How Instagram’s Changes Will Affect Your Marketing
Instagram is quickly climbing up the popularity charts, and its takeover by Facebook is proof of that fact. However, there have been a few changes within Instagram that will definitely affect those who use the photo sharing portal to reach out to and advertise about themselves. Many will have to re-strategise their marketing plans after the changes were implemented on Instagram.
Instagram’s changes and what it means to your brand and marketing strategy
One of the more significant changes that have been made to Instagram is the change to an algorithm based feed. This means that now you can no longer view news feeds in a chronological order; instead, only those updates will be visible for the one that you are actively following. This can be a good thing and also a bad thing. It is a welcome change for those users who log in after a long gap. For them, it is preferable to see the feeds that they are interested in and care about rather than of just all the feeds from those they are following. But for all the artists and small businesses this news is far from welcome since they fear that their pictures or updates might not appear in the list for followers since the order of ‘most recent’ will not be followed.
However, Instagram looks forward to increase the number of users via this algorithm based feed as they can be kept engaged by showing them only what they are interested in and keeping them hooked.
Impact of the changes
With these changes, the onus will be on brands and marketing teams to ensure that their content is powerful and engaging to make it to the top of the list since content will be ‘king’. Thus, the engagement rate of the content will be crucial for it to make the cut and reach a wider audience. Marketing will need to be planned, considering the engagement rate and the content, since both are interlinked. Your content will decide whether your post reaches a wider audience or whether it lacks the engaging factor and therefore drops on the overall reach. Thus, the focus will be on quality over quantity of the post.
Additionally with the changes, Instagram will witness a lot of paid advertising for brands and businesses to reach out to the users. It is an obvious step; as the chronological feeds are replaced by the aggregated ones, businesses will look at ways to reach to a wider audience along with new users. Instagram advertising is the solution since Instagram will offer effective as well as sophisticated advertising.
Apart from this, the demand for influencers will also increase. They will be sought to help market artists and businesses to wider audiences. With increasing demand the pressure on them to perform will also increase and thereby improve quality and overall reach.
Additionally videos on Instagram will be 60 seconds now, longer than before. This means brands and businesses can take advantage of the longer video duration to post effective and quality content and engage the attention of greater audiences.
Instagram’s changes definitely mean that you must rethink and re-strategise your marketing plans. A combination of paid advertising with organic marketing using influencers will be ideal for brands and businesses to market on Instagram.