6 Instagram stats your marketing strategy needs

Editor's Note: This post was originally created by Spredfast before Spredfast and Lithium merged and became Khoros.

If it’s visual inspiration you want, Instagram is the place to find it. Marketers know they’ll find an audience ready to be influenced by highly stylized and intimate images and videos alike on Instagram.

But when you know exactly who you’ll encounter on Instagram—and, perhaps more importantly, what those audiences expect to find on the network—you can streamline your content to ensure it reaches truly receptive users. We previously explored important Facebook stats that can help you up your marketing game; now we’ll detail everything you need to know to build your content strategy on the massively popular photo and video sharing social network.

Editor's note: Curious about how your competitors are doing with their content strategy—and how much engagement they're seeing? Explore our most recent Report, Facebook Engagement Benchmarks for Your Industry.

And Instagram is only growing: the platform tends to add about 100 million new users every 4 months, putting Instagram on a path toward usage numbers like its parent company, Facebook. More users means more paid spend: Instagram reports that there are currently 2 million advertisers on the platform. With numbers like these, you know you need to focus your content strategy on reaching users most likely to be interested in your message.

Improve Your Strategy: Stand out in a crowded field of advertisements—and reach as many of those 800 million eyeballs as you can—by staying true to Instagram’s roots with your content and designing campaigns specific to the platform. Cult makeup brand Glossier does just that by focusing on the “unboxing” experience—they create packaging that begs to be Instagrammed:

(Source: Khoros (formally Spredfast) Social Audience Guide)

This means that almost two-thirds of Instagram users make more than the median income for all age brackets in the US.

Improve Your Strategy: Since your brand is likely to find an audience with more disposable income than average, you can tailor your content to higher income brackets.

(Source: Instagram)

Instagram is all about intimacy: users want a window into other people’s lives. They want to know what others are eating and wearing, how they’re decorating their homes and what they do on vacation (and how they raise their children, and how they work out, and etc.). This means that the more real your brand’s posts feel, the more engagement you’re likely to see.

Improve Your Strategy: Start with your company’s inherent values and reputation to create organic content that fits with both your brand and the platform from there, your followers are likely to engage.

(Source: Khoros (formally Spredfast) Social Audience Guide)

We love this stat because it gets to the heart of how many users see Instagram: more than half of all teens are looking for new products every time they open the app, meaning your brand has a receptive audience just waiting to be enticed.

More than half of all teens are looking for new products every time they open their Instagram app.

Improve Your Strategy: Campaigns that appeal to younger demographics are likely to find a receptive audience.

(Source: Khoros (formally Spredfast) Social Audience Guide)

Just like at the middle school dance—if you know someone is interested, it makes approaching them a whole lot easier.

Improve Your Strategy: Don’t shy away from using Instagram to explicitly showcase what your brand offers—consumers are not only expecting it, they’re coming to Instagram looking for it.

(Source: Instagram)

Instagram Stories are still relatively new to the platform, but they’ve already had a significant impact: users are, across the board, more engaged with the network and spend more time using it. People under 25 spend an average of 32 minutes each day on Instagram, while people over 25 spend an average of 24 minutes a day on the platform, Instagram reports.

Improve Your Strategy: Stories are keeping users engaged longer, so you’ll want to make sure your brand includes Story content whenever it makes sense. We’ve found that successful ads in Stories do a few key things: they adopt the perspective of the viewer, they take risks, they have a clear call to action, and perhaps most importantly, they, ahem, actually tell a story.

An update to note: If there’s one thing we know for sure about social, it’s that it’s always changing, and while change often means good things like innovation and streamlined capabilities, it also means that marketers must always be adapting. Instagram recently announced that they’ll be testing a few new features, including a “New Posts” button. As you plan your Instagram campaigns, be aware that the “New Posts” button will let users choose when they want to view new posts (rather than it happening automatically). Additionally, Instagram is planning to ensure that posts users are more likely to care about will appear first—meaning brands will have to ensure they’re always sharing content audiences will find valuable. It also added a new feature called Instagram TV (abbreviated "IGTV"), which allows Instagram users and brands to publish full-screen vertical videos up to an hour in length. The feature isn’t just available to big names—for now, everyone except smaller and new accounts can upload videos, writes TechCrunch, and soon every user will be able to post to IGTV.

You’ll find more stats about Instagram users in our 2018 Social Audience Guide—where you’ll also find audience stats about Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube users.