Sunday, November 29, 2015

Instagram and its ad platform


With more than 400 million active users, Instagram is now one of the world's largest mobile ads platforms. Its photo and now also available, video sharing features differentiate it aside from other social media platforms such as twitter and facebook. Visual expression’s creative, artistic and chic nature make Instagram a very engaging platform for users and brands can easily resonate with its followers expressing a certain lifestyle spirit. The demographic and behavioral characteristics of Instagram users make the platform a great place for brands to promote brand metrics and interactivities. According to GlobalWebIndex, around 70% of Instagram audience are under 35 and about 53% users follow brands using this platform, ranking the highest among all major social media platforms.

Recently, the platform has launched a new targeting tool for marketers, which allows them to capture the segment of audience who are excited about holiday shopping i.e. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas purchase, by locating keywords and hashtags. A lot of brands are using Instagram to provide gift ideas and promote festive sales. It will alert advertisers when people posting content relevant to holiday buying.

A special thing about Instagram is that it does not have filtering algorithms, which allows ads be seen by a higher percentage of audience comparing to other social media platform which implement filtering algorithms. Instagram also provides good measurement functions for advertisers to evaluate campaigns’ ROI and effectiveness.

However, a weakness of Instagram as a marketing platform is that it lacks behaviorial data beyond the trending hashtags. As mentioned by Sarah Vizard, brands could hardly draw insights on how audience engage on Instagram.

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