According to Simply Measured, 40 percent of top global brands have made Instagram a part of their social media marketing strategy to make sharing visual content more sustainable. For small businesses, integrating Instagram into a social effort can help increase engagement, as images and other visuals are proven to attract more relevant fans and followers.
Moving quickly to adopt Instagram can help SMBs develop their presences on the site and win early adopters’ advantages. Small companies can expand their reach and fuel growth as Instagram is a less cluttered social network – its place as a social marketing tool is still less established than other platforms. Simply Measured reported that Instagram is currently fifth behind Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest in terms of adoption for social media marketing, even as it has abundant consumer users.
Many have been hesitant to move to the visual content sharing platform following its acquisition by Facebook. However, both companies have reported that it’s unlikely that Instagram will lose any integration capability with other social networks. So SMBs hoping to use Instagram to populate Twitter or Google+ marketing pages should be able to do this for the foreseeable future.
On its own, Instagram presents a strong marketing opportunity. While the company still hasn’t developed a dedicated marketing solution, such as Google+ Pages or Facebook Pages, ContentLEAD recently reported that the platform currently has more than 80 million users who have shared more than 4 billion images.