New York, Mar. 2, 2020 — Social listening and media monitoring platform Mention has collected public data from over 80 million Instagram posts and 1.6 million of the top users on the platform. The 2020 Instagram Engagement Report in collaboration with Hubspot, a leading growth platform, evaluates trends about engagement, influencers, location, caption length, and other critical insights for businesses to harness this year.
Fostering a connection on Instagram is getting more difficult for brands
Since 2019, engagement is no longer limited to likes and comments on a photo post. Instagram continues to evolve the platform, introducing new features and improving algorithms that impact the way brands engage with audiences. Instagram’s announcement of ‘hiding’ public like counts in certain countries, was in an effort to get users to “focus on the photos and videos you share, not how many likes you get.”(Social Media Today).
“All in all, engagement isn’t a one-size-fits-all metric, you need to base it on what is important to your brand. Instagram is changing frequently based on new public data sets. If the platform is data-driven, those who are running marketing and advertising on the platform must keep this top of mind to continue brand growth on Instagram.”- Sandra Chung, Head of Content, Mention
The prioritization of Instagram’s algorithm to favour interest, relationship, timeliness, frequency leaves businesses with a constant challenge to adapt and deploy new marketing and advertising strategies. Businesses who adopt an insights-driven approach to their social media strategy will likely see an improvement in reaching core objectives for their brand.
“As more ad spend is being directed towards social media every year, today’s marketers are becoming increasingly data-driven – And this is a good sign considering that the Instagram algorithm is constantly changing due to the huge amount of data it gains every minute. Regardless of whether you are in the B2B or B2C space and have awareness or lead gen goals, make sure you harness the power of analytics to maximize your marketing investment and grow better” – Inken Kuhlmann-Rhinow, Marketing Director EMEA at HubSpot.
Adopting a social insights approach on a data-driven platform
According to Later, Instagram rolls out new versions of its algorithm, based on huge amounts of data, meaning brands need to be leveraging the same public data to stay competitive on the platform and reach their audiences in the most authentic way. Last year, it was reported that only 21% of PR and Communications professionals act on new information. The report further unpacks tactical learning based on the analysis of Instagram data, geared at digital communicators and brands.
Key Findings :
- Image posts receive 27.55% more likes than permanent video posts and 13.55% more likes than carousel posts.
- With the removal of a public tally of likes, comments have become a stronger, more qualitative indicator of how people interact with particular posts.
- Engagement rates drop off after more than 6 hashtags in a post, yet the average Instagram post contains 10.8 hashtags.
- Steering away from ‘top’ or ‘most popular’ hashtags is beneficial to improving post engagement. Focusing on subtopic or niche hashtags is likely to yield more successful engagement numbers, due to the over saturation of posts filtered under this hashtag.
Methodology:
Using the Mention platform, a large amount of social media data was collected for the Instagram report in collaboration with HubSpot. Over 81,258,182 Instagram posts and 1,676,748 of the top users were analyzed to observe trends about engagement rates, hashtags, and other insights that matter to both brands and marketers.
For more information please contact
Meghan DuCille, Global Public Relations Manager
+33 7 66 87 06 23
About Hubspot
HubSpot is a leading growth platform. Over 56,500 total customers in over 100 countries use HubSpot’s award-winning software, services, and support to transform the way they attract, engage, and delight customers.
About Mention
Mention is a leading all-in-one social media management tool, designed to ensure brands can easily track the most important conversations across social media and the web. Mention allows clients to monitor and plan social media the smart way, by offering brands and industry social data to inform each publishing decision. Founded in 2012, Mention’s customer base exceeds 750,000 users in over 125 countries, with over 4,000 enterprise clients. Since September 2018, Mention has joined the NHST Media Group.
