Brands using social media to build engagement might want to take a closer look at Instagram. A recent Forrester study examined seven different social media sites to measure consumer engagement and Instagram came out as the clear winner.
The Forrester Research report studied over 3 million social media interactions across different social channels for more than 2,500 brands.
Instagram had a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21%. Overall, the per-follower engagement rates were less than 0.1% for every other social site.
For every 1 million people following a brand on Facebook, the brand’s content got about 700 total interactions (shares, likes or comments). Brands on Twitter got about 300 total interactions for every 1 million followers.
Consumers engaged with brands on Instagram over 58 times more per follower than on Facebook and 120 times more engagement per follower than on Twitter.
Even when brands posted the same content on different social platforms, consumers were more likely to engage with in on Instagram than the other social networks.
Red Bull posted a snowboarding video in February on both Facebook and Instagram. The video got 2,600 total interactions on Facebook from their 43 million fans.
On Instagram, the same video got over 36,000 likes from only 1.2 million followers. The rate of likes-per-follower for the same video was 0.006% on Facebook and 3% on Instagram.
One of the reasons that Instagram has been so effective is that there aren’t as many brands using it than a lot of the other social networks. The study predicts that engagement on Instagram might decrease as more marketers begin using it.
Brands may want to consider using Instagram now while the engagement opportunities are still high, Forrester recommended.
Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion.
