Social Performance Measurement For Agencies
Ability To Add External Links Is Coming To The Instagram Stories
Tina Ahmed posted on 28 December 2016
Welcome to our Instagram growth and engagement study for the month of November 2016.
In this report, we look at follower growth and content engagement trends on the platform. We analyze 2,500 Instagram profiles every month and make it easy for you to understand the trends and see how your own profile performance compares to the standards on the platform.
We also include any interesting news and information you might want to know in order to run your Instagram profiles more effectively.
Do you want to check your own growth and engagement stats and compare your brand to the profiles in our study? Take a free trial of Locowise and use the Instagram Benchmarker.
Let’s take a look at the numbers for November.
Follower growth and post engagement are down (again)
Follower growth has seen another 9.09% decrease in the month of November.
The average profile gained only 0.1% new followers during the month, which is the lowest since we started doing our studies in April last year.
Profiles posted 2.56 times per day on average with 85.33% of all posts being images.
The average engagement rate was at 1.1%. This is 8.33% lower than October.
Photo posts engaged 1.3% of the followers, while videos engaged 0.8%. A photo engaged 62.5% more people on average than a video.
Big updates to the Instagram Stories
Instagram is making a significant effort to implement the best features from Snapchat and Periscope and make their users less concerned about posting the best moments of their lives only.
According to Instagram’s head of product Kevin Weil: “We pivoted. Instagram should be all of your moments, not just your highlights.”
All these features have great potential for brands and can hopefully help to boost the organic growth and engagement on the platform. Let’s take a look at them.
Self-destructing live video is here
Over 100 million people use Instagram Stories every day and live video on Stories is being rolled out now. Just swipe right, tap “Start Live Video” and you can broadcast for up to an hour.
You can pin specific comments for everyone to see or disable comments altogether.
There are no replays, though. The live story disappears from the app when you’re done which is the big difference from Facebook Live.
Instagram is pushing the live stories by notifying your friends when you go live.
There’s also a new top live stories happening right now algorithmically curated section in the “Explore” tab.
All this means that there will be extra eyeballs on live video and it may be your opportunity to win a new audience.
Adding links and tags within your stories
Verified Instagram accounts can now add links to external websites within their stories. When you add a link, there will be a “see more” note added to the bottom of your story. Viewers can click and view the link within the Instagram app.
This is one of those features that’s been on the wish list for many brands for the main Instagram app for a long time and now it’s here for stories only. The early reports say that the clickthrough rates are between 5% and 12% which is much higher than what we typically see on Facebook.
Instagram did not confirm if and when this feature will be rolled out to all accounts, but it’s something all brands will be eagerly waiting for.
All users can now tag up to ten people within their stories too. This is another useful feature for brands, especially when working with influencers. When someone influential tags you, it could lead to many new organic followers for your brand.
All these new features are something that should be considered by your team. It’s worth experimenting to see how these may help you in your content strategy on the platform. As we’ve shown over the last few months, the organic growth and engagement numbers are way down and brands need help in getting some excitement back. Live video, tagging and external links are very promising developments.
