In april 2017, Instagram hit over 700 million daily active users (Constine 2017), making Instagram a leading social media. If you’re not convinced about it, remember that just one year ago, it hit the 500 million daily active users milestone, so the growth of almost 50% in one year can give you an idea of the increasing popularity of this social network, as well as of its potential use.
In fact, when choosing a social network to launch an ad campaign, most people tend to be more inclined towards Facebook because it has more active users than Instagram. However, one should not just look at general data, but rather look at meaningful data that can be relevant to one’s business. One example of a relevant metric is engagement rate and Instagram is the king of social media with a 4.21% engagement rate (Elliot, 2014). Hence, in terms of ROI and costs, Instagram also returns the best results. Again, so that you can understand how huge this number is, Facebook and Twitter combined barely reach 0,10% engagement rate. “Instagram delivered 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter” (Elliot, 2014).
Its success might be related to the fact that ads are non-intrusive since Instagram has grown to become a passionate community of people who go to Instagram for visual inspiration. Therefore, advertising on Instagram has the power to move people, inspire them to see a business differently or take action.
Obviously, the most profitable method of advertising on Instagram is the paid one. When setting an advertising campaign you can choose your objective, audience and budget. In a nutshell, there are 4 main types of Instagram ads that you can choose from: photo ads, video ads, carousel ads and stories ads.
Instagram ad bidding works very similarly to the Google ad bidding process we discussed in class. In other words, when you are delivering an Instagram ad campaign, you are entering a world auction for Instagram’s users attention. When it comes to costs calculation, the structure is also very similar to the Google’s calculations we learned about in class: there are 3 main factors affecting the Instagram Ad cost which are the campaign bid, the relevance score and the estimated action rates.
Understanding relevance scores help advertisers in a few ways: it can lower the cost of reaching people, help advertisers test ad creative options before running a campaign and help optimize campaigns already in progress.
When we understand the importance of relevance scores, we realize how important it is for marketeers to also have an idea of how the new algorithm works. I will briefly cover below how the algorithm works and then list some main takeaways of how to boost your organic reach.
It is important to mention that Instagram algorithm is not publicly disclosed for obvious reasons: if it was, its success would be highly compromised. However, I researched a lot and read several studies conducted by several people and many different sources, which allowed me to get a broad overview of the main factors. In a nutshell, the following list present 7 key factors I found:
- Engagement: How popular the post is.
- Relevancy: The genres of content you are interested in and have interacted with.
- Relationships: The accounts you regularly interact with.
- Timeliness: How recent the posts are.
- Profile Searches: The accounts you check out often.
- Direct Shares: Whose posts you are sharing.
- Time Spent: The duration spent viewing a post.
Now that we have an idea of how the Instagram algorithm works, the question that comes up is: how can I make the most out of this? You can find below some insightful takeaways on how to boost organic reach for free, using only our knowledge regarding what the algorithm values.
- Find your optimal posting times: posting at right times can help you generate an initial round of engagement on your posts which will then be accounted by the algorithm and help pushing your post up on your followers’ feeds.
- Experiment with videos: Even though on average photos get more likes than videos, videos generate more than twice the amount of comments than photos (Social Publishing Insights Report, 2017).
- Host contests or ask questions to encourage engagement: Calling for action is always a fun way to encourage followers to interact on posts, thus giveaways, questions and calls for tags are great examples of things you could do to augment your engagement.
- Curate user-generated content: Creating user generated content is an efficient strategy to encourage users to engage with and share your content. The great plus of this tip is that it also builds relationships with users, which is considered by the algorithm and thus can help you bring your post up in the feeds. Apart from organic reach, user-generated content is 35% more memorable and 50% more trusted than traditional media and other non-user-generated content (The Marketer’s Guide to User-Generated Content, 2015).
- Tell Instagram Stories: Only 16% of marketeers have created Instagram Stories (The State of Social Marketing, 2017). Therefore, this presents a great opportunity to differentiate from the rest. What is more, Instagram Stories take a prominent position on app — right above the feed, which may allow you to grab more attention. In addition, if your followers start seeing your story often, that can be considered by the algorithm and again help you reach a top position in the followers feed.
- Go live on Instagram: This is actually just an extension of the last tip. Going live puts you in the front of the Stories feed and gives your profile photo a greater prominence.
- Use Instagram ads: At first, this might sound counter-intuitive, but paid ads increase your engagement and overall relevancy, thus it can also help you increase your organic reach.
- Post less: Posts with poor relevance and low engagement can worsen your posts position in the feed. So, less is actually more as you will have a better position in the feed if you post only one amazing photo compared to 10 mediocre ones.
- Create specifically for Instagram: Target your content to the social network you are using, that is, one post might have an outstanding engagement oin Facebook but a poor one on Instagram.
- Be a great Instagram user: Social media algorithms are built to encourage genuine, positive behaviors on the platforms such as sharing, showing appreciation, quick replies, and more. Therefore, you should really focus on building a strong and authentic relationship with your followers. Good examples of how to do it are answering questions on your posts quickly, thanking users for their comments, exploring new profiles and interact with them, posting quality relevant content for your target audiences (inspiring, entertaining, informative).
References:
Constine, J. (2017). ‘Instragram’s growth speeds up as it hits 700 million users’ [online] available at https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/26/instagram-700-million-users/
Elliot, N. (2014). ‘Instagram Is The King Of Social Engagement’ [online] available at https://go.forrester.com/blogs/14-04-29-instagram_is_the_king_of_social_engagement/
News Whip (2017) ‘Social Publishing Insights Report’ [online] available at https://www.newswhip.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/InstagramFallGuide.pdf
CrowdTap (2015) ‘The Marketer’s Guide to User-Generated Content’ [online] available at
Click to access Crowdtap_TheMarketersGuidetoUGC.pdf
Hitz & Blackburn (2017) ‘The State of Social Marketing, 2017’ [online] available at
Lua, A. (2017) ‘Understanding the Instagram Algorithm: 7 Key Factors and Why the Algorithm is Great for Marketers’ [online] available at https://blog.bufferapp.com/increase-instagram-reach
