five years of expertise in the field of SEO and digital marketing, Sophie also delves into blogging, online reputation management, and social media marketing.

Sourced from QL Tech

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Instagram worst social media app for young people’s mental health

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By Kara Fox, CNN

Instagram is the most detrimental social networking app for young people’s mental health, followed closely by Snapchat, according to a new report by the Royal Society for Public Health in the UK.

Their study, #StatusofMind, surveyed almost 1,500 young people aged 14 to 24 on how certain social media platforms impact health and well-being issues such as anxiety, depression, self-identity and body image.
YouTube was found to have the most positive impact, while Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter all demonstrated negative affects overall on young people’s mental health.
Study links social media use to isolation in young adults

Study links social media use to isolation in young adults
Instagram — the image-saturated app with over 700 million users worldwide — topped the list in terms of negative impact, most notably among young women, stated the report, published Friday.
Instagram draws young women to “compare themselves against unrealistic, largely curated, filtered and Photoshopped versions of reality,” said Matt Keracher, author of the report.
“Instagram easily makes girls and women feel as if their bodies aren’t good enough as people add filters and edit their pictures in order for them to look ‘perfect,’ ” an anonymous female respondent said in the report.
To tackle the problem, the Royal Society for Public Health has called for social media platforms to take action in order to help combat young users’ feelings of inadequacy and anxiety by placing a warning on images that have been digitally manipulated.

Snapchat? No thanks; I'm an Old Millennial

“We’re not asking these platforms to ban Photoshop or filters but rather to let people know when images have been altered so that users don’t take the images on face value as real,” Keracher said.
“We really want to equip young people with the tools and the knowledge to be able to navigate social media platforms not only in a positive way but in a way that promotes good mental health,” he added.
The survey concluded that while Instagram negatively affected body image, sleep patterns and added to a sense of “FOMO” — the fear of missing out — the image app was also a positive outlet for self-expression and self-identity for many of its young users.
Professional YouTuber Laci Green, a health vlogger with 1.5 million subscribers, said that education surrounding mental health issues in a digital age is an educational imperative for young people.
#StatusofMind rankings

The impact of five social media sites were evaluated in the following order:

  1. YouTube (the only platform with a positive net impact)
  2. Twitter
  3. Facebook
  4. Snapchat
  5. Instagram (most negative)
“Because platforms like Instagram and Facebook present highly curated versions of the people we know and the world around us. It is easy for our perspective of reality to become distorted,” she said. “Socializing from behind a screen can also be uniquely isolating, obscuring mental health challenges even more than usual.”
Green added that it is important we lay the groundwork now to minimize potential harm as the first generation of social media users become adults.
Teens: This is how social media affects your brain
YouTube was the only social media platform that demonstrated an overall positive impact on young people’s mental health in the study.
The report also found that it’s not just what young people are engaging with on social media but also how long they are engaging with it.
Young people who spend more than two hours per day connecting on social networking sites are more likely to report poor mental health, including psychological distress, according to the report.
“Platforms that are supposed to help young people connect with each other may actually be fueling a mental health crisis,” Shirley Cramer, chief executive of the royal society, noted in the report.
Join the conversation

See the latest news and share your comments with CNN Health on Facebook and Twitter.

To address this, the society has also recommended the introduction of a pop-up warning to alert users that they have been online for too long.
Seven in 10 young people surveyed supported the recommendation, but with experts describing social media use as more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol, it’s not clear whether a “heavy usage” pop-up would be enough to break through that barrier.
Sir Simon Wessely, president of the UK’s Royal College of Psychiatrists, supports an education-based approach and warns that demonizing social media is not the answer.
“I am sure that social media plays a role in unhappiness, but it has as many benefits as it does negatives,” he said. “We need to teach children how to cope with all aspects of social media — good and bad — to prepare them for an increasingly digitized world. There is real danger in blaming the medium for the message.”

By Kara Fox, CNN

Sourced from CNN

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Travel, the New Currency of Influencer Marketing

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Partnering with influencers is turning out to be a better pay-off than other traditional forms of advertising because of how emotionally invested the community of followers are.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers.

Oh the places you’ll go, and the things you’ll see. Never have Dr. Seuss’ rhymes made more sense to adults today than when you start to examine how influencer marketing has turned the travel industry upside down.

Travel writing was relegated to stuffy travel guides written by yesterday’s travel wordsmiths. Now, influencers …social media stars on all manner of platforms are striking deals with destinations, and with brands, and bringing the places they go and things they see to their dream-filled followers.

Chanel brought Stephanie Liu of Honey & Silk to Grasse, France to experience and share the making of their iconic No. 5 fragrance.

Take Tommy Lei, the Hong Kong born / LA raised photographer behind MYBELONGING for example. In the last six months, Tommy has already travelled to Iceland, Punta Cana, Mexico City, New York, London, and Morocco.

Tommy Lei, cashing in on his trip to Morocco.

Tommy partnered with sandal brand Teva on his last trip through Marrakech to the Sahara, where the goal was a ground-swell of destination specific content – Morocco is an Instagram-worthy destination right now. The program was a smashing success, whereby his branded content generated over 40% engagement from his fans, and he was able to use his talent in photography to deliver a robust package of digital content to the brand. These kinds of collaborations are becoming the new win-win for influence deals, and they will only increase in velocity.

Brands who work with influencers get to be part of aspirational journeys across the globe, capturing audiences in a very visual way. Partnering with influencers is turning out to be a better pay-off than other traditional forms of advertising because of how emotionally invested the community of followers are.

Influencers are using wanderlust apps like Sherpa to share guides with their fans, bringing their trips full circle by establishing themselves as travel experts and brand ambassadors – all rolled into one incredible package.

On the other side of the spectrum, destinations themselves are turning into the clients that want to partner and bring groups of influencers to build the buzz. As David Hoffmann, host for popular YouTube travel channel David’s Been Here, noted, “Influencer marketing has branched out beyond fashion into the travel sphere, giving audiences a taste of what it’s like to quit their jobs, travel the world and create a personal brand doing something that was once considered a far-fetched luxury. Now that millennial influencers have taken Instagram by storm, places like the Maldives and Bali have become some of the hottest destinations, triggering flight deals and affordable hotel packages like never before.”

This is a massive shift in marketing dollars for destinations, and brands are seeing the returns in the form of booked hotels, booked flights and exploding local business. Influencers make travel, that often seems like a far off luxury, real and accessible.

The shift is also changing how other related trades are checking off their own bucket lists. Photographer Champagne Victoria has gone from shooting fashion editorials around Los Angeles to spending a better part of her year across Europe and island chains, because of the global impact of influencer marketing. By bundling trips with several brands projects, Champagne has been able to fully fund these trips, allowing her creativity to expand through different settings, and giving brands – many of which don’t have the big budgets of major labels – the opportunity to be shot in desirable destinations like the islands of Greece, Iceland, St. Lucia and so on.

If you imagine yourself waking up in the south of France, exploring the flower fields of CHANEL No. 5 – well, follow Stephanie of Honey & Silk, and see the dream become a reality. If you wanted to take the best Americana road-trip of your life, say from New Orleans to Boston and back, follow Courtney of Pretty Little Fawn. Influencers + travel are creating an exciting new wave of exploration – and thankfully with so many fashion influencers involved, you’ll finally know what to really wear.

For further reading, you can dig around the content of digital influencer management firm, God & Beauty. They discuss how travel is the new currency of influence and branded content.

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How to Make Instagram Followers Buy Your Product or Service

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By Neil Patel.

Last week, I was discussing Instagram strategies with a colleague. Naturally, the conversation flowed from building followers and engagement to generating revenue.

Of course, monetizing any digital channel requires some planning and a well-executed strategy.

But Instagram is different.

One thing that really got me thinking is how Instagram only allows you to link to 1 website or page in your profile’s description (unless you’re paying for ads).

This really changes the playing field and limits a brand’s opportunities to promote the sale – at least by traditional standards.

We’ve all seen those awe-inspiring accounts where it seems like Instagrammers are raking in serious cash just by posting selfies.

Unfortunately, looks can be deceiving.

The reality is that it’s a gradual process. In fact, when it’s the talk of brands, 50 percent of Instagrammers follow at least 1 business, but only 5 percent of them take action (like shopping) after being inspired by a post.

I took these numbers from the Instagram facts-and-stats infographic published by MarketingProfs. Here are a few more highlights.

Don’t get me wrong – the platform is great for generating sales.

It can even account for as much as 80 percent of a brand’s sales, as it did in the case of The Beaufort Bonnet Company, a Kentucky brand selling high-end baby items.

It’s just that Instagram has its own quirks, and it takes a while for the money to flow in.

Selling to your followers can be a big challenge, especially when the impact of the content you post is decreasing. The Instagram account of National Geographic reflected this trend.

As its following increased, and as the number of brands posting to Instagram also increased, engagement with the global nonprofit’s posts declined, revealed TrackMaven.

Most brands can resonate with this trend.

But, it’s possible to see a decent influx of sales – and that requires using Instagram strategically.

In this post, I’m going to list a few different measures that you can take to encourage your followers to buy from your brand.

We know that selling is partially a numbers game. So obviously, your follower numbers will impact your sales numbers. But when it comes to profitability, it’s all about the conversion power you generate.

So, how do you make your followers stop mid-scroll on their feeds and notice your product or service?

Let’s jump in.

Establish a Personal Connection Using Instagram Direct

Instagram Direct, or DM as it is popularly known, gives you an opportunity to connect with consumers personally through private messaging.

You can access this feature by clicking the arrow icon in the top-right corner of your Instagram account. Here’s what it looks like:

It will then give you the option to send text and multimedia messages by displaying a message thread. You can send messages to 15 followers at a time.

There’s also an option to give a certain name to the group of followers you’re sending the message to.

If you want to reference a specific follower’s name or shopping preferences, the DM needs to be sent to each follower individually.

Now that you’re familiar with Instagram Direct, here’s how you can use it to drive sales.

Tactic #1: Offer a promo code

Send a product image to your followers and share a promo code in your message. Instagram Direct doesn’t allow you embed clickable links, so send any links as their own individual message.

You can also announce that this promo code is exclusive to your Instagram followers to encourage them to use it and make a purchase.

Another thing you can do is to add a time limit to the promo to incite a quicker response.

Tactic #2: Host a contest right before a sale

If I offered you free tickets to watch The Fate of the Furious, and all you had to do was comment on the photo of Dwayne Johnson’s outfit, would you do it? I would’ve been all in.

I would’ve been all in.

That’s the allure of an Instagram contest.

A good idea is to host one right before putting your product or service on sale.

Use Instagram Direct to spice things up. For instance, you can post a contest photo and announce that the first 15 people to comment will receive a DM from you on how to participate.

This is exactly how the clothing retailer GAP leveraged Instagram Direct.

The prize should be a product that you’re going to offer in the sale.

Here’s why: By offering the product in the contest, you’ve piqued the interest of those who participated. While they wanted it for free (who doesn’t?), the sale price might be an extra push of encouragement to buy.

That’s really good nurturing at work.

Tactic #3: Conduct Q&A sessions

Instagram Direct supports threaded conversations, so use this as an opportunity to find out if your followers have specific questions about your products.

You can also invite them for a one-on-one Q&A session. it’s a great way to learn about their preferences and educate them about your products.

This is a great way to learn about their preferences and educate them about your products.

To make Instagram Direct really pay off, I recommend segmenting your followers into different groups based on engagement.

For instance, those who engage more with your content can be put in the group that displays the “highest brand loyalty.”

You can use SumAll Premium to add efficiency to your Instagram segmentation efforts.

All of the above tactics should work better with segmented groups.

Make Buying Easy with Shoppable Instagram

While creating an e-commerce-like experience on Instagram sounds like a pipedream, it’s possible with shoppable Instagram tools.

The right tools can transform your feed into an immersive shopping experience. Your followers can explore the unique features of your products and buy with a few easy clicks when they’re ready.

And since you’re only allowed to promote a single link in your bio, these tools are also super handy for avoiding that clumsy and distracting “visit link in bio” image caption that we’ve all seen.

So let’s harness the robust functionality of these tools to make your Instagram feed shoppable. Here are your options.

Tool #1 – Like2Buy

This tool allows you to link photos from your Instagram account to the product or service available on your website.

Using your Like2Buy link in the bio section of your Instagram account, followers are able to open up a gallery of shoppable Instagram photos and click through to buy products on your website.

In addition, followers can also see a personalized feed of the product images they’ve liked that can also be purchased. It appears in the “My Likes” tab that’s present on the Like2Buy page.

Because the tool incorporates the same photos on the Like2Buy page as on your Instagram account, followers don’t feel they’re leaving Instagram.

Curalate says that Like2Buy-referred visitors have a greater average order value than the typical mobile shopper.

However, Like2Buy is for larger businesses and certainly not the ideal option if you’re looking to start right away. You’ll have to shell out $1,000 – $2,000 a month to use it.

Tool #2 – Like2Have.it

This tool enables you to create an embeddable feed and includes links that refer followers to relevant product pages.

You can also feature the images of your existing customers demonstrating how to use your product or service in the embeddable feed.

The user-generated feed works well on product pages by giving followers social proof and gently encouraging them to add products to their shopping carts.

Neckwear, a Swedish shirts and accessories company catering men, uses Like2Have.it to display a shoppable gallery featuring photos from Neckwear’s Instagram account on its website.

Like2Have.it is more suitable for smaller brands. The price is $20 a month.

Tool #3 Linkin.bio

Apart from Like2Buy and Like2Have.it, you can look into Linkin.bio, a part of Later’s – an Instagram scheduling tool – premium plan.

Linkin.bio is a landing page that looks similar to your Instagram feed and shows your images as clickable pictures.

When any follower visits that page, they can click on your Instagram post to go to the product page that the image is about.

It costs $16 a month for 2 Instagram accounts and also provides an option to schedule Instagram posts.

Make shopping easy for your followers by choosing an appropriate shoppable Instagram tool to encourage more purchases.

Piggyback on Influencers to Inspire Followers to Shop

It’s no secret that influencer marketing works. Linqia’s The State of Influencer Marketing Survey revealed that 94 percent of marketers who have used influencer marketing found it to be effective.

And guess which platform along with Facebook is considered the most important for influencer endeavors? Instagram! 87 percent of marketers referenced these two platforms.

Also, Instagram is the best performing platform for social action when it comes to influencers, having a 3.21 percent engagement rate (in contrast to 1.5 percent across all social media channels).

So why not bring influencers into the mix to encourage your followers to purchase your product or service?

According to Social Media Examiner:

There are over 40,000 influencers on Instagram covering all verticals including fashion, beauty, health and wellness, home décor, food and more. With tens of thousands to millions of followers, influencers are trusted for their opinions and they can add credibility to the products they promote.

Therefore, influencers can do much more than just drive sales on your Instagram account. Because your followers will relate to them and value their opinion, they can establish brand equity.

So, with all that in consideration, let’s look at the tactics for using Instagram influencers effectively.

Step #1 Get Relevant Influencers On Board

It’s important to get as targeted as possible when it comes to choosing the influencers you’ll work with.

For instance, if you’re selling handbags, you’ll want to work with influencers who possess knowledge on the subject, such as personal style Instagrammers who talk about handbags and demonstrate different ways to carry them.

The hard part is finding targeted influencers. You’ll have to sift through hundreds of accounts to see who is relevant to your business and if they have influence over the type of people you have as your followers.

One way to cut the research hours is to discover the top hashtags in your particular niche and see what posts are trending.

Often, the “Most Liked” section on Instagram will include posts from influencers.

For the hashtag #conversionrateoptimization, the top post in the “Most Liked” section for this hashtag is from Unbounce.

I recommend using IconoSquare to speed things up. The tool allows you to find hashtags based on popularity, growth, engagement and more.

Still, you’d have to spend time comparing different profiles when you take this approach.

Fortunately, there are a variety of tools out there that can automate the process of analyzing several profiles and detecting suitable influencers for you.

Called influencer marketing tools, they give you accurate results on each influencer’s reach, relevance, and authority. Here are some options:

Here are some options:

Tool 1: Ninja Outreach

The company has over 2 million Instagram influencers in its database and growing.

You just have to type in a keyword inside the Ninja Outreach dashboard to discover thousands of relevant influencers based on the keywords you’re targeting in your niche.

The tool enables you to filter influencers by tags as well as follower count. In addition, it gives you additional data about each influencer such as their website address and contact information.

Tool 2: Ifluenz

Ifluenz is straightforward to use. You just have to create an account, select the campaign criteria, and wait for influencers to make your product or service popular on Instagram.

You can choose to run either a regular campaign or a personalized campaign using this tool. Here’s what each offers:

Zalando used this tool to announce the availability of a new pair of sneakers and drive traffic to its website using fashion influencers with an engaged following.

The result was increased sales, new followers on Zalando’s Instagram account, and new subscribers on the company’s email list.

The campaign reached 248,000 Instagram users that gave 20,200 likes and left 1,373 comments. 90 percent of the comments were positive.

Tool 3: InfluencerDB

InfluencerDB’s database contains influencers from every channel on Instagram. You are able to apply filters to discover channels based on languages used, their KPIs, or the location they post from.

The Engaged Influencers section in InfluencerDB’s dashboard shows influencers who engage the most with a particular channel.

You can then use the tool’s Influencer Analysis features to analyze their profile, where their followers come from, and how they behave on Instagram.

What’s unique about InfluencerDB is that it goes real deep into finding insights about an influencer’s authority. For instance, it shows media value per post and the comments per post for each influencer.

Step #2: Work with Your Influencers to Encourage Purchases

After choosing the influencers you want to work with, how do you make them your brand’s catalyst in sales generation? Here are some ideas:

Tactic 1: Promote discounts or giveaways through Influencers

Influencers have the ability to instill a sense of motivation to try a product. When you allow them to give a discount, they give followers a more compelling reason to check out your offer.

Sumo cited an example where the bone broth company Kettle and Fire did just that. The brand worked with Whole30 Approved to introduce their new Chicken Bone Broth through a giveaway and a discount.

The influencer-powered promotion resulted in 374 website visits and 21 sales with a $95 average order value.

Consumers were given the final push towards the purchase when the influencer shared the discount code. This gave a credible stamp of approval and drove home the value of the discount.

Tactic 2: Get Them to Demonstrate Unique Ways of Using Your Product

Placing products in an enticing setting can work great for sponsored content. But it’s more effective when influencers put the daily life use of your product or service into perspective.

Give influencers some freedom when you take this approach. You’d be surprised to see them come up with unique ways of using your product.

For instance, fashion Instagrammers often create new looks when showing clothing or accessories in action.

Also, influencers can provide tips on how Instagram followers can use the product in the same manner.

Ensure that you repost the content published by your hand-picked influencers. This can inspire your followers to try out your product.

ThinkGeek does that regularly.

The company doesn’t shy away from reposting the content of other Instagram users showcasing ThinkGeek’s products in action.

Tactic 3: Host an Instagram Takeover

Pass over your Instagram content strategy to your influencers by inviting them to post directly to your account as well as engage with your followers in real time.

Even though there may not be a discount or any sort of perk, because the takeover is momentary, it sparks an instant reaction to the discussion at hand such as commenting or even buying products.

Typically, before the takeover, the brand and the content creator should hype their collaboration. Wendy Rowe did this before taking over Sephora’s Instagram account.

The monthly beauty and grooming subscription box company, Birchbox, does a great job at Instagram takeovers.

It presents a unique stream of content to its followers through the voice of influencers, who announce giveaways, new products, and more.

All that improves brand affinity and likely has a positive effect on Birchbox’s sales.

Conclusion

The revenue you generate from social commerce is just as important as the income you generate from your website, and Instagram can be an invaluable tool to boost your social media sales.

The three tactics I mentioned in the article will leave your followers with a positive sentiment about your product or service. They’ll also help you navigate the unique obstacles of the platform – especially the one-link limit for each account.

Soon, your followers will be moving through the buying process as you build a good relationship with them and make it easy to shop on Instagram.

Expect your brand’s influencers to reduce the time your followers spend on making a decision.

By Neil Patel.

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Now Marketers Can Actually Read Your Photos On Instagram And Facebook

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By Jeff Beer

For almost as long as we’ve been typing words into Google’s search bar, we’ve been trailed by online ads based on those searches. The logic being that if they put ads in front of our eyes that are related to what we’re searching–shoes, diapers, cars, anything–we’ll be more likely to click. And even though ad tech has advanced by leaps and bounds over the last decade, that’s still essentially what advertisers are trying to do.

Recently, in order to boost its competitiveness with Nike among serious runners, and raise awareness for its Run Camp program, Under Armour targeted photos on social feeds–finding people who were posting specific models of its running shoes, specific running shoes of its competition, as well as photos that featured running bibs, belts, and other accessories. Once found, that person would be served up a short video ad about Run Camp after they’d left Instagram or Facebook.

So if you posted the new bib for that half-marathon you’re training for on Instagram or Facebook, later while browsing The Huffington Post mobile site you might see an ad for Run Camp. All because of your photo.

The tech is from Toronto-based shop Cluep, which has been working with brands like Nike, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Toyota, and yep, Under Armour, on text and location targeting, but now, following consumer behavior on social, is pushing hard into visuals. Cluep Pics lets marketers target people based on the images they publicly post on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and serve them ads in their mobile apps and mobile websites. It uses a proprietary image recognition engine that learns from every image it sees to identify brands, products, and scenarios to effectively engage people around their interests, activities, and lifestyle.

So if there happens to be a McDonald’s in the background of one of your photos, you may get a Golden Arches ad targeting you somewhere soon. To many people, this sounds pretty creepy. Of course, Cluep CEO Karan Walia (who co-founded company in 2012 with CTO Anton Mamonov and advertising operations director Sobi Walia) says the goal behind Pics is to effectively deliver advertising to the right people, at the right time, when they are most receptive based on the types of images they post on social media. Sound familiar? But contrary to creeped out, Walia says even just through beta testing, they’re already seeing conversions and click-through rates five to 10 times better than industry standards.

“Traditionally the click through rate is around 0.5-0.8%, however, we’re seeing results in metrics like video completion rates, visit lift rates, cost to drive back to store and more are between five to eight times the industry benchmark,” says Walia. “And this isn’t just in one, two, or three programs, this is the average across all the 500 campaigns we’ve done across different verticals. That would suggest we’re driving higher results than other vendors, and those engagement rates with consumers.”

Image recognition tech itself isn’t new, and Walia says Cluep’s primary competition for Pics is the social platforms themselves but believes his firm is just a couple of steps ahead.

“Right now, there is no ad tech platform that is doing image-based targeting like we are,” he says. “Getting a high enough accuracy to classify an image around a brand, logo or activity hasn’t been available at scale until now. I’m getting bombarded with back-to-school ads from Walmart on Instagram. I’m not a student and I’m not a parent. Why is this happening? Walmart is a client of ours, and now with Cluep Pics they’ll be able to better target potential consumers because they’ll see family photos or relevant photos that will let them know if these types of ads will be relevant.”

And you know what’s next, right? the growth of online social video has exploded over the last few years. It’s even been suggested that Facebook could be all video by 2021, which is also where Walia says his tech is headed. The Cluep Pics engine is a stepping stone to video, and the company hopes to launch it by Q2 2018.

[Photo: Flickr user S A N D Y D O V E R]
“For video, the back-end is very similar to Cluep Pics because video is just still frames strung together, so the challenge is to focus on the right frames, and being able to classify not just logos, products, and scenarios, but also actions,” says Walia. “That’s going to be a big next step, allowing brands to target consumers not only based on the type of videos they’re sharing but also know that the ads are being served in safe environments. We’ve seen the concerns over YouTube. We see a big opportunity in allowing publishers to let marketers select the kind of videos their ads appear in or around.”

About the author

By Jeff Beer

Jeff Beer is a staff editor at Fast Company, covering advertising, marketing, and brand creativity. He lives in Toronto.  More

Sourced from FastCompany

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Instagram Dominance Unlikely to Let Up According to Top Influencers

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Influencer marketing is evolving and fast.

By MediaStreet staff writers.

#HASHOFF, a micro-influencer marketing platform, today released a report detailing key industry trends driving the increasing popularity and viability of influencer marketing.

To understand the changing face of influencer marketing, and gain insight into where influencers are headed, #HASHOFF surveyed hundreds of vetted influencers on its platform. The #HASHOFF platform has over 150,000 opt-in influencers who partner with brands and work hard to grow and maintain their organic audiences every day.

With 25% of internet users employing some form of ad blocking, and consumers continuing to trust word of mouth over all other forms of marketing, influencer marketing is proving to be a powerful channel for targeted marketing.

The report found that micro-influencers are emerging as a critical marketing channel for brands large and small, enabling brands to grow awareness and drive sales. Brands are increasingly relying on micro-influencers to share their brand messages, since these influencers have higher engagement rates and are perceived as more passionate, creative and authentic by audiences.

Here are just a few of the highlights from the report:

  • While most respondents work across multiple platforms, nearly all respondents (92%) selected Instagram as their #1 platform of focus, followed by Facebook.
  • The majority (56%) of influencers surveyed spend at least four hours per day on social media, and more than 20% spend 7-8 hours or more.
  • Nearly one-third of influencers have grown their audience by 20%-50% in the past year, while one-fourth have grown their audience by 50%-100%, and 17% have more than doubled their audiences.
  • Platform of choice for influencers – Last year, 80% of respondents said Instagram was #1, while this year, a full 92% cite Instagram as their top platform, a 12%-point increase. A similar number of influencers (87%) predict Instagram will remain #1 for them next year.

“The time, energy, passion and creativity that goes into each influencer post is exactly why brands choose influencers to deliver content to their communities,” said Joel Wright, President of #HASHOFF. “These numbers not only confirm the viability and strength of the micro-influencer channel, but show that brands are increasingly aware that driving authentic and organic content over this medium increases brand-consumer engagement. Creating impactful brand experiences in a crowded media market that combines targeting, analysis and brand safety is vital for brand-consumer engagement, and the #HASHOFF platform delivers all three.”

“The number of followers has no relevance in this day and age, where followers and likes can be bought,” said influencer @AlishaMarie (despite having nearly 3M Instagram followers, 2.45M Twitter followers and 1.9 YouTube subscribers herself). “Content should be king.”

“Influencer marketing grows brands,” said micro-influencer @throughjakeseyes. “Even influencers with fewer than 10K Instagram followers can still have a big impact on the brand and create ROI.”

“I love Instagram for the inspiration and creativity it offers and for the real friendships I’ve made through it!” influencer @ChrissyJPowers said.

Echoed @EdiCaves, “I love Instagram because of the community. Instagram allows me to connect with locals that I would have never met otherwise. As my following has grown, brands have begun to contact me about work.”

 

 

 

 

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