Most businesses recognize the importance of being on Instagram; it has the highest growth and now boasts over 300 million monthly active users (making it officially larger than Twitter (with 284 million active users). However, sheer numbers are not the only reason all businesses should be on Instagram. It has a number of benefits that make it unique compared to Facebook and Twitter marketing. In this post I’ve outlined the top four benefits of Instagram over other social networks.
Highest Engagement
Unlike Facebook where only about 5% of your followers will actually see your post on Instagram your post will show up in all of your followers news feeds. A recent study done by Forrester found that Instagram content generated 4.21% per-follower engagement. This is 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook and 120 times more engagement than Twitter. It’s the best tool to foster a community around your brand and engage with current and potential customers. Especially for small businesses, building a community is key to growth.
Longer Half-Life
The half-life of a social media post refers to the amount of time it takes for the post to fall to half of it’s peak value. This is measured by looking at the lifetime of a post and the half-life is the point where your post has received 50% of all the engagement it’s going to get. For Twitter the average half-life is about 20 minutes whereas on Instagram it is closer to 10 hours. Posts on Instagram get higher engagement and last longer increasing the return on the time your company puts into crafting its social media post.
Greater Discoverability
Not only does Instagram not hide your posts so your posts show up in all of your followers newsfeed, your posts may also show up in the ‘explore’ tab of your followers’ followers exponentially increasing your reach for each post and making your account discoverable to a huge amount of potential customers. Especially since these will generally be people following your followers they are targeted accounts more likely to follow you than if you were exposed to untargeted users.
Users can also discover your account through hashtags and geotags. We all know hashtags from their success on Twitter but unlike Twitter that has a very small character count Instagram lets you include up to 40 hashtags in a post. This way you can include general hashtags where your post will be exposed to a large number of users (although it will get diluted very quickly as other posts use this hashtag) and specific hashtags which give your post the ability to be discoverable for longer periods of time. See for example the post below from a popular Vancouver restaurant, they use general hashtags like #pasta and #homemade to gain wide potential reach although people looking at this hashtag will only see this for a few minutes as it will immediately be pushed down the list from the #pasta list which has over 6 million posts. To be searchable for longer they have included more specific hashtags like #yvreats and #mygastown that are specific to their location and they were then shown as a ‘top post’ under the hashtag #yvreats and will remain near the top of this hashtag for longer.
One of the best tools on Instagram for businesses targeting local customers is the geotag function. This allows instagram users to search a restaurant, retail store or any business with a physical location and then see every post that has been tagged at that location. This is extremely beneficial for restaurants. Instead of going to Yelp to look for reviews a user can look at the geotag for a restaurant they want to try and see photos of the restaurants décor, food, menu, staff, kitchen and/or any other posts people may have put up at that location.
It’s Free!
Yes, it costs nothing to post on Instagram. Unlike Facebook where you must pay a fee to promote every post in order to get it to more than just 5% of your followers and Twitter which gives you the chance to promote a post in order to make it more visible to your followers and potential followers, Instagram automatically puts your post in the feed of all of your followers and likely in the ‘explore’ tab of many of your followers followers all for free. Instagram has recently added sponsored content into people’s feeds but prior to this all posts were on equal ground cost-wise. This makes Instagram a must-use tool for small businesses or those with a small marketing budget. Your only cost is to create the content!