Instagram, the enormously popular photo-sharing app, has announced that ads are to roll-out on the platform in the UK later this year, with Canada and Australia to follow.
Launched in 2010, the platform currently has an estimated user base of 200 million, with 70% of users checking the platform at least once a day.
Instagram began trialling adverts in the US late last year after it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. Since then the company has been looking for ways to integrate marketing without “jeopardising Instagram’s cool factor”
In December last year, the company posted the results of its first US sponsored ad campaigns, revealing that all four initial campaigns measured, which appeared in the home feed on mobile, resulted in marketers achieving ‘high impact’ with a low average frequency of ad impressions per user.
Levi’s reached 7.4 million people in the US across a nine day period, targeting people aged 18-34, while Ben & Jerry’s reached 9.8 million people in the US over an eight day period, targeting people aged 18-35.
Across the four initial campaigns, Instagram reported a ten-point incremental lift in brand message awareness per campaign for people who were repeatedly exposed to a particular campaign versus control groups.
In particular, 17% of people who saw a single ad for Ben & Jerry’s Scotchy Scotch Scotch flavoured ice cream not only became aware of the new flavour, but also associated it with the brand.
In March, Instagram announced it had signed a deal with advertising giant Omnicom worth an estimated $40 million.
A recent report from Forrester found that Instagram is “significantly more engaging” than any other social networking platform, making it an attractive offer for brands.
Studying more than three million user interactions with 2,500 brand posts on seven social networks, the research revealed that while six of the seven networks achieved an engagement rate of less than 0.1%, Instagram posts generated a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21%.
The results mean that Instagram delivered the selected brands 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook, and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter.
Looking at a video that Red Bull posted on both Facebook and Instagram, Forrester found that after a few days the brand’s 43 million Facebook fans had liked the video just 2,600 times, while its 1.2 million Instagram followers had liked the video more than 36,000 times – a 0.006% likes-per-fan rate and 3% likes-per-fan rate, respectively.
