On Instagram, the number of corporate accounts has exceeded 200 million, and the competition among overseas brands has become increasingly fierce. Today, once emerging trends emerge, they quickly become business opportunities that brands are scrambling to capture. Behind all this, Instagram's five major trends are quietly reshaping the marketing landscape, opening up new horizons for brands and bringing unprecedented development opportunities.
Videos take precedence over images
Open Instagram and you will find that video content is increasingly dominant. In 2024, Instagram will continue to promote videos and continue to launch new features to encourage user creation.
- Reels are popular: users can easily reply, add effects, music and voiceovers, and even upload videos up to 60 seconds long. This makes video content more vivid and interesting, making it easier to attract viewers and establish deep interactions with them.
- Social media managers become spokespersons: One of the trends this year is that social media managers stand in front of the camera as brand spokespersons, delivering brand information in a real and vivid way and establishing emotional connections with the audience.
- Video hot topics are popular: Brands cleverly combine popular music with hot topic elements to create interesting and creative video content, successfully attracting the attention of the audience.
- Static posts also have new ways to play: In addition to videos, static posts are still popular. Instagram has added audio functions to static posts, allowing pictures to "speak".
In short, whether it is video or static posts, the key is to keep up with Instagram's popular trends, constantly innovate content forms, establish sincere connections with the audience, and promote brand growth.
Using AI can enhance social content creation capabilities
Like many technology brands, Instagram and its parent company Meta have also invested heavily in the field of artificial intelligence this year. For marketers, this trend may profoundly change the way they create content.
Currently, Instagram provides the following AI features for creators in specific regions:
AI-generated stickers: Users only need to enter prompts to create personalized AI stickers. After that, they can send these stickers in chats or add them to their stories.
Chat with AI: Users can seek AI recommendations and suggestions, explore their interests, and browse and follow the dynamics of AI profiles to get their published content in real time.
Smart backgrounds for stories: When you share photos to stories, you can use the AI background tool to generate a new background based on text prompts.
Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Instagram will soon launch two innovative AI features: smart image editing and high-quality video generation. Users can easily edit images, replace backgrounds, and create personalized videos. Although AI is powerful, it will not completely replace the work of social media managers in the short term. On the contrary, AI has become an important part of social media strategy, helping brands enrich content, improve user experience, and strengthen competitiveness.
Use Instagram SEO to increase content exposure
Social search is becoming increasingly popular. Last year, nearly 30% of Generation Z and Millennial users preferred to find information through social media, and it is expected to be even more popular in 2024. Optimizing search is particularly important in this context. Instagram algorithms can accurately push content to meet user search needs.
In this regard, marketers are not enough to use the right tags, but must develop a comprehensive and effective Instagram SEO strategy. Here are some practical suggestions to help you improve the ranking of your content on Instagram and attract more users' attention and interaction:
- Accurately lock keywords: Deeply understanding the search habits of the target audience and ensuring that information can accurately reach the target users is the key to developing an effective content strategy.
- Optimize captions and descriptions: Cleverly insert keywords into Instagram posts and stories to increase content visibility while keeping it attractive and interesting.
- Interaction to increase influence: Actively interact with users in similar fields, like and comment on other popular bloggers' posts, which is conducive to expanding social circles and attracting more attention.
- Add alternative text: Adding descriptive alternative text to images not only helps users better understand the content, but also helps Instagram algorithms better identify and classify content to increase exposure.
- Keep up with trends: Always pay attention to popular tags and challenges on Instagram, which is the key to keeping content fresh and timely.
- Follow official guidelines: Follow Instagram official guidelines to ensure content quality and compliance, which can effectively avoid the trouble caused by illegal operations.
Create value with user-generated content
Traditional hard sales are no longer effective. Now people are more pursuing authenticity and relevance, which also reflects the importance of user-generated content (UGC) to brands. In this regard, overseas brands can successfully build trust, promote user engagement, and promote brand development by using real customer content.
So, how can we obtain high-quality Instagram UGC? Some industry giants, such as BMW, Samsung, and Apple, have successfully collected user-generated content through hashtags. For example:
The hashtag "#shotoniphone" has 29.6 million posts
The hashtag "#bmwrepost" has 2.8 million posts
The hashtag "#galaxy" has 1.9 million posts
Samsung has set up a dedicated Instagram account specifically for user-generated content. Many creators eager to increase exposure on the platform actively use the hashtag "#withGalaxy" to tag their photos taken with Samsung devices, so that their works have the opportunity to appear on this brand page with 4.8 million followers.
Use paid advertising to expand your influence
As the popularity of social media platforms continues to increase, the need for algorithmic content push is also increasing. If the algorithm push is not accurate enough, the coverage of the content may be affected. Therefore, it is expected that the growth trend of paid advertising on Instagram will be very significant in 2024.
Now, try a little experiment: scroll down Facebook to browse the first 10 to 20 posts. If your observations match mine, you’ll find that among these posts, there are about 9 videos, 6 regular posts, and 5 sponsored posts, which means that a quarter of your subscription content is paid advertising.
Although this ratio may seem high at first glance, from another perspective, it actually indicates that there is a 25% chance that your target audience will be exposed to advertisers’ posts. Therefore, if you decide to invest in Instagram ads, your brand will be able to occupy a place in this 25% share.
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On the ever-changing platform of Instagram, keeping up with trends is not only the key to content updates, but also a great opportunity to show brand vitality and innovative spirit.
