More detailed analytics on Instagram activity available now (late 2018)
Favored social media moves quickly, despite the size of scale and reach. The rapid shift into an Instagram-driven conversation, full of pictures and now more lengthy slideshows, video and the IGTV channels is overtaking Facebook’s domination of attention and user activity. Facebook, however, has no worries in dominating the social media landscape, and while it works on AR/VR next, it’s hard at work maximizing the advertising and marketing capabilities of Instagram. Mobile wins, and Instagram is truly mobile first! The vertical video format and square still image are clearly what people want to see in their hands certainly in short attention bursts, and, hopefully, over time, even in longer form with the Stories, slideshows, and more use of the IGTV channels.
Facebook has dedicated its efforts to giving the user more power to reach others on Instagram thanks to paid promotion that a novice can employ, and teaching the principles of advertising via promotion is being made easier with little more than a swipe and pressing the promote option for those who chose to convert a standard personal account into what Instagram deems is a business account. The categories range from blogs to wellness coach to every kind of traditional service, and it will be certain that if it can be hashtagged it will be findable and probably classified into a business. Great for the individual, and another niche marketing channel opportunity for the MARCOM pros.
Adding better analytics to strengthen the platform’s appeal to the promotional and advertising side is essential, and the beta of a new array of displays and data visibility was released on November 1 on Facebook, making sure that Instagram as a platform doesn’t carry the weight of these back office tasks, and remains the light-weight user-facing social media portal. No harm in keeping the two separated, certainly from an end-user perspective, though possibly more confusing to the side-gig entrepreneur learning the path to marketing themselves via social media. The analytic language here for Instagram is no different than those found in Google Analytics or Facebook’s own (“Conversion Rates” (the percentage of visitors to your website that complete a desired goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors) is first on the list), and this will guide Instagrammers who become marketers/promoters to doing some homework on classic online marketing.
No doubt we are somewhere on the ascending side of Instagram’s usage and penetration curve, if you’ve been here before with other social media, go ahead and plunge in. It is hard to say how long this platform will be a hot ticket, but the vertical video format will probably become locked in as very strong standard now and as long as we have the rectangular mobile device form factor in our hands.
The complete announcement on Facebook’s marketing blog regarding the beta release of their analytics for Instagram can be found here.
And yes, this post will now be showing up on our Instagram feed as well. See you there!
