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Instagram Numbers All Marketers Need to Know

Instagram has fast become a social media network behemoth to rival the best of them. According to statistics taken from their website, Instagram now boasts 200m monthly active users, and an average of 60m photos posted every day. Not bad for a company that only launched a little over four years ago.

Considering these numbers, it’s no surprise that numerous brands have flocked to the site. But until now, there has been limited data available about what actually works and what doesn’t. That has now changed thanks to social media analytics company Simply Measured. They have studied the Interbrand top 100 list to derive meaningful insight that will pique the attention of marketers everywhere. The study encompasses more than 6,000 posts by 80 brands, 113m likes and 1.3m comments.

The following infographic from Simply Measured gives a few highlights from their study. One stat of particular interest is that mentioned another user in your post increases engagement by 56%. Only 36% of the posts they looked at did this, so big brands should be very keen to change this.
infographic
Some other key insights that marketers will find enlightening include:
• Posts that tag a location receive a whopping 79% more engagement; only 5% of the posts in the study used this feature.
• The average caption is 138 characters long (why does that length sound familiar?), and there is no correlation between post length and engagement levels.
• Hashtags are a huge part of Instagram, and including even just one will increase engagement levels by more than 12%.
• If your posts seems to be performing lower than expectations in the immediate hours after sharing, don’t be alarmed. The highest performing posts peak later, with more than 50% of comments on the top posts arriving after 13 or more.

The full study is available to download from Simply Measured and is sure to make very interesting reading for the many marketers who have been eagerly awaiting exactly this kind of study for Instagram.

In the meantime, keep a close eye on the big brands you follow on Instagram to see if they adopt any of these engagement increasing methods.

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Ignacio Cassinelli
nacho.cassinelli@acmconnect.com