Instagram is about engagement, not conversions

An interesting new study makes it clear what exactly is in it for brands when they decide to get involved in Instagram publishing: Engagement.

If you’re a brand publisher and looking at Instagram (or Vine for that matter) as a conversion platform then you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the tool. Yes, you can shoe-horn a link into the caption with a photo of video if you really, really need to. But within the apps there’s no way to click those links.

Instead, Instagram and Vine are about engagement and branding. It’s about visual storytelling, not directly selling a product, and reaching a fast-growing audience with that story. It’s about building awareness, taking the audience behind the scenes and presenting a fun side of the brand more than anything else.

All that being said, while Instagram can be a fun platform for brands to play on, it’s not for everyone. First off, there’s nothing you can do on Instagram that you can’t do on Twitter or even Facebook, even though the latter doesn’t feature the same filter features. But more than that there’s nothing preventing photo sharing on Twitter or Facebook, so ideally there’s already a visual storytelling plan in place as part of the overall content marketing strategy. And that has to be more than just promotional graphics, which aren’t likely to go over well on Instagram. Instead it’s about the other stuff, the nice photograph that clearly shows off the product or whatever but which isn’t an image that’s been art-directed by the Marketing department, at least not all the time.