Instagram boasts over 400 million active monthly users, who post 80 million photos and like 3.5 billion of them every day. It’s a fast-growing social media platform that enables you to efficiently and quickly capture an audience through enticing image ads, video ads or carousel ads.
Recently, Instagram rolled out its advertising platform to select API partners and on Facebook’s self-serve platform, Power Editor. A case study posted on the Instagram website is claiming sponsored posts (AKA ads) resulted in 2.8x higher ad recall than other online advertising. I can vouch for the engagement on Instagram vs. Facebook (and I’m not even paying for a sponsored post yet).
Instagram vs. Facebook Engagement
I posted the below image on both Facebook and Instagram. Only 15 likes on Facebook – a public cover photo. 0 comments. (Due to Facebook’s organic reach problem, most of my followers probably didn’t even see it.)
The same photo got 384 likes and 8 comments on Instagram:
Again, on Facebook, 33 Likes:
On Instagram, 242 likes:
These numbers should convince you that Instagram has powerful potential as a marketing platform.
Don’t Want to Pay to Play? Use Geo-tagging
Here’s a secret for advertisers looking to utilize Instagram’s influence outside of sponsored posts – interestingly enough, a photo you post on Instagram has the opportunity to show up in the Explore section based on a random algorithm (I have my bets on what it’s looking at), where users that don’t currently follow you can easily discover you by location, hashtag and more.
This photo I posted above is a TOP POST for the summit of Mount Washington because I geo-tagged it to the summit location for Mount Washington. This instantly grabs the attention of anyone searching for photos of the summit of Mount Washington. This presents a perfect opportunity for companies like Backcountry.com, REI, Eastern Mountain Sports and more to reach additional audiences outside of sponsored posts on Instagram and grow their follower base too.
Remember that Fenway photo? I took a different photo there that ended up in the Top Posts on the Explore page for Fenway Park, right up there with celebrities and baseball players. This drove a ton of organic traffic to my blog (linked in the bio on my Instagram profile) as well as organic followers on Instagram that I can later market to directly in their feeds.
That’s me in the middle!
I have so many tips and tricks to grow your Instagram follower base (I grew my Instagram follower base from 1k to ~11k in 3 months), but for this post, let’s get back to Instagram ads. The best Instagram ads do not seem like ads at a first glance. Like most photos on Instagram, tailoring the photo for the ad to seem like a candid shot with sharp, short text will work best. There shouldn’t be any aggressive calls to action as it will come across as too sales-y. A subtle download link with a mention of your app or website will result in better conversion rates.
Currently, Instagram ads are managed through Facebook’s self-serve platform, Power Editor, on a select basis. Or, you can try contacting your API partner to begin. We have yet to gain access, but will be sure to post details as soon as we do! In the meantime, check out Margot’s excellent tips for marketing your business on Instagram.
Let us know your plans for advertising on Instagram. We’d love to hear them!
About the author
Liz Dean is the Tech Support Engineer at WordStream. While she combats bugs and issues during the day, she is passionate about Instagram and ultimately hopes to become an expert in PPC on Instagram as they work on rolling out their new advertising platform (and internally for WordStream as we adopt the ad platform down the line). You can follow Liz on Instagram.
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