Instagram: The Trends and Strategies That are Working Best
If a few years ago Instagram was a social network for young people and modern youth in a specific way, now it has become a ubiquitous social network, one that reaches a variety of consumers and, above all, in the new space and setting that brands want to conquer.
Instagram is the new fashion social network for companies and brands, who want to settle in it and want to get the best out of it.
However, as with any social network in its emerging moment, they are still not entirely clear about what they can get out of it and how they can do it. They need to know what is working on Instagram and what are the trends and strategies that give results.
A study by Quintly has analyzed the data of nine million posts published on Instagram, to reach conclusions about what is happening on the social network and above all to detect what is working and what is not in this scenario.
Some of his conclusions fit quite well with what is expected from the social network. For example, updates published over the weekend tend to present better data and better results than those that are uploaded during the week.
The bonanza of gaining followers is not yet over
One of the critical points to connect with audiences on social networks is the moment when the network reaches maturity and when a kind of limit is reached. Suddenly, the growth that seemed so easy and the accumulation of new users that seemed so simple stop being so. Instagram has not yet reached that stage.
According to the data of the study, the profiles were growing between 17 and 33%, which has been the average growth fork of the different types of profiles. The ones that have grown the most have been profiles with medium to medium-sized followers. Those who started with between 1,000 and 10,000 followers did so by 33.7% and those who were between 10,000 and 100,000 by 29.7%.
Instagram begins to have its golden moment on video
Another of the great obsessions of brands and companies when it comes to social networks is to find what is the type of content that works best. They need to know which is the golden key that will open the door of great engagement. The moment of the video has just arrived on Instagram. Images are still the most common content in posts, but video is the one that works best. They achieve 18.6% more interactions than photo carousels and 21.2% more than photos.
A lot is being written on Instagram
What matters are the images or at least that’s what we take for granted when we think about Instagram and the essence of the social network. It is a network of photos, after all. And yet the updates are filling up with text and are increasingly using longer written content.
In fact, the study has detected that 31% of the updates already have very long texts in the description: so much that they exceed 300 characters. This figure far exceeds those who trust only the image. Only 1.1% of the publications have zero characters and only 8.2% stay between 1 and 50. The rest are divided between 50 to 150 characters (29.1%) and 150 to 300 characters (30%). .
This occurs despite the fact that, according to the study data, very long descriptions obtain worse results than shorter posts.
The hashtag thing … it’s still complicated
Hashtags are the element that causes updates to be found and helps increase the visibility of updates.
But despite everything, it is still not very clear how or when they should be used, or that is what could be concluded by looking at the study results. A significant number of updates still do not use them. 28.9% of posts on the social network still do not use hashtags. 36.2% stays between 1 and 3, which is the most used volume. 13% use more than 10 and 21.9% get between 4 and 10.
Emojis are still ground to conquer
Although emojis have become a ubiquitous element and despite the fact that they are increasingly present in more and more spaces, they still have Instagram to conquer. According to the study’s conclusions, 54.9% of the profiles (which is more than half, let’s not lose sight of it) still do not use emojis at all in their updates. 35.8% use between 1 and 3 emojis in communications and 8.3% between 4 and 10. 1% goes beyond 10.
This may be an error in the activity of the profiles, because – as a previous study by Quintly also demonstrated – emojis have a very positive impact on the reception of messages. The power of these elements is quite eye-catching: an emoji can drive Instagram interactions up 47.7%. Therefore, they are not simply something fun, decorative or that helps to better position the empathy of the receiver, but something that achieves better results in interactions and engagement.