Why Influencers Are An Integral Part Of Instagram: A Case Study
🔍Insights
Before Instagram Influencers became an essential part of Instagram, it was one of the most recent social media platform as it was established in 2010 and is a multi-channel platform that is available on both a mobile application and a desktop site. The website was created by Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom and launched on the 6th of October 2010, however in April Facebook brought Instagram for $1 Billion.
The photo sharing app allows its users to have their individual profile which is a user can make public or private based on their preference. The instagram users are able to post their photographers and videos on their profile, follow other users and gain followers in return. When Instagram was first launched it became sensation and garnered a million user within the first two months.
Devashish Shrivastava
Instagram Influencers
Now the platform has over 800 million active user on the platform from which 30 million brands and advertisers on the platform and around 500,000 active Influencers and 60% moving toward becoming an influencer. Most social media Influencers make a huge sum of money thorough this platform.
Some of the top Earning from single post by Kim Kardashian who has grown into a millionaire and created an empire through Instagram. Influencer marketing allows brands to reach their target audience in a way that feels far more genuine than traditional advertising Instagram influencer have a strong and loyal relationship with their followers as they share many aspects of their lives with them.
Influencer’s posts have made users decisions much simpler by providing information of new product information, helping them researcher the product and finally buy them as well. Most people on Instagram spend at least 60% or more of their time trying to engage in content created by brands and influencers.
A survey stats that after seeing these products on Instagram at least 79% of the people searched for these products online, 65% looked up the app or the website and 46% brought the product. These statistics makes the influencers a vital part of instagram revenue. Below here are the different ways the Influencers benefit from instagram
Followers and Following of Instagram Influencers
The distribution of the number of followers is incredibly skewed, so it’s very difficult to visualize it in a readable manner. This is because the great majority of profiles have a low number of followers (less than 1000) whereas there are profiles with hundreds of millions of followers. Profiles with a high number of followers are very rare as only 10 profiles have more than 100 million followers and 420 of them that have between the range of 10 and 100 million.
There are 4.5 million profiles with less than 100 followers as, on average instagram accounts have 296 more followers than following, but for verified profiles this ratio is 17,910. Another important distinction is between micro and macro influencers. Micro influencers have lesser than 100,000 followers, while major influencers have more than 100,000 followers.
The average followers to following ratio for micro influencers is 37,000 whereas for major influencers it is 18,104. This tells us that if a brand is trying to run a campaign across niche markets they should go for micro influencers while if the campaign needs major influencers you should search for profiles with a ratio greater than 20,000 which accounts to 8% of the total number of major influencers.
Target Audience
Finding or identifying the right set of users is an important step for most influencers as even the brands expect the influencers to find a niche audiences to identify the right set of users. It is important to narrow down the user base as much as possible because once you narrow down, find the users that would appreciate product. Once the target audience is found then they try to reach them through multiple modes.
Parnas Ghosh
Engagement with target audience
This is an important metric as it can reasonably summarize an Instagram profile and its engagement rate. For each unit of content published by the profile as the ratio between the sum of the number or likes and replies and the number of followers of the profile. This helps in identifying the quality of a profile.
A chart must be creates as it is useful to get an idea of which values of the engagement rate are average or better in order to make changes next time. There are considerable differences between micro and major influencers. For the former group, 11% is the average engagement rate, while for major influencers values are of course lower and the average is 3%.
Problems faced by Influencers and the brands
While everything will be working out in number there are still seem to be multiple problems that brands and influencers are facing. Some of these issues include is not having a platform for payment and tracking the campaign which is happening through other companies like ifluenz, scrunch, etc.
This is one of the gaps that can be filled to make things a little simple for Business users. Other problem are on managing contracts as if they are too many accepted by the influences it is difficult to fulfill them all at once. Which is why the Influencers also face problems to time manage their contracts.
Vidhi Punamiya
Images or Videos
There is a noticeable difference in engagement between image posts and video posts, and the contrast is even more pronounced for major influencers. The post have a higher engagement than video posts. on average for a micro influencer image posts have 1.5 times more engagement than video posts, while for major influencers this multiple increases to more than 2 times.
On Instagram, the number of likes is much higher than the number of replies. On average the profile of a major influencer will have 237 times more likes than compared to replies, while for micro influencers the multiple is lower at 42 times. Replies are usually considered stronger engagement than simple likes so this should be considered before deciding which influencer the brands should patner up with for sponsored campaigns.
Locations and languages
The geographical location of a profile is estimated by taking into account a variety of factors like the biography of the profile the posts and the location tags on each post. The countries with the highest number of instagram profile are USA, Canada, Australia, UK, and Indonesia. Followed by Russia, India, The principal European countries and South American countries like Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia.
Location data can also be used to infer the language spoken be Instagram users. Languages like English and Spanish are the most common by a wide margin. French is in third place to Canada and all the African where it is the official language followed by Portuguese, Arabic, Russian and Indonesian and Hindi which are in the top ten.
Yash Raj Srivastava
Hashtags
Hashtags are important part of an instagram post especially for an influencer because it is a way to connect social media content to a specific topic, event, theme or conversation. They also make it easier to discover posts around those specific topics because hashtags aggregate all social media content with the same hashtag.
The most frequent ones in our database are also the most frequent ones on Instagram: #love, #instagood, #photography, #summer and #repost are the first five. In this analysis we focus our attention to the tags that signal sponsored or promoted content. With hashtags one can observe which topics are most frequent with the most common promotional hashtags.
The blue circles represent the most frequent hashtags used in combination with the one that indicate sponsored content, but there is not enough space to label them all, so we just summarized the most common topics. The #ad hashtag is used in pretty much all contexts, and the same is true, to a lesser degree, for the #collaboration hashtag.
In the beauty and cosmetics sector we see a predominance of the #collab and #collaboration hashtags. The #ambassador hashtag seems to be used almost exclusively for fitness, sports and summertime topics. The #partner hashtag appears for the most part in posts related to photography, nature and fitness again.
Posting Frequency
The great majority of the profiles post a few times a week on average. One may wonder if major influencers post more than regular profiles. That is indeed the case the biggest influencers post 4.2 times per week on average, while smaller profiles have an average of 3.2 posts per week.
As to why a higher posting frequency correlates with a lower engagement rate there could be several factors at play, like more posting corresponds to lower quality overall; too much posting is penalized by Instagram's feed algorithms.
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