Running a business is more than a choice – it’s a lifestyle, a continuous self-perfecting process where you have to be the best in order to reach the market, fight the competition and make your clients constantly happy. Depending where you stand, technology can be a friend or a foe… While to some business owners the digital world is a no-man’s land, to others it is the place to attract new customers, engage with them and make them choose their business over and over again. Sailing the social media might give you a headache and you might be very tempted to stay only with the old, good Facebook, but guess what – there’s so much more out there and your competitors are already taking advantage of that. For instance… Instagram!
Instagram is younger than Facebook and it has been only recently that businesses realised its huge potential when it comes to brand communication and marketing in general. If you’re not on Instagrammer yet, here’s a few reasons why your business should navigate to Instagram as soon as possible:
The medium
- Instagram is all about visuals – pictures and short videos. This means that at least 80% of what you post there will remain in your target’s mind because that’s how the human brain works: we remember 80% of what we see, 20% of what we read and only 10% of what we hear.
- Bonus: Instagram videos are getting very trendy now, as the time spent watching them increased by 40% in the last 6 months!
- Best news: 100% organic reach! That means that your followers will see everything you post, not a selection of posts (the way Facebook works, for instance). What a deal!
The users
- The numbers of Instagram users are expanding as we speak. There are now 500 million and they love it since there are over 95 million daily posts on Instagram and over 4 billion likes. This also means the users are active and engage with the content. More than that, when it comes to brand accounts, Instagrammers still keep a high level of interaction: 68% of them engage with the brand on a regular basis.
- Best news: Half of the millennials are there already! Millennials are the future of your business because they will be your main market in the years to come. All you need to do it talk their language, go where they are, make them choose you by showing them that you understand them and their social media choices.
The business side
- While there are sponsored ads on Instagram, most of the content posting is free. All you need to do is create a large pool of followers and feed them high quality content on a regular basis. It seems a pretty decent, easy to follow and successful recipe, since 90% of Interbrand 100 Companies use it…
- Instagram is becoming a very business friendly medium, allowing users to switch between accounts instead of using login credentials every time they need to take action on a certain account. In the same lines, businesses can now post up to 50 seconds long videos instead of 30. Bonus: there are live view stats on each video, showing if and how many people really watched your content.
Finally, keep in mind that Instagram is still a new environment with non-saturated users when it comes to brand presence and early adopters can only win from becoming business Instragrammers. Are you one of them yet?
