Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Have you ever struggled to captivate your audience's attention?

Sometimes, it can feel like your social media posts are just shouts in the wind. Especially on a platform like Instagram.

That's why I hand-curated the advice from 11 marketing experts to share some of their best tips on how to engage and delight your audience on Instagram....

Jasmine shares one of her favorite quotes from author Simon Sinek, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” In her opinion, there’s no better platform than Instagram to showcase why you do something.

She believes Instagram’s powerful storytelling components give you the ability to make customers loyal before a purchase has been made. If you can tell a powerful story in fewer than 87 characters (the caption limit), along with a photo that matches and elevates the storytelling component, you’ll win at Instagram....

The last thing you expect from the Rock is long-windedness. But Dwayne Johnson is a veritable novelist on Instagram, where he documents his days, which are composed chiefly of pumping iron at the gym, playing with his dogs, and eating snacks on private jets. Take, for example, this post from Labor Day, in which Johnson tells the gripping story of jumping into his pool with two baby French bulldogs in no less than 240 words. Spoiler: The dogs almost drown, but the Rock saves them.

Instagram, a minimalist, mobile-focused app for sharing photos, might seem like a strange place to keep a public diary. Facebook, which aggressively positions itself as an ongoing digital record of your life, comes across as a more natural place to share updates and idle musings. But the Rock’s not alone: People are increasingly turning toward Instagram not just as a place to post filtered photos, but to spill their lives and thoughts into the captions as well.

Why is this happening? For one thing, if you’re already posting pretentious, evocative images, you’re more likely to be in an artsy-musings state of mind. But it’s more than that: Facebook, at 1.5 billion users, has felt cacophonous and impersonal for a while. Many of us use it as an address book more than a means of communication; with its sheer density of information, writing a sincere post there feels a little like shouting on the streets of Manhattan. Instagram might eventually grow as large as Facebook, but its uncomplicated design and tightly curated feed make it more than just a photo app — it’s also one of the more potent blogging spaces around....

Instagram Stories is benefitting from the large active user base Instagram itself enjoys, and now has 100 million daily active viewers. That’s two-thirds of the daily active user population for Snapchat, which reported 150 million global active users across its entire platform in late September. Even with a built-in audience to build from, and prime real estate positioning at the very top of Instagram’s user interface, the rapid pace of its adoption is impressive.

The new stat comes from a Buzzfeed report that also reiterated the total of monthly active users across Instagram at a high of 500 million (a number it first released in June), halfway to that coveted 1 billion mark Facebook Messenger passed earlier this year.Instagram has been around for slightly longer than Snapchat, as a six-year old company compared to Snapchat’s five, but the quick uptake of a new feature that differs dramatically from the existing Instagram experience definitely indicates that the photo-focused social network hit on a customer need when it introduced the feature.

Typically, new features introduced by Facebook on its platform are initially greeted with skepticism by users who prefer the comfort of things they already know well, so early eagerness around Stories is a good indicator that it’ll continue to do well in the future....

If you don’t have access to Instagram’s new brand profiles as yet, you soon will, along with the platforms new analytics tools and options, which have the potential change the way you approach the platform.

In order to highlight the benefits and uses of their new business-specific additions, Instagram's released a new set of videos which examine the details of how to use each element – here’s a breakdown of the key details you need to know....

How are publishers engaging audiences on Instagram amid algorithmic changes?

Instagram remains a less straightforward platform for publishers. Without external links, traffic isn’t driven to publisher content and nearly all engagement takes place directly in the stream.

However, as we noted last year, publishers are nonetheless finding imaginative ways to use Instagram and engage with their followers.

From stunning visual galleries, to native storytelling, to enhancing existing reporting, Instagram remains a great place for publishers to build a devoted community and bolster their brand.

When we looked at a selection of 30 publishers on Instagram for mid-June to mid-July 2016, we saw some interesting statistics....

Stories provides Instagram users with a chance to share posts at a higher frequency. While Instagram photos are typically reserved for perfectly composed shots, Stories allows you to share the little moments that may not be as picture-perfect.

Instagram is positioning this feature as a solution to over posting. There is a significant separate space where your Instagram Stories live and you can post as frequently as you want without worrying about over flooding your friends’ feeds or filling the grid on your profile page.

So, how does it work and how can it be helpful in building your marketing strategy? Don’t worry we have got you covered.

Before we start with how Instagram stories works,  let’s first have a glance at how they appear on your Instagram profile....

However, with Instagram’s timeline now also algorithmically sorted and the aforementioned growth in engagement with video on the platform, it’s likely that these engagement rates will continue to rise.

It’s important to note that having a successful Instagram video strategy does not mean you’ll be able to directly transplant it to other networks. Although there are some elements that will cross over, and if the video itself is unique enough it will take off regardless, Instagram is very much its own place.

There will be differences from platform to platform, so assuming that the videos that you produce for your Facebook page will be immediate success on Instagram is a bad idea.

We took a closer look at Instagram videos in Spike to see what the most successful videos on the platform have in common....