NATIONAL REPORT—All hoteliers know that social media is an important piece of digital strategy, but some social media platforms are better utilized than others. For instance, Yesmail, the digital marketing services provider within Yes Lifecycle Marketing, analyzed more than 2,000 brands on social platforms and found that not many are on Instagram.
“Instagram is still fairly new to the advertising game as it just introduced sponsored posts in 2013, so it’s possible that brands are still warming up to the idea of using it for marketing purposes. Before sponsored posts and its Carousel feature, Instagram wasn’t a major player in the advertising field and was probably viewed as a nice-to-have rather than a must-have,” explained Bob Sybydlo, director, intelligence products, Yesmail, of possible reasons why brands are slow to adopt the channel.
However, while the rollout of ads on the platform has been measured, according to Instagram, 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.
And the company’s advertising game is evolving. Instagram recently announced a few changes to its ad platform that it will focus on next: expanding ad offerings to include action-oriented formats, enabling more targeting capabilities, and making it easier for businesses large and small to buy ads on Instagram.
The company has begun testing direct-response formats, which it says will enable people to learn about a product or service and then take action directly from an ad to sign up on a website, buy a product, or download an app. Additionally, Instagram will work with Facebook to enable advertisers to reach people on Instagram based on demographics and interests, as well as information businesses have about their own customers. It will also improve the feedback mechanisms within Instagram to give people greater control and improve the relevance of the ads they see. Finally, the company is working to make Instagram advertising available through an Instagram Ads API and Facebook ad buying interfaces over the coming months.
There are more than two million advertisers who actively use Facebook to market their business and, according to Instagram, it wants to leverage the best of Facebook’s infrastructure for buying, managing and measuring the success of ads on Instagram. It will start by opening the Instagram Ads API to a select group of Facebook Marketing Partners and agencies, and plans to expand globally throughout the year.
However, according to Yesmail’s study, many brands have yet to get on board, with only 30.8% of hotel brands represented on the platform. By comparison, of the hotel, restaurant, retail and consumer- packaged-goods brands analyzed, 80% have Facebook pages, 83% are active on Twitter and 60% engage on YouTube. More than a third of the brands have a Google+ profile. The research found that, when brands promote themselves via three social channels, only 12% include Instagram. If they add a fourth channel, that jumps to 37%, and brands that use five channels jump to 47%.
However, the research also showed that Instagram could be a high-engagement channel. Brands on Instagram experienced a 278% growth in followers in 2014, according to Yesmail. Retailers included in the research observed on average an 8% increase in followers per month, which was double the rate of other platforms analyzed.
“Instagram is an extremely engaging platform, boasting more than 300 million users and 70 million photos and videos shared daily,” said Sybydlo. “Instagram’s platform enables users and brands to not only share a picture, but tell a story with their posts. The hospitality industry is a very visual industry, making Instagram the perfect platform to engage an audience. Hospitality’s multiple verticals—hotels, travel, theme parks, etc.—leave plenty of room for brands to tell a story and entice visitors.”