Instagram has doubled its monthly active users during the past two years, sailing beyond the 1 billion mark in 2018. In addition, Instagram, unlike several social platforms, also has a relatively pristine reputation. And it’s where younger demos live.
Later this month, on Sept. 19, PRNEWS will host a webinar: “How to Use Visual Storytelling on Instagram to Build New Audiences.” To prepare for that session, this month’s PRNEWS Roundtable addresses recent and future Instagram features that are influencing storytelling. The respondents in this roundtable also will be featured during the webinar.
[Editor’s Note: Paid subscribers of PRNEWS are entitled to a 33 percent discount on this webinar. For more information, please contact: [email protected]]
Erica Byrum
Assistant Vice President, Social Media
Apartments.com
PRNEWS: What recent Instagram features have helped your brand or brand clients with storytelling and audience augmentation?
Erica Byrum: Instagram Stories, IGTV and Highlights are some of the top features we have been using at Apartments.com. With Instagram’s algorithm updates, these features have given us more opportunities to improve our engagement, visibility, and diversify our content. They keep our brand at the top of the feed and top of mind. This year we have invested significant marketing dollars in running more than 9,000 TV commercials, 18,000 radio ads, plus campaigns across social media, paid search, display ads and email. Instagram has been a great platform for us to leverage our offline content to a new audience, which is on Instagram.
As a bonus, you can repurpose Instagram Stories content on Facebook to extend your reach as well as limit the need to create different content for both platforms. It’s a great way to get more mileage out of each campaign and keep your social media pipeline filled. When visibility is the goal (and isn’t it always?), Instagram Stories and IGTV can help get you there.
PRNEWS: What future Instagram feature are you most looking forward to exploiting to bolster your storytelling or IG presence?
Erica Byrum: Brands and consumers already have been using Instagram Stories to shop with the ‘swipe up’ feature and some have even caught on to using shoppable tags in the newsfeed. But those features are limited to businesses that have 10,000 or more followers.
Earlier in the year, Instagram released Shoppable Instagram Stories Stickers, which allow businesses with 10,000 followers or fewer the capability to drive traffic to their products and services through their stories. This is a game changer for smaller businesses now that they are able to tag physical products from their inventory or e-commerce platform. I’m excited to see how this feature might support selling real estate in the future.
Steve Denker
Sr. Director of Marketing
Turner Classic Movies
PRNEWS: What recent Instagram feature has helped your brand or brand clients with storytelling and audience augmentation?
Steve Denker:The opportunity to play horizontal video on IGTV is definitely a plus to brands like Turner Classic Movies. Particularly with our passionate and knowledgeable fans, who expect clips of movies to be displayed in the proper aspect ratio that the filmmakers intended. For audience augmentation, I’m keeping my eye on the continued Facebook integrations to maximize metrics, security and user/fan behavior.
PRNEWS: What rumored or upcoming Instagram feature are you most looking forward to exploiting to bolster your storytelling or IG presence?
Steve Denker:As a brand marketer at a fast-paced modern media company, having the ability to schedule Instagram content in advance and utilize Instagram’s desktop publishing is a new feature I’m excited about. This will create efficiencies on my team and be highly effective with our fan-engagement strategy. While I’d considerate it unreal-time storytelling, the execution will align with our marcomm goals.
Nicole J. Shevlin
Social Brand Strategist
IBM
PRNEWS: What feature would you like to see on Instagram so you can augment your storytelling?
Nicole Shevlin:I would love to see feed posts with the ability to interact on the asset. For example, an interactive GIF on Twitter may translate well into the IG feed to gamify content. In addition, I would love to see the interactive Instagram Stories features, such as polls or questions, added as an option to supplement your feed asset/post copy.
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