Instagram, the online photo sharing social Web service, has recently become a social phenomenon. As one of the most popular social networking sites in the world, it lets users share their life with friends through a series of pictures captured with a mobile device. Since being bought by Facebook in 2012, Instagram has expanded to eight countries and has seen many of the best marketers and agencies in the world embrace their network to achieve their branding objectives.
On June 2, 2015, Instagram announced plans to open the Instagram feed to all advertisers in order to make Instagram ads available to a variety of businesses. Marketers will be able to target ads to users by interest, age, gender and other factors just as they can on Facebook. Instagram will also begin testing a type of ad that allows viewers to click on a link to buy a product or install an app that is advertised.
According to Instagram’s blog, “This past year, we have worked across brands, agencies and our community to design an advertising experience that feels native to the platform. And we’ve made our ad formats more impactful, from photo and video ads to carousel ads that allow brands to tell a deeper story and provide a link for people to learn more.” In result, across more than 475 campaigns measured globally with Nielsen Brand Effect, ad recall from sponsored posts on Instagram was 2.9x higher than Nielsen’s norms for online advertising.
Here are the two most important things about the new advertising platform on Instagram:
- Empowering people and advertisers to do more. With Instagram’s new ad formats, it will help evolve brands and achieve goals. Not only will this help advertisers, but the community as well. Users will be able to learn about a product or service, and then take action by signing up on a website, buying a product or downloading an app. In the coming days they will begin testing some of these direct-response formats.
- More relevance through enhanced targeting. By working with Facebook, Instagram will allow advertisers to reach people on Instagram based on demographics and interests, as well as information businesses have about their own customers. These improvements will give people greater control and improve the relevance of the ads they see.
Are you a fan of the new advertising on Instagram? Learn more about the ads here: http://blog.business.instagram.com/post/120537653811/the-next-steps-for-ads-on-instagram-new-formats
