Instagram is the ‘best platform
for brands’ in 2013, beating out
Facebook, Twitter, and Google+
John Koetsier
Instagram is the best platform for brands, according to a new
study that reviewed all brands on social with over 25 fans on
each of four major social platforms: Instagram, Facebook,
Twitter, and Google+.
“With increases in fan/follower engagement nearly three
times that of other networks studied, Instagram is the clear
winner for 2013,” SumAll CEO Dan Atkinson said. “If a
company has a visual product to sell and it’s currently not on
Instagram, that company is missing out on significant brand
awareness and revenue.”
SumAll, a business analytics tool, currently tracks over
100,000 businesses on social networks, analyzing over 290
billion social actions per year.
Across businesses that are on all four networks, SumAll says
that Instagram resulted in the most new followers in 2013 —
and significant revenue. Brands on Instagram saw an average
of 7 percent growth in both followers and engagement. And
while U.S. brands saw a nice little revenue lift from Instagram
— 1.5 percent to 5 percent — businesses in the U.K. reported
more, up to 3.6 percent.
Which means that social commerce may finally be a real
phenomenon.
Social media marketing expert Eric Dahan, the CEO of
Instabrand, agreed. Instabrand is a social marketing
organization focused on visual media. Right now that means
Instagram, but Vine, Tumblr, and Pinterest are on the horizon.
“Instagram is the best platform for brands,” he told me. “It’s
much stronger than Facebook.”
thumbs downInstabrand says its customers saw their followers
grow from zero to 30,000 in campaigns costing just $3,000
to $5,000. One jewelry company, NouviNomi, got 50,000
unique visitors to its site from Instagram in two months as a
result of a campaign that cost just $3,000.
“We average around 2 cents per engagement,” Dahan says.
“We can’t measure impressions — Instagram doesn’t allow
it — but we can measure engagement. If you have 200,000
followers, we’ll see 3,000 to 15,000 likes for a post, for a
2 percent to 10 percent engagement rate. Sometimes that
jumps to 20 percent.”
Clearly, with a visual medium, visual brands that can
communicate via images do best.
SumAll says that fashion retailer In God We Trust credits 2.3
percent of its revenue to Instagram, a number that may sound
small but is actually huge for social commerce stemming
from just one mobile social network. And SumAll’s Atkinson
says that a bicycle manufacturer, Pure Fix Cycles, reports that
every Instagram post it publishes is worth roughly $100 in
revenue.
That’s impressive.
The best approach on Instagram, Dahan says, is not what
you might think. Many brands are turning to celebrity
endorsements as a quick-fix strategy to drive views,
engagement, and ultimately revenue, but that can backfire.
“We match businesses with users that already like the brand,”
he told me. “We tend not to like using celebrities — they’re
almost corporate now, and people know they’re promoting
a product just because they’re getting paid. We like to use
grassroots people.”
And other networks, such as Facebook and Twitter?
“Twitter is mainly text-based … great for articles and headlines
… but not as good for brands,” he said. “And Instagram is …
much stronger than Facebook.”