How are brand influencers faring on Instagram?

This data was originally featured in the March 29, 2023 newsletter found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2023/03/inbox-insights-march-29-2023-staying-productive-instagram-engagement/.

In this week’s Data Diaries, as we close out the quarter, let’s check in on how things are going for brand influencers on Instagram and see how they are faring on one of the world’s most popular social networks?

Let’s first look at brands:

This quarter we’ve seen a slight sag in brand performance, with a small rebound to basically end where the quarter began, at roughly a 0.22% engagement rate for brands.

We see that albums – carousels – still remain the most engaging content format for brands, followed by images, then videos. Remember that video content also includes Reels.

What about individual influencers?

Influencers saw their performance sag to just below 0.6% for the quarter, in a similar level of performance compared to brands.

After a brief convergence, albums remain the top content for influencers, followed by individual photo posts, then videos. Remember that video content also includes Reels.

In both cases, Stories are not counted because they are not provided in the Instagram data API.

What do we make of this data? Well, it’s a mixed bag. There’s nothing in the data that shouts for a major, drastic change in strategy. Videos continue to underperform other content types; across all different accounts, carousels of multiple posts continue to lead engagement. When you think about it, this makes logical sense from a behavioral perspective. Carousels inherently have the ability to pique curiosity – as long as the first image is eye-catching, it intrigues users to want to swipe to the next piece of content.

Should you focus on Instagram as a social network for your business? That always depends on where your audience is. If you haven’t run a survey to your audience asking them where they spend their time (especially where they spend their time when considering purchases), that should be your first priority.

Disclosures and methodology: Trust Insights extracted 487,307 unique brand posts and 177,994 unique influencer posts from Instagram using the Crowdtangle service. The timeframe of the dataset is 2023-01-01 to 2023-03-27. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.