Brands need to earn the right to be on Instagram
In this guest post, Ken Walsh argues why brands should approach Instagram differently to other social media as the picture-sharing platform reaches five years old and the 400 million-user mark.
It may be hard to believe that Instagram has turned five years old, but potentially even harder to believe that advertising on the platform, especially in some APAC markets, is roughly only five weeks old.
That it’s taken three years to accelerate the monetisation of Instagram, demonstrates that Facebook knew Instagram needed to develop not only its own user base, but just as importantly, its positioning in the social media landscape.
It’s that positioning statement – to capture and share the world’s moments – which makes Instagram so much more than just a photo upload service. Equally it’s that positioning that puts a certain extra pressure on advertisers and this pressure can impact revenue opportunities.
Oh joy, yet another Facebook platform that simultaneously asks for a lot of dollars and for businesses to approach success metrics in a new and completely different way than how all other media is measured.
Instagram feels like it’s simply repeating the last 3-4 years of Facebook: build an organic audience to build ‘permission to be there’, try and get the nebulous beast that is ‘brand awareness’ in digital valued, fail, then move to pay-to-play. Fine, but let’s just cut to pay-to-play and forget all this audience build stuff. Eventually organic reach will be <1% just like FB because they'll need Ad revenue growth for shareholders.
I have to agree with Kevin that "cracking the content credibility question is the key to success" but it's always going to be the hardest thing for businesses to do and for some businesses a simply impossible task: customers are skeptical of any brand that talks outside its patch and innately know and any brand reaching outside of it is only doing so because it serves that company's purpose, think: Westpac and AirBnB lining up on twitter to 'faux chat' in a market softening up exercise. Would either brand have engaged the other if it wasn't for $$$ and co-product? Simple answer: nope.
On the plus side it should provide plenty of Instagram Ad fail fodder for marketing websites to talk about in 2016 so that'll be entertaining.