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The Rise of Instagram for Brands
Instagram is a relative late-comer to the social media field, but the rise of instagram for brands is no surprise. Created in 2012, it was purchased by Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012. The purchase was derided by critics who saw Instagram as a one-trick pony. But it was quite a trick. While Facebook, Twitter and the other social media competitors focused on text-based communication, Instagram struck a real nerve among young people who were stretching their muscles with their new-found ability to create professional-looking photographs from their smartphone cameras, using Instagram filters to give their creations a more artistic or unique look.
The growth of Instagram is not a surprise to me. Instagram started to rise and grow its user base because it appealed to an audience that, frankly, was dissatisfied with Facebook. As advertising and clickbait started being pervasive on Facebook, the millennial generation and those younger became dissatisfied with their feeds being taken over by content they weren’t interested in. These are people who grew up with technology always in their hands. Now they could edit and morph the pictures they took into something more personal and more special than they had seen before.
The Rise of Instagram for Brands
At the time Instagram came along, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms were just starting to break free from their text chat-style beginnings. By the time they started incorporating simple photographs with posts, Instagram was already leading the pack with distinctive filters and other add-ons. Instagram is, at its core, story-by-photo rather than story-by-text. And there’s a whole generation that is flocking to it.
In Instagram, users lead with the photo first, followed by a few words of text. And, in most posts, the text is concentrated on hashtags to help identify specific categories the photo is associated with, rather than a prose-style description, as pervades in Facebook, Twitter and blog posts.
After the acquisition by Facebook, the company trod lightly on Instagram, giving it an influx of money, but not trying to turn it into a Facebook Jr. It took a few years after the purchase to start incorporating advertising on the platform, and only now are they working on an Application Programming Interface (API) to the platform. It was the addition of an API to Facebook and Twitter that let those platforms explode in the marketing space. With the API, people using Facebook and Twitter for marketing can plan campaigns well in advance and reduce the number of staffers required to post messages several times a day, seven days a week. Now, with its own API, the Instagram platform will be transformed for marketers.
What The Future of Instagram Look Like
I believe the introduction of a formal API will change Instagram. I don’t know whether or not it’s for the better or for the worse. But simply by the nature of allowing the scheduling of posts and content will definitely change the overall feel and tone of the platform. There’s no way to get around that. You’ll now have brands that are currently scheduling content weeks and months in advance on the other platforms doing the same thing on Instagram. I’m afraid you’ll have things that will feel off-tone because they were pre-planned, as opposed to happening in the moment.
Brands that are smart will have to find ways to minimize that feeling so that it can feel authentic. The users who have flocked to Instagram expect that out of the platform, because that’s the way it has been for such a long time. It is important for the Instagram team to maintain the appearance of displaying an event happening right now, and visually representing that it is happening now, in the moment, to keep its cool factor, which differentiates it from other platforms. If you break it down, Instagram is still the hipster at the party, not the old dude in the suit and tie.
As long as brands are intelligent about their using of this new Instagram API, I think they can avoid turning it into a warmed-over, more graphical version of Facebook.