Muhammad Talha Mubasher

The Trends of Instagram Marketing: Use it Like a Pro Instagram is perhaps the most popular social media platform of the time. The features continue to expand along with its user base. With over a billion active users and numerous content creating options such as stories, photos, videos, and much more, the businesses and marketers are taking a keen interest in it. As a person using Instagram, we show a lot of excitement whenever a new feature is added to the app. However, what does that mean for brands? How marketers deal with the ever-changing platform? Well, individuals might see it as a handy change, but for businesses, it is certainly much more significant as the social giant offers them a lot to maximize their revenue. With more and more tools added for business use and a new level of e-commerce connection coming into play, it is worth noting how brands are using Instagram for marketing. So, some recent reports uncovered how digital marketers are making use of Instagram as a marketing tool and what is their take on it. Current trends in Instagram Marketing In order to know how marketing goes on this platform, it is essential to understand how brands are using it. According to the responses recorded in the survey, more than 90% of the marketers indicated that Instagram is already an integral part of their marketing efforts. Taken a step further, when asked about which features you use the most for marketing purpose, the responses were astonishing. 80% of the individuals indicated that they are using stories as the primary tool for marketing. Following the stories, we have ads and stories’ highlights on the second and third place, respectively. Then comes the IGTV, Shipping Tags, and Instagram Live. Conclusively, the stats clearly show the dominance of Instagram Stories. But why stories? Well, there are about 500 million daily active users for stories, which makes it an essential element in the social media marketing strategy. While you may think of stories as insignificant and might not have a lot to create stories about, you must start focusing on it. Why? According to the stats, there are more than 1.25 billion active individuals who view stories each day across Facebook’s family of apps. As for stories, the least number of reach is at facebook, which is followed by SnapChat, the introducer of stories. Whatsapp dominates the stories platform with the most number of active users per day, followed by Instagram. With story highlights being in the third place, second to ads, it is worth noticing how the trend of marketing is shifting. Ads, however, are still at the second number considering how important they are for increasing the reach. Moreover, the fact that facebook’s ad manager is now supporting ads for Instagram makes it even more convenient for marketers to display ads across various social platforms. As for IGTV, it may appear to be still under the process of capturing the attention, which is why only 16.5% of the respondents use it. Shopping tags are also in early development but have the potential to be the difference-maker. And last but not least, Instagram Live is another option for marketers. The fact that it is placed at the top when you are live gives it an edge.