Brands’ Biggest Instagram Frustrations

Instagram‘s popularity with the brands has been on the rise. Recent report from Olapic and L2  indicated that brands have been putting up more posts on Instagram and decreasing the number of posts on Facebook. Facebook’s organic reach squeeze had the brands looking for alternatives, but before your brand joins the Instagram madness, consider this:

•  Instagram ads are way too costly for smaller players:  “Lower-end monthly pricing is estimated around $350,000, while higher end can get up to $1 million. (Jun 12, 2014)”. In most cases brands don’t have hundreds of thousands to drop on an Instagram ad, so all of the sudden paying few dollars on Facebook isn’t all that bad. Without ads, your brand will be stuck with having to grow followers organically, which will be pretty time-consuming (and time is money). 
• You can forget about clickable links on Instagram (for now). Instagram has only recently given this sought-after benefit to the advertisers who use carousel ads. I expect this feature to roll out to all the users in a near future (or is it wishful thinking), but for now, most brands have to rely on the only active link which is in the profile’s bio. Brands have been pretty creative to work around this by sneaking the link references elsewhere, but it’s pretty frustrating for both brands and users to have to beat around the bush when it can be just so simple (come on, Instagram!).
• Have I mentioned Instagram’s limited analytics options? At the moment, brands have to rely on the third party apps for metrics. There are not many choices either: easily the most popular one, Iconosquare, gives you a decent amount of data (who your most loyal followers are, most popular images, best times to post etc.) but you won’t get any demographics data, won’t be able to customize date range, and there is no option of one-click exporting.

So should your brand invest more into Instagram than into Facebook? Depends on what your goals are.

If you are looking to drive traffic, then you’re currently better off paying to play on Facebook (or get pinning). If you care more about engagement and brand awareness, give Instagram a try. According to a November 2014 Instagram study from research firm L2, users interacted 18 times more on Instagram than on Facebook.