Meta Launches Threads: Advertiser Q&A

Meta Launches Threads: Advertiser Q&A

by Taylor Hart Instagram Meta Threads Twitter

In just five days, Meta’s Threads app has become the fastest-growing app in history, with 100 million users, and counting. Threads is basically a Twitter clone, and because it’s connected to a user’s Instagram account, so far both brands and people alike have been posting content that pretty much resembles what they’d post on Twitter and Insta. Let’s take a closer look at Threads by answering some commonly asked questions brands might have about it.

What exactly is Threads, and why does it exist?

As noted, Threads gives its user base a place to post the same kind of rapid-fire posts that they share on Twitter and Instagram. There is a 500-character limit for posting. Users can respond to each other’s posts, and they can link to photos, video, and external URLs as with Twitter. It’s one of a handful of Twitter rivals, including Bluesky and Mastadon, that have emerged to challenge Twitter’s long-established lead as a micro-blogging platform.

Interest in Threads has intensified in light of Twitter’s ongoing service problems and a reported rise in hate speech on Twitter, which has made the app less appealing for both brands and everyday users. Twitter has 354 million users – which is a sizable audience, making it tempting for a rival to create its own similar platform. But Twitter is a firmly ensconced platform. It would take someone with a lot of clout to rival the company. Meta has that kind of clout.

How do you sign up for Threads?

You need to have an Instagram account to sign up. From there, you download the app from your iOS or Android device.

Wait – I have to have an Instgram account to sign up for Threads? What are the implications of Threads being connected to Instagram?

Yes, you need to be on Instagram to be on Threads. Technically, Threads is in fact a stand-alone social network with its own app, but you need Instagram to sign up for it.

When you sign up for Threads, you can choose to auto-follow all of the accounts you follow on Instagram. This means that if your Instagram followers also sign up for Threads, they will automatically start following you back.

This is a great way to grow your Threads following quickly. However, it’s important to note that not everyone who auto-follows you will be interested in your content. So, it’s still important to post high-quality content and engage with your followers.

But what if you don’t want to be on Threads anymore? Well, if you decide you don’t like Threads, you cannot delete your Threads account unless you also delete your Instagram account.

If you violate Threads’s community guidelines and get your Threads account banned, your Instagram account will also be banned. To change your Threads username, you must also change your Instagram username.

How did Threads get so big so fast?

It’s all about the Instagram integration. Threads has instant access to Instagram’s 2.35 billion monthly active users. Meta made it easy for anyone to sign up through Instagram – and that’s not all. Meta also made it easy to import your Instagram profile. The auto-follow button, which allows your new Threads account to follow every account you follow on Instagram, created an instant Threads following for anyone on Instagram.

What kind of content should I post on Threads?

For now, businesses and people are posting the same kind of content that they post on Twitter and Instagram. So, what’s good for those platforms will be just right for Threads. Remember, your initial following comes from your Instagram audience – so it makes sense to be as visual as you can.

Social Media Manager Bri Reynolds suggests that you go grab your top-performing evergreen tweets, post one or a few as your initial Thread content. You’ve already proven they’re successful elsewhere.

Down the road, as Threads evolves, brands might develop a separate content strategy for Threads. But for now, Threads has quickly become a platform for cross-posting.

What caveats should I be aware of?

As noted above, if you want to delete your Threads, you need to delete your Insta.

Threads lacks a lot of functionality that users have become accustomed to on other platforms, including a lack of hash tagging and direct messaging capacity. There is no desktop version, and there is no chronological feed (although Instagram says a chronological feed will be coming soon).

Threads collects the same data as its parent company. This includes users’ physical addresses, health and fitness data, and sensitive information such as biometric and ethnic data. Twitter, on the other hand, does not collect these types of data.

Being present on Threads could become burdensome to your social media team. There is a tremendous amount of pressure for brands to experiment there. Make sure you have the bandwidth.

Is advertising coming to Threads?

Not yet. But as reported in Advertising Age, Meta is talking with ad agencies and brands about how the platform will work and has shared a presentation with several agencies outlining how Threads could potentially become the new Twitter. Meta has told advertisers that it will ensure brand safety by applying Instagram’s own community guidelines. If you want to get an early take on how Threads advertising will work, Instagram’s own ad units are a good place to start given the integration of the two apps.

Here are some specific examples of how Threads advertising may work (based on the Instagram experience):

  • Advertisers may be able to target their ads to users based on their interests, location, or demographics.
  • Ads may be displayed in the form of sponsored posts, promoted stories, or promoted video.
  • Ads may be placed alongside organic content in the Threads feed.

It is still too early to say exactly how Threads advertising will work, but one thing is certain: ads will come to Threads.

Contact True Interactive

At True Interactive, we’re following the rise of Threads closely. To succeed in the ever-changing world of online advertising, contact True Interactive. Read about some of our client work here, and learn about our social media services here.

Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-close-up-of-a-cell-phone-with-a-keyboard-in-the-background-vk8iRvRjoAg

Why Meta’s Lattice Architecture Matters

Why Meta’s Lattice Architecture Matters

by Taylor Hart Artificial Intelligence Meta

Meta continues to demonstrate resilience. In 2022, the company took at $10 billion hit to its bottom after Apple’s privacy controls diminished Meta’s ability to target users with advertising that relies on third-party cookies. Since then, Meta has been developing better ad products that help the company develop targeted ads via first-party data, or the information that customers share with Meta on its apps such as Facebook and Instagram. Meta recently announced a potential breakthrough with Meta Lattice, which uses AI to improve ad targeting.

What Is Meta Lattice?

Meta Lattice is a new model architecture developed by Meta AI that improves the performance and efficiency of Meta’s ads systems. Meta Lattice is a high-capacity architecture that allows the ads system to understand new concepts and relationships more broadly and deeply in data. Meta says this benefits advertisers through joint optimization of a large number of goals.

Meta Lattice is also capable of generalizing its learnings across domains and objectives. This means that it can be used to improve the performance of ads across a variety of apps, such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Meta also says that Lattice can be used to improve the performance of ads even as the way people use Meta’s products changes.

The Potential Impact of Meta Lattice

Here’s a good before/after way to demonstrate the impact of Lattice.

  • Before: Meta had segmented advertising data. Meta maintained distinct datasets for ads presented in feeds, stories, Facebook and Instagram video reels, and other formats. This was also true for objectives, as ads targeting conversion, traffic, and video views were kept separate.
  • Soon: Meta will unify all this information using AI. With Meta Lattice, the platform will decipher patterns that result in enhanced ad performance across various ad formats, objectives, and types. This unification presents Meta’s machine learning algorithms with a larger dataset for learning. According to Meta, this implies better predictions for identifying the most suitable audience for your advertisements, resulting in more conversions through your Facebook Ads Manager — if Lattice does its job.

Meta Lattice is still under development, but it has already shown results. Meta says that in one test, Lattice was able to improve the click-through rate of ads by 10 percent. Meta Lattice is expected to be used to improve the performance of Meta’s ads systems in the future.

Potential Benefits

Here are some of the potential benefits of Meta Lattice:

  • Improved performance: Meta Lattice is able to improve the performance of ads by understanding new concepts and relationships in data.
  • Improved efficiency: Meta Lattice is able to generalize its learnings across domains and objectives, which makes it more efficient to use.
  • Faster adaptability: Meta Lattice is able to adapt to the fast-evolving market landscape, which makes it more effective at delivering relevant ads to users.

It is important that advertisers understand how Meta is developing new ad products. For instance Meta’s Advantage+ ads provide performance marketers advancing ad targeting tools.

As these AI-based platforms evolve, they may become more significant drivers of response, which could help you target the right audience for your offerings without needing to manually set the parameters of each campaign. However, we caution against any advertiser turning over the keys to AI. Advertising campaigns require human supervision to ensure that they continue to meet your objectives. AI advertising tools require human oversight to ensure that its output is accurate, free of bias, and consistent with your brand voice, among other needs.

Contact True Interactive

To succeed in the ever-changing world of online advertising, contact True Interactive. Read about some of our client work here.

Image source: https://pixabay.com/users/knfind-22056618/

How Meta Is Rebounding

How Meta Is Rebounding

by Taylor Hart Meta

Meta is back.

The company’s market capitalization lost considerable value in 2022 after failing to meet its financial targets. A costly investment into the emerging metaverse has been ridiculed. But Meta is showing signs of a much brighter 2023.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that:

  • The company’s investments into artificial intelligence (AI) have helped Meta improve ad-targeting systems to make better predictions based on less data.
  • Meta’s short-form video product, Reels, is becoming more popular on Meta’s core Facebook and Instagram platforms.
  • The development of ad products based on user data from Meta’s own platforms is easing the blow of Apple’s privacy restrictions. Those restrictions, focusing on ad products that rely on third-party user data, had forced Meta to retool its ad strategy away from third-party user tracking to first-party data (the information that Meta gains from users from its own platforms such as Facebook and Instagram).

Reels Gains Traction

All of these developments are noteworthy. For instance, Reels is Meta’s answer to TikTok, whose dramatic rise, based on short-form videos, has threatened Meta. So, more user engagement with Reels should attract more advertisers.

The Wall Street Journal said that Tom Alison, head of Facebook, wrote in a memo to staff, “Facebook engagement is stronger than people expected. Our internal data indicates that Meta has grown to a meaningful share of short-form video.” And on Facebook alone, Meta can count on a large, engaged user base.

Facebook engagement

Reportedly, Meta has credited improvements to both Facebook’s algorithms and the computing systems on which they run, resulting in a 20 percent gain in time spent in Reels consumption. This is quite a turnaround from summer 2022, when Meta was still struggling to get users to embrace Reels videos.

More Effective Ad Products

Meta suffered a blow in 2021 when Apple introduced privacy controls that resulted in people opting out of having their online behavior tracked while using Apple products. This was a problem because Meta’s ad products rely mostly on tracking people across the web via third-party cookies. The privacy controls have forced Meta to do a better job building ad products based on user behavior on Meta’s own platforms (which Apple’s privacy controls do not affect).

Meta estimated last February that the Apple change would cost it more than $10 billion in lost sales for 2022, equivalent to about 8 percent of its total revenue for 2021. At the time, the news caused Meta’s stock price to plummet.

But Meta is gaining traction with new ad products. For instance, Meta’s broad targeting ad program consists of an automated targeting approach that reportedly produces better results for Facebook and Instagram ads than more refined, more niche audience approaches do. Meta is also developing ads in which users click straight into a messaging conversation with a business.

But ads based on first-party data are only 18 percent of Meta’s revenue, according to The Wall Street Journal. Meta has a lot of work to do.

Key Issues Going Forward

Meta recently reported better-than-expected results in its most recent quarterly earnings announcement. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said 2023 is a “Year of Efficiency,” which means managing spending carefully. Key questions going forward:

  • How well Meta will use AI to recommend Reels content to Facebook and Instagram users. The more targeted the recommendations, the higher the engagement rates. Meta needs people to stay engaged on Reels like they are glued to their TikTok videos. Engagement means advertising revenue from businesses that want to target those users with content.
  • The performance of ad products based on first-party data. Businesses should continue to ask their Meta ad representatives for developments in this area.
  • How well Meta manages its costly investment into the still young metaverse, which remains a sore spot for the company. The metaverse generates no advertising revenue streams to speak of for Meta.

At True Interactive, we advocate for our clients that invest in Meta and other platforms. We will continue to monitor developments and adapt our ad strategies as needed.

Contact True Interactive

To succeed in the ever-changing world of online advertising, contact True Interactive. Read about some of our client work here.

Lead photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@solomin_d

How Effective Is TikTok as an Advertising Platform?

How Effective Is TikTok as an Advertising Platform?

by Taylor Hart TikTok

By Tim Colucci, Taylor Hart, and Bella Schneider 

TikTok is an advertising juggernaut. The app doubled its ad revenues in 2022 according to an industry estimate. Rivals such as YouTube were directly affected. And TikTok continues to roll out new capabilities that appeal to businesses, such as livestream commerce. This is all the more remarkable considering the fact that TikTok has been operating under the threat of being banned in the United States for the past few years.

But just how effective is TikTok as an ad platform? Our own experiences working with TikTok have seen mixed results.

Inconsistent Performance with Conversions

TikTok has both impressed and disappointed us when it comes to conversions such as app downloads, purchases, and leads. On the positive side, one of our clients running social ads increased ROI on TikTok by over 18% in Q3 compared to Q1.

In Q3 on TikTok, we launched conversion campaigns (as well as upper-funnel) for this client, which definitely affected the increase in ROI because in Q1 we only were running upper-funnel campaigns on TikTok.

But when we look at results for other clients – specifically for lead-generation-based mobile app campaigns — we have seen disappointing conversion numbers. For those clients, the cost per conversion on TikTok is higher than on other apps. Why? Probably because TikTok compels users to stay on the app and scroll continuously through a stream of content – as any TikTok user can attest. Taking the time to disengage from TikTok to download an app or to make a purchase is counterintuitive to how TikTok operates.

TikTok does offer tools for advertisers to drive conversions, such as an instant lead form, which creates a customized lead generation form with a call to action. As a result, the user need not leave the app to fill out a lead form. We have seen some success using the instant lead form, but nowhere near the conversion rates we’ve experienced on Facebook and Google. As a result, the cost per lead for TikTok is much higher than for Facebook and Google for lead-generation-based mobile app campaigns.

Awkward App Optimization Feature

Apps such as Facebook and TikTok offer features that make it possible for businesses to optimize multiple app campaigns based on different audiences, creative assets, and objectives. These are known as app event optimization (AEO). With AEO, a business can ensure that multiple campaigns are not competing with each other as they maximize their performance. We found that TikTok’s AEO feature is less effective than Facebook’s. For example, on Facebook, a business can optimize for both web and app campaigns together a lot more effectively than on TikTok. In at least one case, we found that multiple TikTok campaigns for the same brand were competing with each other, but fortunately our own team caught the issue early on and adapted our strategy.

Advice for Brands

  • Monitor your TikTok performance closely. As noted above, conversions can differ by type of campaign (in our case, social ads versus lead-generation-based mobile app campaigns). TikTok is still evolving as an ad platform, and TikTok ad accounts require more maintenance and proactive communication with the TikTok ad team. Keep on top of your performance and be ready to shift gears quickly as we have done.
  • Consider TikTok for brand awareness, but the jury is still out when it comes to conversions. Our campaigns have performed especially well when our objectives have been to achieve reach and brand lift. In our experience, TikTok CPMs are typically less expensive than CPMs for Facebook, Snap, or Pinterest.
  • Watch for new tools. TikTok will continue to roll out new tools to maximize its value, including more livestreaming features. Be alert for them and decide which ones are a possible fit for your brand – but treat them as experimental.
  • Consider the big picture. The conversation about TikTok as an ad platform could become moot if the app is banned in the United States owing to ongoing concerns about the app posing a security and privacy threat. Advertisers are staying true to TikTok as the app’s parent company ByteDance negotiates an agreement with the U.S. government. Could TikTok get sold? That’s a real possibility. Watch developments and be ready to adapt.

Contact True Interactive

At True Interactive, we work with our clients to maximize the value of all their online advertising, including social media spend. We strongly advocate for our clients as we work with apps such as TikTok. Contact us to learn how we can help you.

Why Mobile Is Soaring — and What That Means for Advertisers

Why Mobile Is Soaring — and What That Means for Advertisers

by Taylor Hart Mobile

Back in 2020, we blogged about the rise in mobile marketing. At that time, all signs pointed to the wisdom of advertisers embracing mobile. Two years down the line, we’re here to report that businesses worldwide appear to have gotten the memo: according to App Annie’s State of Mobile in 2022 report, the pandemic has changed the way we work and play—and projected mobile ad spend for the year ahead reflects that sea change.

Consumers Are Online

According to App Annie, consumers are spending more and more time online. 2021 broke records for time spent on mobile: as reported by prnewswire.com, people spent a jaw-dropping 4.8 hours a day on mobile in the top 10 mobile markets. Downloads reached 230 billion, a figure that represents a five percent leap year over year.

Users certainly had plenty of options from which to choose: publishers have released two million new apps and games for a cumulative total of twenty-one million! That’s a lot of apps, although certain trends are apparent. Apps like TikTok tend to dominate: the report reveals that seven of every 10 minutes spent online was devoted to some sort of social, photo, and/or video app. TikTok ranked the No. 1 most-downloaded app globally, followed by Instagram and Facebook.

Consumers Are Spending

Users aren’t just passively watching. They are spending. App Annie notes that time spent in shopping apps jumped 18 percent year over year, reaching 100 billion hours. Fast fashion, social shopping, and big box players were the winners here. According to Marketing Dive, “Consumer spending across app stores grew 19% in 2021, hitting $170 billion.”

Dating apps also flourished, in part because meeting people in person has gotten thornier thanks to Covid. According to Business Standard, people relied more on dating apps to navigate the social distancing imposed by the pandemic, a practice some users have said they’ll continue even after Covid is in our rearview mirror. The numbers certainly tell a compelling story: worldwide consumer spend on dating apps has barreled past $4.2 billion, a whopping 55 percent increase from 2019.

Mobile Ad Spend Is Growing

Brands are taking note and responding accordingly. Compared to 2020, advertisers are investing in mobile ads 23 percent more, an approach that can take many forms:

  • Consider Snickers, which partnered with Spotify to reach out to users listening to music genres outside of their comfort zone. The “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” audio campaign used Spotify’s consumer data to target users branching out beyond their everyday listening. When a user streamed an atypical (for them) song, Snickers delivered an audio message—with a link to a branded “Hunger List.” The ads were customized to match the consumer’s favorite music genre.
  • The Pond’s beauty brand, on the other hand, navigated a saturated market to promote a new line of acne face wash in Indonesia. They leaned into augmented reality to do so, using the front-facing cameras on users’ phones to scan faces and determine which areas were prone to acne. The unique campaign was, in fact, the first AR face-detecting ad. That’s a feather in Pond’s cap.

According to App Annie, mobile app spend is only going up, with “mobile ad spend on track to hit $350 billion in 2022.”

What Does This Mean for Advertisers?

What can we learn from the stats, not to mention the brands that have already thrown their hat into the mobile ring? We recommend that you:

  • Consider the type of mobile advertising that makes sense for your brand. Each type of advertising—from videos to banner ads to pop-ups—has its own platform, design, and strengths. What type of mobile advertising will help you accomplish your goal?
  • Which brings us to the next point: understand your goals. Do you want to boost sales? Promote brand awareness? Increase traffic to your site? Knowing your objectives will help you craft the most effective campaign.
  • You also want to identify, and understand, your target audience. Knowing where they like to spend time online, and what type of messaging they respond to, will help make your outreach meaningful. Gen Z, for example, wants to interact with their favorite brands via online games or sponsored events. Boomers, on the other hand, tend to spend a lot of time on Facebook. To reach your target audience, you have to speak their language.
  • Finally, don’t skimp on design. Use high-resolution and high-quality designs and graphics in your outreach. And the design should align with your message and your brand. This may seem like common sense, but it’s a big sticking point: users won’t linger if your advertising is amateurish or seems phoned in for the sake of having something—anything—online.

Contact True Interactive

The App Annie report underlines that mobile advertising is exploding. Not sure how to bring mobile into your advertising strategy? Contact us. We can help.

Photo by Rami Al-zayat on Unsplash

Why Facebook Launched Shoppable Groups

Why Facebook Launched Shoppable Groups

by Taylor Hart Facebook

We all need a little help from our friends, and Facebook is leaning into this reality with its Shops in Groups. The social networking behemoth has announced that it will be making it easier to shop for products on the app, using connections with friends and trusted creators to gain inspiration — and find just the right gift. This development underscores how important social media is becoming as the holiday shopping season ramps up.

Facebook Announces Shoppable Groups

Facebook describes its mandate this way: Facebook wants to introduce new tools to “make shopping and buying better on our apps.” And Shops in Groups allows users to support the communities they are interested in by buying products from them. One example? Shops in Groups makes it possible for members of OctoNation, an octopus fan group on Facebook, to directly purchase stickers, mugs, and apparel related to their passion for the eight-limbed mollusks.

TechCrunch describes the new feature as follows: admins of Facebook groups can essentially set up an online store on their associated Facebook Page, and the admins can determine where the money goes. In the case of OctoNation, mentioned above, profits go straight to OctoNation’s nonprofit. And as Yulie Kwon Kim, Meta’s VP of Product Management, notes, the shops can offer a revenue stream to group admins, who tend to be volunteers. She says, “The money goes to the group admin, and they can decide how they want to use it. This is a great way for people to sustain and keep the group going.”

The feature appears to have legs: Ad Age reports that after testing on a smaller number of groups, Facebook is opening up shoppability to another 100,000 groups. And it’s worth noting how flexible the setup can be: groups can link to sites such as a Facebook Shop, Shopify store, or BigCommerce store. Making Groups shoppable is important because, as Facebook points out, more than 1.8 billion people are using Facebook Groups every month.

Facebook Shoppable Groups in the Context of Social Shopping

Facebook is tapping into the rise of social shopping — also known as social commerce. As we’ve blogged, social shopping accelerated in popularity during the pandemic — and it’s showing no sign of slowing down. Social media has evolved along with this trend, working to meet the needs of users who are inspired by what they see online.

The numbers are telling. According to ChannelAdvisor, 57 percent of people aged 26 to 35 had researched a product on Facebook. People on Facebook are not only receptive to social shopping, they are actually doing it. And according to Retail Dive, a whopping 87 percent of Gen Z will be looking to social media for shopping inspiration.

chart showing Instagram usage

Facebook is determined not to miss out on this trend. Moreover, the tech giant wants to give people more reasons to stay engaged with Facebook and use its advertising products.

What Brands Should Do

What does this mean for your brand? We suggest:

  • If you sell products online, consider Facebook as more than an advertising platform. Learn more about features such as Shops in Groups.
  • Master Facebook advertising products that appeal to people on Facebook (or find a partner who can do the heavy lifting for you – we manage Facebook advertising for our clients). The platform is clearly committed to making itself more engaging and useful to users: consider how that investment might benefit your brand.
  • As ever, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Balance your online presence between the major platforms that offer value in advertising — and shoppability.

Contact True Interactive

Eager to explore what Facebook — and other platforms — have to offer your brand? Contact us. We can help. Learn more our social media expertise here and our experience with shopping tools here.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

Why and How Instagram Is Leaning into Video

Why and How Instagram Is Leaning into Video

by Taylor Hart Instagram Social media

Instagram isn’t just about the photos anymore. As reported in The Verge, the social networking service is embracing entertainment and video in a bid to stay competitive with platforms like TikTok and YouTube. This isn’t the first time Instagram has gone head-to-head with TikTok: as we’ve blogged, Instagram launched Reels last August as a means of connecting with TikTok’s Gen Z audience. What do these new changes mean? Read on to learn more.

Not Just For Square . . . Photos

In a video posted on his Twitter and Instagram accounts, Instagram head Adam Mosseri explained that the platform no longer wants to be identified as a “square photo-sharing app,” rather as a hip general entertainment app driven by video — and algorithms. Mosseri says focus is on four key areas:

  • Creators, where Insta’s recognition of “the shift in power from institutions to individuals across industries” underlines Instagram’s desire to empower its creators.
  • Video, which is, as far as Mosseri is concerned, where it’s at. As he notes, “Video is driving an immense amount of growth online for all the major platforms right now.” His message: Instagram users have spoken. They want to be entertained. To stay relevant, Instagram is making video a tentpole of its offerings. Mosseri promises changes along the lines of users getting full-screen, recommended videos in their feeds, including videos from accounts a user may not already follow.
  • Shopping, to reflect the leap commerce has made from offline to online, a change accelerated by the pandemic.
  • Messaging, to honor the way close friends keep connected now — not by Feed and Stories, as has been the case in the past.

Reactions So Far

Reactions to Mosseri’s announcement have been mixed. Journalists are saying Instagram is responding to the rise of TikTok and YouTube, but as noted in Axios, warn that “[a]s social networks continue growing, they run the risk of overwhelming consumers and losing what made them special and distinct to begin with.”

And while Mosseri specifically names creators as a priority in his video, some creators, specifically photographers, are feeling marginalized and voting with their feet: Digital Photography Review reports that some photographers are defecting to Twitter in order to share their work in a space they feel is more dedicated to their art. Photographer Bryan Minear is a case in point. “In my eyes, Instagram stopped caring about artists and independent creators a long time ago,” he says. Minear, who switched to Twitter as his primary social media outlet in 2019, has found a vibrant photography community there.

Although Mosseri later tried to retract some of his wording — “We’re no longer a photo-sharing app or a square photo-sharing app” drew particular ire — his initial statement has aggravated photographers who feel an algorithm championing entertainment doesn’t put a premium on quality. “Instagram has done nothing but promote video-centric features at the expense of still photographers,” Minear says. “They’ve made it loud and clear that we aren’t welcome anymore.”

What Advertisers Should Do

What does all this mean for your brand? Is this “new” Instagram a good fit? We recommend that you:

  • Re-examine how you use video in your marketing and advertising. Clearly, video is getting bigger: 86 percent of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and 93 percent of marketers who use video say that it’s an important part of their marketing strategy. Instagram is showing where its allegiance lies. If video makes sense for you, Instagram might just be a viable advertising platform for you.
  • Consider the different ways influencers on Instagram are using both video and imagery as you find influencers to partner with. Who does a great job with video? Are they the right fit for your brand?

Contact True Interactive

In short, video is hot. Trying to figure out how to embracing video in your online advertising and marketing? Contact us. We can help.