The rise of Instagram and what it can do for your business

The rise of Instagram.

Why?

Since 2010, Instagram has proven to be the fastest growing social media platform. It has a user base of around 300 million and is expected to grow even more. So why is this seemingly simple app growing so fast? Well, it all comes down to creativity, Instagram has found new ways to share content on its platform and make the user experience more seamless. For example, Instagram stories were launched to compete with snapchats, allowing users to provide images or videos that disappear.

Sounds simple right? Well that’s because it is. Instagram now has more influence over all of its users who may have been using Snapchat in conjunction with their own app, reducing the need to use both and connecting these users to their own services.

This aggressive tactic has paid off, as Instagram has overtaken Snapchat in users. Instagram Stories also encourage content sharing and give your app a chat element, allowing it to compete with all other direct messaging platforms. Innovation like this is the reason for the sudden growth of Instagram.

What is all this fuss about?

Instagram is the perfect application to share content through visual images. Its audience is young, educated and very fond of shopping. This makes content creative, exciting, and fast-moving. It has a different feel to platforms like Facebook and Twitter, with a focus on images rather than words. However, studies have shown that, like Facebook, it is used on a daily basis, making it a very active and loyal user base.

This ability to capture a younger and more creative audience is sounding the alarms of major companies looking to advertise on social media. With high usage, there will surely be increased interest in in-app advertising. However, the competition will be ripe and companies will have to find creative ways to outperform their rivals in the visual world of social media.

How can it be used for marketing?

Of course, if you want to use this to market your business or a product, then you need to consider how. This is a visual platform and therefore products are generally easier to market than services. But services are not impossible to promote in the application, finding interesting ways to spice up your service will catch the attention of the Instagram user.

Hashtags are used frequently on Instagram and staying on top of trends or even starting your own is a surefire way to engage an audience, similar to Twitter. However, one must be careful to match the hashtag with the visual content it provides, so it is not as simple as other applications that use this technique.

Instagram is predominantly a mobile app, so the content should be easy to read and continually updated for a mobile data hungry demographic. Only fresh, new content will attract attention.

Finally, Instagram Stories are a great way to personally interact with your audience, as they are only 24 hours long. Stories should be used to keep potential customers updated daily about your business and reveal behind-the-scenes content so that the user feels part of the company.

Instagram can be used to market just about anything, with a creative mind and a committed team, you can build quite a bit of buzz around your brand!

The future

With a young and educated audience that uses the application on their mobiles on a daily basis, only the sustained growth and loyalty of its users can be predicted. There will be more opportunities to use this app for business purposes and this writer’s advice is to get inside while it’s hot. It will only get bigger, so get on the market before it gets even more crowded.

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