Today, marketers are rapidly discovering how powerful Instagram can be for promoting products and services. More than 25 million businesses already use the platform, and more are flocking to it every day. While Facebook and Twitter continue to be the highest-profile social media platforms, Instagram has emerged as a very real competitor. Here are four shocking statistics about Instagram’s power as a marketing platform.
Instagram Now Has More Than 1 Billion Monthly Users and Is Still Growing Rapidly
While Facebook’s monthly user base is growing at just over 3 percent per quarter and Twitter’s is actively declining as the company works to purge fake accounts, the total number of monthly Instagram users continues to grow at a steady rate of about 5 percent per quarter. Even with more than 1 billion users as of June, Instagram still has room for growth. The company is expected to continue seeing annual growth rates of 5 percent or more from the US alone until at least 2021, though user growth will begin to slow as the supply of potential new users diminishes.
80 Percent of Instagram Users Follow at Least One Business
One of the challenges of modern digital advertising is that consumers, particularly younger ones, are increasingly tired of having ads served to them on social media. This advertising fatigue, however, hasn’t carried over to Instagram, where about 80 percent of accounts follow one or more businesses
Instagram’s Engagement Rate is 15 Times That of Facebook
As all marketing experts and business owners know, getting people to actually engage with your content is vastly more important than simply having people view it. This is a large part of the reason that marketers are quickly turning to Instagram, which has engagement rates 15 times higher than Facebook and a full 20 times higher than Twitter. If you want people to actively engage with your content and join your audience of prospective customers, Instagram is a platform you should definitely be using.
70 Percent of All Instagram Hashtags Are Branded
A further piece of evidence that Instagram’s users are extremely receptive to business and advertising content is the fact that approximately 70 percent of hashtags on the platform relate to brands in some way. Posts with hashtags also have higher engagement rates, with about a 12.6 percent advantage over Instagram posts without hashtags.
These are just a few of the many statistics that paint a clear picture of Instagram as a powerful platform for social media marketing. If your business needs a larger audience and more engagement, Instagram is an excellent platform to use in your marketing efforts.