Instagram Advertising

After being acquired by social media giant Facebook nearly 6 months ago, Instagram recently announced that they had reached 400 million active monthly users, making them bigger than Twitter.

On the back of their massive growth since last year, they’ve also announced that as of the end of September 2015, their advertising functionality will be available world wide.

Sponsored post advertising became available for the US only toward the end of 2013, and for the UK in 2014.  The fastest growing social networking platform was acquired by Facebook this year, and as of the end of this month, people from anywhere in the world will be able to take advantage of their advertising options, which use the existing Facebook advertising infrastructure.

Global User Base

Although they report that nearly 28% of the US population is an Instagram user, it’s worth noting that 75% of their now 400 million active users are from outside the US, so opening up the advertising options globally is clearly a good move.

Right now, it’s difficult to predict how effective Instagram advertising will be, given how new the option is for most people.  Although 80 million images are shared on the platform every day, it hasn’t really been much of a factor in things like B2B marketing yet.

With the expansion of its ad offerings, and the facility of Facebooks advertising technology, this may be something that’s going to change.

Brands Plan On Expanding to Instagram

Although the advertising options that Instagram had available until recently were fairly limited, especially in terms of who could use them, preliminary reports are that B2C advertising efforts on the platform appear to have been relatively successful. (A result which may also have been influenced by just who those brands were.)

That said however, a report from Social Media Examiner earlier this year found that although Instagram has not featured in B2B marketers plans so far, 40% of B2B businesses polled reported that they intended to increase their Instagram activity, something which is now possible with the opening of Instagram advertising to all comers.

Of course, the real question is how users will react to increased Instagram advertising.