The 4 essentials of Instagram Marketing

In our last social media studies Instagram always was the shooting star. That's why Instagram Analytics get increasingly important. Even though companies have 10x more fans on Facebook than followers on Instagram, the average posts receives up to 12x more interactions. In a nutshell, the organic reach is higher and thus more people can be reached and engaged. That was one of the reasons why we hosted the webinar “How to set up a visual social media strategy and measure success”. The dashboard used during the social media webinar given last week, shows numerous revealing metrics. 

After some interesting discussions with our partners and friends at the digital agency RCKT  from Berlin, we set up an Instagram infographic together on what is essential for perfect Instagram Marketing. Therefore, we used dm and Rossmann, two German drug stores as an example. Here our new format: The RCKTLY-Analysis

1. Content:

Both, dm and Rossmann have well-prepared content which is not repetitive. Even after analyzing their Facebook and Twitter followers, these Instagram channels still receive meaningful content to them. Due to the uniqueness of content the follower has a benefit of following on Instagram. Both stores manage to publish interesting as well as appealing pictures with seasonal relevance. As we revealed in our social media study in end of July, images and videos perform on the same level on Instagram. Knowing that, marketers might consider integrating video in the social strategy and post them more often, as the user spends more time watching a video than an image. Here it should be noted that users spend more time watching them, so quality of engagement might be considered higher than on a picture post.

2. Timing

According to Pew Research 49% of Instagram users check their timeline at least once per day. “Your aim is to reach as many people as possible. Therefore, you should post regular content, both so that your customers can look forward to updates from your channel and to increase the number of people that you reach.” , says Christoph Abels from RCKT on their blog post on that analysis. Figuring which posting patterns are the most successful ones, our metric XX helps analysts to optimize the own social media strategy.

With the help of this metric you can identify clear posting patterns of the analyzed groups. Based on that Instagram Marketing can easily be adjusted by optimizing own posting times.

3. Customer interaction

For this it is essential to have a clear view on how you want to be perceived on Twitter. Your businesses communication here should be aligned with the communication in other channels. Ask yourself what the share of own content and curated content should be. This is a good way to start to engage with opinion leaders and start a conversation with those. Analyzing Rossmann and dm clear differences can be seen. Rossman posts in a higher frequency as dm but interacts less. This pattern can also be seen when examining the performance of company-specific hashtags. The hashtag #rossmann has a total of 197,402 interactions, whereas the interactions for #neuimdm total 345,570.

To use hashtags successfully already-existing hashtags such as #summertime, #summerfeeling etc. should be combined with unique, company-specific hashtags. Thus, a company is able to differentiate, engage their users and ensures higher exposure.

4. Network / Community

Building a community around your product, service or in this case Instagram account is essential and the main objective of many Instagram Marketing strategies. As described above dm relies heavily on the dialogue with the users and other potential followers. Identifying key influencers is important for every industry and seems to play a major role in the beauty industry, looking at Instagrammers who have a high exposure to the target group of a company.

Time to get a kickstart in your Instagram measurement! 

Any questions? We are just one tweet away!