Instagram’s Rise and What It Means for Brands

In April 2012, Facebook agreed to buy a photo sharing app with no revenue and a very small team for approximately $1 billion, structured as about 23 million Facebook shares plus $300 million in cash. At the time the price was widely mocked. Ten months on, that reaction looks like a failure to understand what was being bought, and the reasoning behind it is worth understanding because it tells you what Instagram is actually for.

What the acquisition was really about

Facebook did not pay a billion dollars for filters. It paid for a mobile-native audience at a moment when its own product was still fundamentally a desktop experience being retrofitted for phones. Instagram had never had a desktop version to defend, which meant it was designed from the first screen for the device people were actually holding.

That is the strategic lesson for a small business too, and it has nothing to do with photography. The platforms that are winning attention are the ones built for how people behave now rather than adapted from how they behaved before. The same logic applies to your own site, which is why mobile-first design stopped being optional.

Instagram is a different medium, not another distribution channel

The most common mistake is treating it as one more place to push the same promotional posts. It fails there for a structural reason: Instagram does not do links. There is no clickable link in a caption. A post cannot send someone to a product page the way a tweet or a Facebook post can.

That constraint is not a flaw to work around, it is the definition of the medium. If a channel cannot drive a click, its job is not direct response. Its job is familiarity, taste, and trust, accumulated over months, so that when someone does need what you sell, you are already a known quantity. Businesses that measure Instagram by immediate traffic will conclude it does not work, and they will be measuring the wrong thing.

How brands can show up well

• Develop a visual style that is recognizably yours before you worry about frequency. Consistency of look does more for recall than volume of posting.
• Show people, process, and craft rather than product shots. The catalogue photo is the least interesting thing you have and the easiest for a competitor to replicate.
• Use hashtags to reach communities rather than to describe your photo. They function as discovery, which is the only meaningful reach mechanism available without paid distribution.
• Reply to comments as a person. On a platform this small and this social, a genuine reply is worth more than a scheduled post.
• Put the one link you get in your profile to work, and change it when what you are promoting changes.

Judge it on the right numbers

Follower count is the metric everyone quotes and the one that means least. It can be bought, it can be inflated by a giveaway, and it goes up without any corresponding change to your business. Watch engagement rate relative to your follower count, saves, and profile visits. Those measure whether people care, which is the thing that eventually converts.

Valter Brandt

Chief Marketing Officer

Valter Brandt is the Chief Marketing Officer of ThisCom, working with clients across the United States and Europe. He has led marketing strategy through the major shifts in social advertising, mobile, content marketing, programmatic media, and marketing automation.

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