How The Top Luxury Tech Brands Use Instagram

Rolex is still one of the biggest names in the luxury accessories industry, while Intrepid is arguably the most popular powerboat manufacturer for high rollers. But an industry that we rarely acknowledge, is that of luxury tech.

The prime reason for this is the segregation of each brand into its own niche of products. For example, Tesla is a popular luxury tech brand, but the company is primarily discussed as a luxury car manufacturer.

Having to retain a notable standing as brands to appeal to high rollers, we were intrigued by the notion of what their social media campaigns might be. And with Instagram being the social network with arguably the highest importance of coherence throughout all posted content, we decided to make it the platform of choice for the analysis.

That being said and without further adieu, here is how the top luxury tech brands run their social media campaigns on Instagram. All the graphs in the article are taken directly from social media reports you can run on Locowise for competing brands. Let’s get started!

Apple

Apple has one of the more peculiar content management strategies on Instagram. Instead of following different trends or pushing for the improvement of brand reach through the social platform, Apple prefers relying on an existing audience.

Being a highly recognized luxury tech brand, the manufacturer prefers using subtle product promotion of their iPhone devices, while disregarding other industries, such as laptops, hardware or other accessories.

This is rather surprising, especially having in mind the fact that their other products are quite successful on their own accord. For example, the Apple Watch holds as much as 16% of the global wearable market and its OS, the watchOS accounts for 55% of the wearables OS market.

Instead of sharing snapshots of their products, promoting its events or anything in between, Apple rather posts photos taken by audience members under the hashtag #shotOnIPhone.

Taking into account the fact that the brand doesn’t post regularly on Instagram, their 7.81% ER is rather surprising. Receiving a total of 458,990 engagements during the month of September, the brand primarily relies on outside events and virality to increase their Instagram traffic.

And for such a popular brand as Apple things do seem to work out quite nicely. For example, when the company held its annual press conference event on September 12, 2017, when the iPhone X was announced, the Instagram profile saw a bump in the audience growth.

In fact, their most popular photo for the month, that had over 12% ER, was primarily used by fans as a hub to share their comments of the latest announcements by the company.

The Take

What can you take from this? First and foremost, trying to analyze the images for any consistency is a worthless effort. The posts by Apple have little to nothing to do with one another and rather focus on the individual strengths in the quality of each photo.

Similar to other big brand names, Apple relies on real world coverage and brand reach to boost its social media profiles. An item to note is that the irregular posting does work in favor of the brand when it comes to numbers, but we are not sure whether the company manages to take full advantage of the power of social media.

Tesla Motors

Tesla Motors seems to be yet another luxury tech brand that doesn’t truly realize the potential of social media. Posting only once or twice per month without any obvious consistency throughout the posted content, Tesla relies heavily on its existing brand reach. In fact, their Instagram profile doesn’t seem to have a clear purpose.

At times, you’d see one or two of Tesla’s posts and see that there is an idea about a social media strategy. Yet, in a few more weeks the company will post something completely random with no clear purpose.

Like with Apple, Tesla does show some nice engagement numbers, but the stats show a clear picture.

The luxury tech brand does suffer a lot from inconsistency and the lack of regular posts on social media.

In September, for example, you can see two huge bumps in Audience Growth and Engagement at the times the manufacturer has posted content.

The Take

No matter how big your brand is, you can’t rely on your existing brand reach to boost your social media numbers. Lack of consistency and lack of a clear social media strategy can greatly harm your chances of unleashing the full potential that comes with Instagram and its influence.

Samsung Mobile

Samsung is one of the most famous tech manufacturers of today. And among the company’s most popular products are the luxury mobile flagships of the Galaxy series and the Gear smartwatch accessories. All of those products have their own official Instagram account, Samsung Mobile, which we are going to take a look at today.

To start off, Samsung instantly blows both Apple and Tesla out of the waters when it comes to content consistency. The brand has a pretty decent social media strategy with regular posting intervals and content which is specifically designed for Instagram.

Granted, the luxury tech brand does try out different strategies, such as posting primarily videos or posting primarily photos, but that further goes to show that it cares about the brand’s social media performance.

What’s more, Samsung tends to use Instagram as a platform to promote its various luxury tech offerings. Almost each and every photo or video is a special Instagram presentation of a certain product, accessory or feature.

But the numbers show a rather inconsistent picture. Samsung has only about 1% ER, which is pretty decent for an active Instagram brand profile. But the company’s total engagement of 404,000 is still less than what Apple has managed to achieve without any coherence in its Instagram strategy.

The Take

Having a consistent social media strategy on Instagram can improve your chances of steadily increasing your audience growth and engagement. Keeping track of your statistics can further give you insights on what your audience is interested in.

Furthermore, you won’t have to rely on your existing brand reach or current company events and product releases to increase your engagement. Plus, by being able to pinpoint the exact ER on posts related to your products can help you better analyze the audience’s response towards a specific matter.

Sonos

Sonos is another brand recognized by luxury tech enthusiasts. Recognized for their smart HiFi audio systems, the company takes a quality over quantity approach when it comes to Instagram. The strategy of Sonos is backed up by nice numbers, including over 1% ER and a steady monthly audience growth.

However, Sonos does miss out on a few great factors in its content, including visual flow consistency and overall brand appearance. First and foremost, while the photos of the company on Instagram are rather creative, they have little to no relation to one another, excluding the featuring of a Sonos speaker on almost all of them.

In addition, the company does not tend to focus on relatable content, but instead pushes for interior design captures that might be better off on Pinterest.

Taking a look at the most successful posts in September, it can be easily seen that relatable visual quality takes the lead. Out of the three photos, the most successful one is of a dog, the second most successful being related to kitchen activities and the third one being an interior piece of a living room.

The stats further show that these successful posts correspond directly to the increased reach and growth of the brand on the social media.

The Take

Quality content is of utmost importance when it comes to Instagram. However, a brand should also focus on consistency, flow and relatability. What’s more, knowing the stats behind what works and what doesn’t can help you achieve better audience growth numbers and brand reach in the long run.

Krups

While there are quite a few other luxury tech brands that we wanted to cover including Dyson, GoPro and Fitbit, we decided to round things off by discussing coffee. One of the most infamous brands for quality coffee makers is Krups.

Bound by luxury, the brand is famous with caffeine addicts with some money to spare, yet they have one of the worst social media campaigns of a successful real world brand. In fact, chances are your own personal Instagram account is better off than Krups are.

First and foremost, checking the company’s Instagram account, even we can’t be extremely certain about the actual originality of the profile. What’s more it connects to linkinprofile.com, and no other official website further pointing to the fact that Krups probably doesn’t know how Instagram works.

But the content speaks for itself. And this can easily be noted when looking at their six latest posts. Two of them (bottom left and bottom right) are complete promotional product shots, two of them have almost nothing to do with the product (upper left and right), one completely doesn’t fit the style (upper middle) and only one actually makes some sort of sense for Instagram (bottom middle).

Unsure of what your content strategy should be for Instagram? Head over to our detailed analysis of visual flow consistency right here. What’s more, don’t forget to subscribe for a free 7-day trial of Locowise to have access to detailed analytics that will help you build a better social media strategy.