It is no secret nowadays that Instagram is a platform that has had an astronomical growth since its launch in 2010 since today it has more than 1 billion users around the world.

According to a recent report, more than 600 million users sign in at least once a day, 500 million people use Stories daily and by 2020, users will spend a minimum of 28 minutes per day in the application.

Taking this growth and evolution into account, Instagram has become an essential communication platform for brands. It is also the one that has the most impact on users, well above than Facebook and Twitter, as users get 23% more engagement on the same images shared on Instagram than on Facebook. Also, the brands get 10 times more engagement on Instagram than on Facebook.

 

*Source www.squarelovin.com

The statistics of the platform are overwhelming as well as the options it offers for users and brands to do things differently. That’s why the challenge becomes to stand out and captivate the audience among so many options available.

 

These are the 6 key Instagram data you should know for this 2020:

  1. 95 million posts are shared daily on the platform
  2. The most active group is between 18-35 years of age.
  3. 1.3% of users click on sales publications every month.
  4. 73% of teenagers in the US believe that Instagram is the best channel to see brands or to watch their ads.
  5. 32% of users visit at least one commercial site once a day.
  6. 62% of users say they are more interested in a brand after having seen it on Instagram stories.

 

No likes, no gain?

Since mid-2019, Instagram began implementing the function of hiding the likes count in some countries such as Canada, Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Italy and Japan. A study conducted in Canada shows that some influencers suffered a 41% loss of engagement after their likes were hidden by the application.

The influencers reported receiving fewer likes, comments and new followers so most of them were not very comfortable with this adjustment. In turn, this has resulted in brands not being able to see the influencers’ statistics directly and therefore making it more difficult for them to define who they want to collaborate with.

Regarding this, opinions are quite divided; There are those who defend the measure because it discourages competition between users since without visibility, likes simply don’t matter, which could be beneficial for the mental health of users and help reduce the levels of anxiety generated by the comparison.

There are also strong detractors of this measure since some influencers have seen severely affected their engagement levels with the consequent negative impact on their income through a loss of collaborations with brands.

This opens a very interesting debate about what should be done in terms of generating content for social networks; Without the option of openly viewing likes, users have more need to be creative and generate content that really connects them with their target audience.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

An example of this is the UGC (user generated content); this is real content from real users who share opinions about their experiences with the products or brands they have tried. This type of content is already a trend that is taking over in response to the need of building trust among users and consumers.

Brands that use UGC can achieve up to 7 times more engagement on Instagram than brands that only use traditional Ads. For Social Ads, the UGC reduces on average both the cost per click (CPC) and the cost per acquisition in half.

 

Key data you should know about UGC

Source: www.squarelovin.com/blog/infographic-instagram-2020

The evolution of the Stories

Since the birth of stories on Instagram, this utility has evolved drastically and has become a fundamental function of the application.

Today, the platform allows you to transfer its stories to Facebook stories, create music videos, create collages of various images, add animated filters, among many more options. These implementations have been changing the utility of the application as an advertising channel, which will be a decisive element in how brands adapt and configure their strategies to maximize their presence and growth on Instagram.

Increasingly brands seek to stand out and cut through the “noise” of social networks and the stories utility are a creative way to reach their audience. 73% of teenagers in the US say that Instagram is the best way for brands to impact them and 62% say they were interested in a brand after having seen an ad through stories.

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

The new functions of the platform, such as ‘Layout’, allow us to diversify the way in which both brands and influencers create content in an organic and fun way to be able to stand out.

And while it is true that today there is a lot of competition due to the “democratization” of the information generated by the social media, now the challenge and the new trend is to be creative and “real” in order to be able to succeed and captivate.

 

 

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