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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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How to Get More Instagram Followers

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By Eric Kim.

How to Get More Instagram Followers

  1. Follow as many other people you can, hoping that they will ‘follow back’
  2. If someone doesn’t follow you back, unfollow them. After all, you don’t want your follower/following ratio to look unbalanced.
  3. #Hashtag the shit out of your photos. The more hashtags, the better. Don’t forget to leave additional comments on the bottom of your photos to add more hashtags.
  4. Go on Google and search for services to get you more followers.
  5. Whenever you meet someone in real life, tell them to follow you.
  6. Like and comment as many other people’s photos, so maybe they can follow you back.
  7. Upload a photo everyday, or else you might actually lose followers.
  8. Cross-promote: Tell your Facebook friends to follow you on Instagram. Tell your Twitter followers to follow you on Instagram. Tell your YouTube followers to follow you on Instagram. Use every social media channel to remind them to follow you on Instagram.
  9. Get people with a lot of followers on Instagram to mention you on their Instagram.
  10. Check your phone every 5 minutes, because the more you check, the more likely you are to get more followers. It is the ‘law of attraction.’

I am guilty of many of these.

Learn more social media strategies

eric-kim-photography-Cindy-Project-color-6

Why social media?

  1. 50 Blogging Tips For Beginners
  2. The Social Media Blackbook for Photographers
  3. How to Start Your Own Photography Blog
  4. A Photographer’s Guide to SEO, Blogging, and Social Media
  5. How to Brand Yourself as a Photographer
  6. Advice for Aspiring Full-Time Photographers
  7. 1,000 True Fans
  8. The “10x Principle”: The Only Difference Between “Success” and “Failure”
  9. Trust: The Most Important Thing You Need to Succeed as a Photographer
  10. Why Do You Need More Likes or Followers?
  11. Don’t Go Into Debt For Your Photography
  12. Instagram is Going to Be the Next Facebook

See all articles >

By Eric Kim

Sourced from Erik Kim Photography

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How To Sell On Instagram: Emerging Trends and Platform

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By Margarita Hakobyan.

Emerging Instagram trends and tools for every business owner. Learn to master the skills of social selling.

Instagram isn’t the first platform you probably think of when it comes to social selling.

Facebook is the obvious number one, maybe Pinterest, and Twitter if you’re generating leads through direct product or sales announcements. But Instagram? It doesn’t even let you hyperlink in descriptions.

Actually, it is starting to gain a pretty solid lead for sales these days. The fact that it is a visual site already makes it prime for marketing (as many brands have discovered).

Now it can act as a kind of social portal to your storefront. You just have to know how to properly utilize it.

Unfortunately there are a limited number of actual tools out there to help you do it. But the ones that are at your disposal are good enough to really make up for that.

Turn Your Photos Into Prints

Photographer Daniel Arnold figured it out, and he made $15,000 in PayPal orders in a single day. All with a single trick that isn’t a trick at all: he asked.

Desperate for money, he asked his more than 100,000 followers if they would be interested in perhaps getting a print of any of his photographs for a small fee. The response was overwhelming, and his success was incredible.

This shows something that we occasionally forget, and that is the power of simply asking people to buy from you.

Your Instagram followers probably enjoy your work very much. Why not see if they would like to own a piece of it in real life.

These days there are services like PrintMePoster that allows to easily turn your Instagram timeline into a poster.

It’s more suitable for personal use than for selling (unless your timeline is highly thematic). But there are other features that allow you to sell Instagram photos as well.

Another one is MobilePrints, which allow you to create print versions of photos on Instagram (or your mobile phone) in different sizes. It’s a pretty new service but something to take a look at if you are into creative photography.

Create an Instagram Store

You can sync up your inventory directly, so that it updates in your Instagram account and acts as a catalog for your followers. Shopseen is an easy to use application that turns your account into a digital storefront.

Just link the two, and once it is confirmed you can upload images into Instagram. From there you can add in descriptions and prices. Payments can be made using credit cards on a secure server the customer follows through your profile link.

While you wouldn’t want this to be your only option, it is a good way to expand onto a new social network that isn’t so crowded by other businesses.

Plus, it doesn’t have the ever changing rules of Facebook, nor does it restrict your reach based on direct promotion.

Utilize Your Description Link

The only place where you can hyperlink to your own asset is your Instagram description and quite unbelievably, there are services that monetize that field to the fullest.

Soldsie creates a custom site that looks exactly the same as your Instagram account to avoid customers’ confusion and increase conversions. The app adds that shoppable link to your Instagram bio.

Soldie integrates with WooCommerce and Shopify letting you import your products from there.

Treat Instagram Like a Look Book

Creating a storefront might not be your style. Maybe a look book would be better. You can show off your products for the sake of promoting your brand, without directly selling.

As long as you push for conversions back on your site, you should be able to build a solid foundation.

Elizabeth Victoria Clark is a good example of an indie fashion entrepreneur utilizing Instagram as a look book to increase her sales. You can read how she uses Instagram in her interview for FirstSiteGuide and see her Instagram timeline here.

By Margarita Hakobyan

Margarita Hakobyan is a serial entrepreneur, creator and a business consultant. Business women, wife and mother of two with bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah with a concentration in International Studies and a Masters Degree also from the University of Utah with a degree in International business. CEO and Founder of MoversCorp and Co-Founder of WP Events Planner

Sourced from business.com

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34 Stats to Help You Plan Your Social Media Strategy on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & More

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By Ilya Pestov.

Back in October, I wrote a piece on Medium that covered the numbers behind some of today’s top social media networks.

From usage numbers to engagement statistics, it was incredible to see just how impactful networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become. For example, not only is Facebook home to 1.23 billion daily active users on average, but those users come from all over the world — with 85.2% residing outside of the U.S. and Canada. That’s a crazy level of connectivity.

As I put together the post, it became obvious just how fast these networks were growing — and I thought a lot about how hard is it to keep up with all of these changes, especially for marketers. To make things a little easier to wrap your head around, I put together a simplified list of some standout statistics for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instragram, and Pinterest. Check them out below if you’re looking for some guidance for your social media strategy this year.

34 Stats to Help You Plan Your Social Media Strategy on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & More

Facebook

Twitter

  • Tweets with images receive 18% more clickthroughs, 89% more Likes, and 150% more retweets.
  • 60% of consumers expect brands to respond to their query within the hour, but the average is 1 hour 24 minutes.
  • Ideal tweet length: 100 characters.
  • Clickthrough rate is highest on Wednesdays.
  • Tweet that doesn’t include a # or @ mention will generate 23% more clicks. When the tweet is focused on driving an app install, for going a # or @ mention increases clicks by 11%. But according to Quicksprout, tweets with hashtags get 2X more engagement — clicks, retweets, favorites, and replies.

LinkedIn

Instagram

  • On average, people miss 70% of their feeds.
  • 1.1% average engagement rate of all posts (4.2% in 2014; 2.2% in 2015).
  • Images with a single dominant color generate 17% more Likes than images with multiple dominant colors. Images with a high amount of negative space generate 29% more Likes than those with minimal negative space. Images featuring blue as the dominant color generate 24% more Likes than images that are predominantly red.
  • Photos showing faces get 38% more Likes than photos not showing faces.
  • Photos see more engagement than videos on Instagram.
  • The red heart is the most frequently shared emoji on Instagram, which is shared 79% more than the next most popular symbol, a smiling face with heart eyes.
  • 50% of captions and comments on Instagram contain at least one emoji.
  • The most common posting frequency for brands on Instagram is 11–20 times per month.
  • Instagram audiences are more engaged on Mondays and Thursdays at 2 a.m., 8–9 a.m., and 5 p.m.

Pinterest

By Ilya Pestov

Sourced from HubSpot

 

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This new Instagram feature will change everything, forever

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By Sami Khan.

We’ve seen Facebook integrate some Instagram features into its site, but this change will be huge for Instagram users who are more spontaneous with sharing moments captured in a single image or video.

Instagram is going to bring a new feature that will change the way you share your memories on the site forever. The popular photo and video sharing platform will soon add the ability to share multiple photos in a single post, much like its parent company Facebook.

We’ve seen Facebook integrate some of Instagram features into its site, but this change will be huge for Instagram users who are more spontaneous with sharing moments captured in a single image or a video. That changes soon!

Be prepared to see more than one image (not in the form of collages) start popping up on your feeds. Single image sharing is a unique feature in the world of social media sites that let you share albums in a single go. Taking that away can hurt some users, and of course the site’s true essence.

It is too soon to tell if the impending change will impact the site’s user base in any way, but ever since Facebook took over the site and made a series of changes to it, Instagram’s growth has seen an upward trend.

However, the album sharing feature is still in beta and may or may not see the light of the day. But it sounds too important not to materialise.

Once the feature is ready, it will allow users to select up to 10 photos from the gallery and share them at once. If you want to check out a particular album, simply swipe right on the first photo.

You are, of course, still in control of not using the feature by shooting images directly from the Instagram camera and sharing them instantly. But you cannot stop the world from doing the same.

Instagram’s new feature will arrive in the OTA software update form. Once rolled out, you can update the app from Play Store or App Store, depending on what OS you are using. As of now, the feature isn’t added to the app, but that can change any time soon.

Source: Droid-Life

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Sourced from International Business Times

 

 

 

 

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Facebook’s execs just revealed their shameless plan for taking down Snapchat

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By Mike Murphy.

Snapchat parent company Snap filed to become a public company today, and arguably the largest threat to its future, Facebook, had its quarterly earnings call yesterday.

One topic that kept popping up throughout the call was Instagram, the Facebook-owned photo- and video-sharing service which could well undermine Snap’s chances of becoming a profitable publicly traded company. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to buy Snapchat for $3 billion back in 2013, and was rebuffed. Since then, Facebook has tried to copy multiple features from Snapchat’s app for standalone Facebook apps, and recently inserted what’s more or less a clone of Snapchat into Instagram, on top of its original features.

Without actually mentioning Snapchat on the call, Facebook made a series of comments about Instagram that may keep Snap executives and potential investors up at night before their initial public offering:

Mark Zuckerberg talked about the long-term strategy for Instagram’s growth, and the fact that in a few months, the company created a new product identical to Snapchat’s Stories that already has more than the 110 million users as Snapchat’s entire app is reported to have:

Over the next five years, we’re going to keep building ecosystems around our apps that a lot of people are already using. Growth and engagement on Instagram have been strong. We announced in December that Instagram now has over 600 million monthly actives and recently passed 400 million daily actives. Instagram Stories reached 150 million daily actives just five months after the launch, and we’ve added new features like Boomerang and Live into Stories and I’m excited to see that continue to grow.

Chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg discussed Instagram’s success has finding ways to provide services to businesses, beyond just selling ads to them—something Snap has not been able to do—by leveraging a model originally built by Facebook:

We’re really excited to announce today that 65 million businesses are using our free Pages product and 5 million are using Instagram Business profiles. More and more of these businesses are becoming advertisers with over 4 million advertising on Facebook and over 500,000 on Instagram. As a result, our revenue base is becoming more diverse. In Q4, our top 100 advertisers represented less than a quarter of our ad revenue, which is a decline from Q4 last year.

Sandberg explained how granular Facebook can get with its advertising products for businesses—whereas right now, Snapchat only offers video ads and sponsored filters for users’ snaps:

To make our ad products as relevant and effective as possible, we’re increasingly tailoring them by vertical. In 2016, we invested in Dynamic Ads, which allow advertisers to automatically promote products from their entire catalog. We expanded Dynamic Ads across Facebook, Instagram, and the Audience Network, and tailored them for verticals like travel and retail.

Sandberg implied there’s still a lot of room for growth in Facebook and Instagram’s advertising businesses:

With only a small fraction of the businesses on Facebook and Instagram advertising, we know we have a lot of opportunity and hard work ahead. In 2017, we’ll stay focused on helping businesses of all sizes reach customers around the world and grow.

Echoing Sandberg’s implication that there is still more room for Instagram to grow, chief financial officer David Wehner explained that Instagram helped Facebook show more ads to more people, and generate more revenue, than it did in the same quarter a year earlier:

On the supply side, growth in users, time spent, and ad load also contributed to our strong results. In Q4, the average price per ad increased 3% and the total number of ad impressions served increased 49%, driven primarily by mobile feed ads on Facebook and Instagram.

An analyst asked Zuckerberg how Instagram’s audience differs from Facebook’s core audience, and his answer explains how Instagram is perfectly aligned to fill the same need that Snapchat does:

Instagram is a follow model, right, so it’s—they’re not all bidirectional friendships [like on Facebook]. A larger portion of the content is public content. More of the content is visual, right. Facebook has a mix of text and news and links and visual content like photos and videos. And Instagram creates a pure experience that’s focused on photos and videos. So all those good and subtle decisions that [Instagram CEO] Kevin [Systrom] has made over the years add up to creating a different kind of community that what we’re finding and that’s great, is that it’s really complementary to what people are doing on Facebook.

And some of what we found is that as we encourage people to use both Facebook and Instagram, engagement on both can increase. So that is great. And that I think speaks to how you can build these different kinds of communities with different connections in a way that really is creating new value in people’s lives.

Another analyst asked about Facebook’s plans to monetize videos on its platforms. Sandberg’s response shows the company’s familiarity with advertising agencies and big brands and their interest in working with Facebook—even despite recent advertising metrics misstatements:

As consumer video has grown in News Feed, it’s given us that opportunity for video ads because the format of the ads fits the format of what consumers are doing. And we’re seeing a lot of great examples of people using ads in the feed across Instagram and News Feed.

To share one example, Motorola, working with Ogilvy and Moto Mento, launched the Moto Z phone, and they did awareness boosting before they launched, targeting Android users and Verizon subscribers. And they optimized their video for the Facebook and Instagram mobile feeds. And then after they launched, they did purchasing ads and re-targeted people who had viewed those initial ads.

That’s just a great example of someone using video ads, optimizing a format, but also using the pretty unique targeting we can offer to drive sales. They measured that they had over a 3.5% lift in sales driven by the Facebook and Instagram video ads.

Sandberg also discussed how the end-goal of Facebook’s advertising products is to help businesses increase their sales—and how the company can prove that to businesses, something that Snapchat has struggled with:

What matters the most is the A/B test that these people saw ads on Facebook and Instagram, these people didn’t, and here’s the sales lift. And all of the other metrics, although important and we’re working hard, are proxy metrics, and those metrics are going through a platform shift that we need to work on.

It’s likely that engagement—time spent on a social network, and how much users interact with its content—will be a metric that Snap focuses on in its filings, given that, as The Information pointed out (paywall), spending longer in an app gives a company more time to show ads to that user. Snapchat doesn’t have the largest user base, but if it has a really engaged group of users, advertisers—and investors—will be more interested. On the earnings call, Wehner said Instagram, and Facebook more generally, are seeing high levels of engagement:

Video is one of the big drivers of engagement growth on Facebook. It’s also helpful on Instagram where we’re also seeing the benefit of ranking changes. So we continue to see good engagement and time spent growth across the Facebook family and on just Facebook, and video is a part of that story. So it’s an important part of that story.

One of Snapchat’s major benefits is that it has a younger audience—that marketers are after (and who can mature along with the company)—than its competitors. Wehner said this same generation is also on Instagram, and the company is figuring out how to better target them every day:

Instagram is obviously another great place to reach Millennials, and we continue to build our products to serve a wide variety of audiences, including Millennials as well.

In passing, Zuckerberg mentioned that he considers Instagram to be the Facebook Messenger of its messaging apps, compared with his other property, WhatsApp—meaning that Instagram and Messenger are more about sharing imagery than Facebook and WhatsApp, which tend to be used more for conveying information. While this isn’t a particular shot across the bow at Snapchat, it’s worth remembering just how many social and messaging products Facebook owns that have millions of users to sell advertising against—all of which could be a threat to Snap’s long-term successes:

[Facebook] Messenger is much more focused on being an expressive and rich environment that has lots of different types of content. Kind of more like Facebook to the Instagram example that we used before, whereas WhatsApp I think is a much more utilitarian experience with a much more stark UI where there’s just not as much emphasis on having a lot of different ways to engage.

Wehner added that Instagram still has the potential to be stuffed with more advertisements—what Facebook refers to as “ad load”—meaning it has the potential to generate more revenue off its current users, assuming they aren’t annoyed by seeing more and more ads:

On Instagram versus Facebook and ad load, clearly the biggest driver of our business is core Facebook just in terms of sheer size and even sheer contribution to growth. Instagram is growing quicker on a percentage basis, but it’s much smaller. The ad load opportunities are higher on Instagram because Instagram is at a lower ad load than Facebook, so there is an opportunity for us to continue to grow ad load on Instagram probably beyond—in a longer timeframe—[the number] there is on Facebook because of that disparity in terms of where they are today.

By Mike Murphy

Sourced from Quartz

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