Top 10 Brands on Instagram in Mexico

Mexico is ranked in 9th place for countries with the most Instagram users with over 22 million monthly active users.

Also, Mexico is in the fourth place – after the Philippines, Brazil and Argentina – when it comes to most time spent on social media. More precisely: the average Mexican spends about eight hours and one minute online every day! Yes, that’s true.

This time is spent on the smartphone, as it is their favorite device to browse the internet.

Let’s return to Instagram – the social media platform is getting more and more popular in the country and is catching up on Mexicans’ favorite social media platform Facebook.

A statistic of 2018, shows that 72% of all Instagram users in Mexico are between 18 and 35 years old.

But let’s dive a little deeper and take a look at how Mexico’s biggest brands are using Instagram. This article will give you insights on the performance of those brands plus what they do well and not so well. In which ways could they improve their strategy? Find out and get some learnings for your social media strategy as well.

Here are the brands that we’re analyzing: Cinépolis, Hola Mexico, Cinemex, Liverpool, Volaris, TV Azteca, ELLE Mexico, Aeromexico, Walmart Mexico, Samsung Mexico,  The report is based on data from February 12, 2019  until April 2, 2019.

Images are the predominant post type

The main post type that is used by the analyzed brands on Instagram in Mexico are images.

We just found two exceptions: Walmart Mexico and Samsung Mexico almost entirely post videos. Walmart Mexico mixes it up with carousel posts but posts no images at all – Samsung posts images additionally to videos but never posts carousels.

Elle Mexico and Cinépolis are the only brands that have a good content mix. Yes, they mostly post images but in comparison to the other brands they also publish a good amount of videos and carousels. To make it more clear: the share for videos and carousels is 33.7% for Elle Mexico and 42.8% for Cinépolis.

On another note: Videos are getting more and more popular and also usually also get higher interactions, but as producing video content requires much more effort, it seems that the brands still stick to posting photos.

Our recommendation is to make an effort and mix your content up a little bit. This way, your audience is less likely to get bored always seeing the same type of postings. Also, you can analyze how your followers react to different post types. You can find out what kind of content they’re most attracted to. It could be, that your audience loves videos and heavily engages with them. This in turn, could be the first step towards a successful social media strategy!

Most of the brands lack a regular posting plan

Looking at the lower metric, it’s obvious that one of the brands is standing out with a high amount of daily published posts – it’s the TV channel Azteca. Now hold on tight: they upload around 60 posts a day! Those are mostly short video snippets and screenshots of their shows.

Knowing that, It’s not a surprise that Azteca has a very low interaction rate. Users simply can’t keep up with this high frequency of content and certainly won’t interact with every single post.

Brands on Instagram should be aware of the amount of content they are publishing. Instagram users can get annoyed pretty fast and perceive a high amount of content as spammy. The old rule still applies – quality over quantity.

For Azteca TV, it could make more sense to just pick out some highlights or teasers of a show or at least aggregate pieces of one type of show into a carousel. In doing so, they could increase their interaction rate and become more relevant on Instagram.

The nine other brands publish around five posts a day on average. What is noticeable though, is an irregularity within their posting strategy.

Samsung, Walmart, Aeromexico, Liverpool and Volaris for example don’t post at all on some days. That’s the half of the Top 10 Mexican Brands on Instagram!

The metrics below show you an example of Volaris, that posts very irregularly and some days even nothing at all in comparison to Cinemex, which has a rather regular posting strategy.

This could also be the reason why Cinemex is successful on Instagram. Consistency is key if you want to have long term success on  social media. Stay in people’s minds with a moderate amount of postings per day.

Nostalgia leads to high interactions  

The peaks in the average interactions per post for Cinépolis certainly can’t be overlooked when seeing the metric above. Because we wanted to find out the reason for such great results, we dug a bit deeper into the posts that led to Cinépolis’ high interactions.

Now looking at the posts that caused the peaks, there surely is a pattern: they show main characters of cult movies that everyone knows and loves.

Now this topic seems to trigger nostalgia and great memories in Cinépolis’ followers – like most people, they love to reminisce about the “good old times”.

It shows that if you want your followers to engage with your content, you have to provoke some kind of emotions within them and surprise them with something they haven’t seen in a long time. And in this example, it is certainly achievable with nostalgic content.

No matter in what kind of field you work in – you can always get nostalgic about something. Apparently, people love it!

This is also clearly recognizable with accounts like 90s.daily or 00scartoons that are related to music, fashion, art and movies from the 90s and 00s and are very (!) successful on Instagram.

When you look at the total interactions though, ¡HOLA! México, a celebrity magazine, takes the first place with 1,487,904 interactions in total during the analyzed time period. Cinépolis “just” takes the second place with 1,349,803 interactions.

This may be the case because ¡HOLA! posts more constantly: not a day goes by without a post on Instagram whereas Cinépolis doesn’t post anything on some days. It’s possible that Cinépolis’ Instagram account could be even more successful if they would come up with a consistent posting strategy and further engage their followers with nostalgic content.

Now let’s take a look at the reason for ¡HOLA!’s high average interactions per post. February surely was all about the Oscars – and as the mexican actress Yalitza Aparicio was nominated for the golden statue it’s not hard to understand why two of the most successful posts on ¡HOLA!’s Instagram account are about Yalitza.

But now there’s an interesting finding: the posts with a high amount of average interactions that follow right after the two Oscar posts don’t cover international stars but Mexican celebrities!

Takeaways for your Instagram strategy

Most of the Top Mexican brands already do a decent job but there’s still a lot of potential out there. Especially with being aware of the high number of Instagram users that are spending so much time on the platform. Instagram is not just about sharing some content from time to time – if you’re a brand, you need a strategy.

After analyzing the Top 10 Mexican brands on Instagram, we realized that there are some important aspects you should be aware of (or: we would like to remind you about), when working on your Instagram strategy:

1. Define your goal! What do you want to achieve with your Instagram account –  do you primarily want to increase brand awareness, generate traffic or maybe get more engagement?

2. Get to know your audience! And with that we mean, really get to know your audience. What kind of content do your followers enjoy? Find out at which time your followers are using the app, identify who they are (gender, age, location) and analyze which content of yours they’re enjoying most.

3. Make sure you have a good content mix. Try out different types of content such as videos, carousels and images and see what works best with your community. Also, don’t forget to create some good Instagram Stories! (link)

4. Consistency is key. You should really try to stick to a consistent posting plan. With so much content out there, you always have to stay on track and post regularly. Make sure your audience gets reminded of you and your product.

Related readings

https://www.quintly.com/blog/how-does-instagram-insights-work

https://www.quintly.com/blog/how-to-analyze-influencers

https://www.quintly.com/blog/instagram-analytics