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Here Comes Instagram!
June 15, 2015
Have an opinion? Add your comment below. We've been watching Instagram steadily climb the ladder of relevance and popularity among radio listeners, especially that small subset predisposed to accept a PPM or a diary. While the digerati have been crowing about SnapChat and Vine and other portals gathering usage among younger consumers, our studies have shown that Instagram is the platform to watch. Our most-recent NuVoodoo Ratings Prospect Study showed Instagram surpassing Twitter to become the third-ranked social media portal and gathering strong weekly usage among younger-targeted formats.
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We’ve been watching Instagram steadily climb the ladder of relevance and popularity among radio listeners, especially that small subset predisposed to accept a PPM or a diary. While the digerati have been crowing about SnapChatand Vine and other portals gathering usage among younger consumers, our studies have shown that Instagram is the platform to watch.
Our most-recent NuVoodoo Ratings Prospect Study showed Instagram surpassing Twitter to become the third-ranked social media portal and gathering strong weekly usage among younger-targeted formats.
We’ve been waiting eagerly to add Instagram into our existing matrix with Facebook and YouTube, thus creating the holy trinity of ratings weapons for our clients. However, to date, advertising on Instagram has been limited to a select few national advertisers, as the Facebook-owned platform has been reticent to repeat the mistakes of the parent by irritating users by launching too fast with ad content.
Instagram will slow-roll local advertiser access to consumer news feeds over the next few months through the Facebook ads platform. That will allow stations to create highly-efficient integrated campaigns across two of the most powerful platforms for radio. During testing across nearly 500 campaigns measured with Nielsen Brand Effect, ad recall from sponsored posts on Instagram was 2.9 times higher than Nielsen’s norms for online advertising.
Instagram is poised to become a powerful mobile platform for radio station advertisers, with ad formats from photo and video ads to carousel ads that allow stations to tell a deeper story about their promotion or attention-getting stunt and provide links to station sites for listeners to learn more.
The best way to be ready for this opportunity is to implement Instagram best practices with your organic posts now. Here are some idea starters:
- Create and maintain a consistent theme for your content. It’s all about the listener, not your station.
- Photos about experiences listeners have with your station (backstage with artists, spending prize money or interacting with station personalities) will be remarkably viral and lead to more followers.
- Engage with your followers: comment, follow back, like their content. Be human. Don’t broadcast.
- Tell an interesting story through your images and captions: photos of people cueing up for your festival, going crazy for each act, leaving the venue happy and satisfied.
- Take lots of photos when you are out on the streets and make them aesthetically pleasing and creative.
- Spread out posts like you would any other network. Post at least once or twice a day. Be consistent.
- Throw a creative #hashtag contest to get interaction going and amplify it across your already-established social networks
- And, if you must roll-out an advertiser photo, give it a human touch by making it creative, funny or truly valuable to your followers/listeners.
- Use Instagram as your station's lifestyle magazine.
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