Marketer Crew - Did Instagram Make a Mistake? 🧐

Hey 👋🏼 Chris here…

Happy Thursday to the thousands of motivated marketing professionals, startup founders, and business owners who are a part of this community.

Instagram received a lot of backlash from users this week for its recent move to focus on short form video and discovery in feed… So much so that the head of instagram made a response video explaining the rationale.

There’s a lot of gold in his response so let’s take a look at what this transition means for marketers and creators moving forward.

Today’s issue takes around 2 minute to read. As always, if you have any feedback or questions I would love to hear. Feel free to send me a text or a DM on TikTok.

Enjoy!

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Instagram is Intentionally Becoming More Like TikTok

We’ve speculated this for a while now but with the Adam Mosseri’s (Head of Instagram) recent post on Twitter it is confirmed that the move to a discovery based short form video centric Instagram is the future.

Despite the initial user backlash we will begin to see an emphasis on an interest/discovery based feed over one that focuses on social connection.

Personally, I think this is a favorable move for users, creators, AND marketers… Here are a few things we should keep in mind:

✅ Social Discoverability Just Opened Wide Up

The "For You" page in TikTok is the holy grail of content discovery. This is why the platform has taken off so quickly. It's simply more entertaining than pictures of our friends fancy vacations on Instagram. Like it or hate it, that data is being announced from the Head of Instagram as the reason for the change.

One of the things that is working well for brands on TikTok is ToF awareness and organic reach. We haven't seen this kind of access to net new audiences from organic since the early days of social media. 

Brands like Duolingo, Chipotle, & Crocs are demonstrating how a solid organic social strategy can energize brand affinity on TikTok. It's the wild west folks!

✅ There is a Focus on Helping Smaller Creators/Accounts Grow

The message in Adam's video is clear about one thing... Instagram wants to help smaller creators. We can speculate the reason for this is because the platform sees smaller creators as the long tail of contributors to the content. If Instagram can help them grow then the user, creator, and platform all benefit.

What this means for us as marketers is that we should take advantage of the opportunity to work directly with creators, no matter how small, to help us create and promote content in platform. 

Check out Monday's issue of MarketerCrew to learn how to leverage UGC for your brand.

✅ Create Content for In-Feed Consumption over Clicks

The 2010's were some amazing years for marketers. We saw more opportunity to track and measure campaign performance than ever in the history of marketing. 

However, the pendulum is shifting once again back to fundamentals.

• Provide Value Instead of Selling
• Build an Engaged Community
• Create Demand Instead of Capturing It

The KPIs for our campaigns here should focus on content consumption and engagement metrics. Instagram will reward this effort with FREE organic reach to net new audiences.

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Things are changing fast in the world of social media. Remember in 2014 when we had to convince our boss that our brand needed a Facebook page? No…? I’m showing my age.

As always, if you have any feedback or questions I would love to hear. Feel free to send me a text or a DM on TikTok.

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