With over 1.5 billion active users, Instagram is a social media marketing force that should not be ignored. This social media service is the most popular image-sharing network. A study conducted by Forrester Research discovered that Instagram posts create an engagement rate 58 times more powerful than Facebook and an unbelievable 120 times more than Twitter. Visual content can help make or break a brand, and that’s why Instagram has become the new darling of Social Media Marketing.
As Instagram gains speed and influence every day, more and more marketers plan to harness that energy come 2025. In fact, more than 70% of marketers plan to focus more on using Instagram in the coming year. Other social networks that involve pictures are solid ground as well, though Instagram fetches fewer results than it does. Some of these include Tumblr, Snapchat, Vine, and Pinterest. Instagram now offers a feature that allows marketers to target the social media’s general demographic, the young and the wealthy. It’s now possible to pay for a 60-second video on Instagram that can be targeted to a certain age, country, and gender.
Website Closers experienced brokers for e-commerce businesses and experts in website selling, suggests to every new and seasoned entrepreneur to throw in their marketing lasso and harness some of the incredible energy that Instagram has to offer in 2025. They recommend integrating your marketing tools with the behavioral data of your website. In this way, the entrepreneur can more easily tailor their ads to specific demographics, which in turn makes the ads feel less like a commercial and more like a personal message that’s meant just for the consumer.
And, of course, the evolution of the picture is the video. Instagram is active in its caliber and isn’t presently competing with the likes of Snapchat, Hyperlapse, and Vine, which are among the most popular video social networking websites. They each offer different editing capabilities. Instagram has continued to grow due to the differences in video lengths and features, and it’s expected to continue its dominance over Vine and the rest in popularity in 2025. Video gives marketers the opportunity to create compelling stories that reach consumers on an emotional level, leaving them with a positive opinion about the brand.
In recent years, social media has become a powerful tool. When its full potential is tapped correctly, it can become a bridge that connects potential customers or target audiences to a brand. Mind you, it wasn’t always like that. Times changed, years went by, and social media evolved into a top marketing tool trusted by most marketers who, as we now know, call themselves digital marketers. Let’s carefully look at the evolution of social media platforms.
Could you believe it when you’re told that the first social media platform was created 30 years ago, which, of course, is no longer in use, but it really did serve as a foundation for other social media platforms today, even our most popular Instagram?
Many people think that MySpace was the first social media platform, but nope! Surprisingly, it was a social media website known as Six Degrees. It was launched in 1997 by Andrew Weinreich and was a place where people created profiles, connected with friends, and sent messages to one another. It was active till it was purchased in 2000. Other social platforms that have existed include Hot or Not, which was seen as the inspiration for YouTube, Facebook, Bolt, Friendster, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Then, we moved into the era of Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, which came into existence in 2010.
Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom launched Instagram before being acquired by Facebook in 2012.
It was only a short time before marketers understood the power and the potential of social media when it comes to marketing campaigns. The use of social media for marketing started as a personal thought, but it didn’t take long for it to transform into the most powerful marketing tool in the 21st century. The evolution of social media into a business marketing tool started in the early 2000s, yes, that’s right. It wasn’t popular, but it was used by individuals who owned brands, and they started by creating official profiles for their businesses. Marketers began using social media platforms for marketing by sharing blogs, podcasts, and ebooks, and by 2010, they had transitioned into the creation of ads. However, that was only part of it as marketers started to explore other ways aside from ads, as many now utilize organic social media feeds to develop brand voice and personality.
It raised some eyebrows in 2012 when it paid a billion dollars for Instagram, which then boasted a mere 30 million users. Before going public, Facebook was struggling with its mobile presence, and acquiring Instagram provided it with an almost instant ramp-up in the sector. He was praised for his commitment not to absorb the photo-sharing site into the main app but to keep it independent. Fast-forward six years, and his insights are all the more telling:
“For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team also to offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests…That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.”
The main differences between Instagram and Facebook are the type of content that each platform enables. Instagram is all about photo-sharing, videos, Stories, and Reels, all with brief captions. On Facebook, all of these options are supported except links, longer-form videos, articles, Stories, and quizzes. One such difference is that links in the caption text can be clicked upon. Both have mobile applications and a web version. While Facebook is used vastly on the application and the website, Instagram users more often use their mobile application because it is more user-friendly.
Facebook and Instagram draw in different audiences. The most mature audience that Instagram brings in are people below 30 years of age. Instagram is also more appealing to those users who would like to scale up to be influencers and leverage their interests and personality for brands in a bid to help connect with their target audience. It would be a great idea to work with an Instagram influencer marketing agency to promote your products if your brand targets a younger audience.
Both Facebook and Instagram are highly engaging as they are widely used. The purpose of user engagement is the main difference between these two when considering the engagement perspective. In both platforms, you have to create images in different shapes and types. Users are creating a standard Instagram grid to enhance the engagement levels on the Instagram platform.
Another difference between Instagram and Facebook is the ad spending that can be attributed to social media marketing between the two social media platforms. Facebook has a more developed advertising platform, as it serves users effectively with content. It also supports the running of Instagram ads. Because of its efficiency, Facebook users trust Facebook to show them relevant ads. As a brand, you can use that trust to start running ad campaigns on this platform. For instance, if you want to make sales presentations on Facebook, you can integrate sales navigator intelligent links.
Given it created this Snapchat-imitation feature, there is no surprise that Instagram offers the broadest stories functionality. Of course, Facebook has a story function, but at this juncture, the linkage between the Facebook News Feed and Facebook Stories seems tenuous and vague. Instagram Stories, on the other hand, have been very viral, amassing 500 million in daily users.
What really sets Instagram apart from any other social media platform is how visually oriented it is. Whether your business operates heavily in product design or a service that has a tangible visual outcome, Instagram’s the place to show it off.
This is a fantastic platform for sharing videos, images, and illustrations with a great audience, but the success of your marketing depends upon your strategy. Without jumping right into using Instagram, it’s essential to create a plan that is in line with your objectives and, most importantly, in line with the audience. You can follow these steps to use Instagram for social media marketing:
Before you get too carried away with posting to Instagram, take a moment to answer this question or, better yet, discuss it with your team: Why are you on Instagram? Yes, the platform has a broad reach, but that doesn’t mean your response should be “. because it’s trendy.” If you want to find long-term success on the platform, you need to define your business purposes and objectives that will guide you in using your time, energy, and budget more effectively.
You need to understand who you want to reach before you start implementing your marketing campaigns there. If you already have marketing campaigns in place, use those as guides for consistency. Consider age, location, gender, income, interests, motivations, and pain points.
Where to get started? Monitor trending events and hashtags relevant to your business. See who is interacting in these hashtags and check out their profiles. You can also look at the followers of some of your competitors. Instagram has some handy tools to make finding your audience easier.
Once you have located your Instagram audience, it is time to check on the competition and find what other marketers in your sector are sharing. If you know who your key competitors are, start by looking at their Instagram profile. If not, search for keywords in your business and industry to find similar accounts.
Quickly go through these similar accounts to see what posts get the most engagement, what hot hashtags they use, what their caption style is, how often they post, and the rate at which they grow. This can be a good benchmark while building your account. As you are analyzing your competitor’s content, make sure to note all the places that they still need to fill up with content. Adding this unique content will set your business apart from the pack.
Having a ready content calendar will make things much more accessible, and your Instagram will improve faster. Fill out your calendar with different post types for Instagram, and plan the text, hashtags, and times to post.
Your content calendar will be beneficial in marking the events of interest to feature on your Instagram, such as new product launches or special promotions. It will keep you on your toes, looking out for timely opportunities rather than rushing to make posts at the last minute.
When you publish random or unrelated content, people will become puzzled and eventually stop following you. For that reason, make sure your Instagram profile reflects a consistent personality from your brand. To begin with, take into consideration the personality of your brand. What does your brand stand for? How would your customers or team explain your brand? Vibrant? Fun? Edgy? Daring?
Instagram marketing refers to the process in which brands use Instagram to connect with target audiences for increased brand awareness or to sell various products. In essence, it offers multiple possibilities for both marketers and businesses to reach your perfect customer, whether paid or organic. Instagram metrics are indicators of how well your content is performing and how your audience is engaging with it. These metrics encompass the number of views, interactions, and likes your posts receive. Here are the ways to measure a successful marketing run on Instagram:
The Reach metric tells you how many people actually see your content. Reach and Impressions are often used interchangeably, but they have different meanings.
Simply put, the reach of your Instagram will tell you how many people have genuinely viewed the post, while impressions are the number of times the content has been pulled up, even if a click or no engagement occurred.
What this tells you on Instagram is the number of times people view your content. Impressions give insight into the number of views your content received among users.
This is one powerful piece of information in measuring the success of your content; considering a large number of impressions will often indicate that the audience well received your ad and compelled them to want to view it again.
This is another way of measuring your success on Instagram, as the growth of your followers tells you whether your overall number of followers is increasing or decreasing. To be fair, we all love growth in terms of numbers.
When looking at the trend of your follower count on Instagram, consider a step back and put this number into context – particularly when seeing spikes or drops that feel a little too abnormal due to activities like a specific campaign or paid promotion.
Track your follower count over time and understand these contextual pieces that may have caused the ups and downs. What you really want to see is this slow and steady climb: proof that your target audience is into your content and wants more.
It’s about knowing which of the strategies or types of content are working and which are needed for readjustment within the overall Instagram marketing strategy. That then will provide an insight into the types of content to be continued and the ones that may need refinement.
For some, the total followers metric might be very superficial, but at the end of the day, it reflects the ultimate audience of your content. This definitely connects with other Instagram metrics, such as engagement, so focusing on organic audience growth has never been more critical.
We all love seeing those likes and comments roll in; it’s like real-time applause for your brand’s work. But there’s another metric you should use to place a premium on-saves. Whenever someone saves your Instagram post, it means they were more than just momentarily engaged; they think your content is worth coming back to later. In addition, saves indicate to the algorithm that your type of content is high-quality and deserves more visibility.
Likes can be given in passing, and there is no natural way to know with any certainty that your followers actually saw your post. Comments will always be the superior way of knowing. Be it positive or negative, comments let you know one thing: your Instagram posts or Instagram reels spoke to someone enough to take the time to say so or leave a remark.
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