Influencers are the people who have the caliber to affect the lifestyle decisions of people mainly because of their personality, fan following, authority, knowledge, or position. Every influencer has a different niche and thinking, with which he/she engages actively and influences the audience of the same niche. They are signed by renowned brands to fulfil their marketing objectives. Brands collaborate with them to expand their reach; hence, they work as an asset to brands.

They continuously post about it on various social networking sites in order to generate large followings of people who are actively engaged, enthusiastic, and pay attention to their ways and views, wherein Instagram has been widely accepted by all the influencers.

How do influencers work?

Nowadays social media influencers have elevated social media marketing to new heights. These accounts have amassed millions of followers, making them smartphone celebrities. Their areas of content themes and expertise can range from parenting, nutrition, and health to beauty, fashion, and gaming.

Because of their popularity, marketers tend to partner with influencers to promote their goods and services through sponsored posts and gifting, and to use their social media accounts as an advertising asset.

This is not a new thing for several marketers; campaigns are running with elements of influencers for years now, due to which they are so effective for the brands focussing their marketing efforts on social media customers through these influencers.

Brands may be able to connect with consumers by tapping into these social media platforms. People are far more accepting of the promotions and recommendations from these influencers than they are of promotions received through other channels since they have a high level of admiration for them.

Statistics:

According to the study, more than 45 percent of the world’s population, or 3.484 billion people, are active users of social media..

The study also found that more people are using mobile devices to access social media. As a result, it is clear that using Instagram and other social media sites on their phones has become much simpler. Despite this ease, Instagram remains the most successful site, with 84 percent interaction.

Instagram has a monthly active user base of 1.15 billion people. Instagram’s user numbers are hitting new heights, thanks to the relentless rollout of exciting updates and the pandemic’s impact. According to a report, photos shared via Instagram on Facebook receive more interaction than those shared directly.

Instagram is also, according to the latest predictions from Social Media Today, the world’s fastest rising social networking site. These figures clearly demonstrate that Instagram will assist you in effectively showcasing your brand around the world.

According to the report, Instagram is used by nearly half a billion users on a regular basis. However, it’s not just the huge number of users who draw brands to the social platform.

Instagram, on the other hand, is a website that has the highest engagement rates for shared content.

Why is Instagram the best platform for influencers?

So, why is this media-sharing platform so popular amongst the influencer community? In recent years, the rise of influencer marketing has evolved the way businesses appeal to audiences.

Influencers can be found in the middle of various platforms, but any marketer knows that Instagram till now is the best digital hub and also nowadays brands are paying a huge amount to influencers to promote their products and services and most of this investment will be generated on Instagram.

These influencers influence everyday consumers to like certain products or choose certain services. It has been found that micro-influencers (users with anywhere between 1000 to 100,000 followers and high engagement rates) are one of the best ways for brands to drive their sales. It was also said that more than 90% of the influencers prefer Instagram as their networking platform.

Other than Instagram no other social media platforms have the reach nor the natural capacity to facilitate brand-sponsored posts. From all perspectives, Instagram is undoubtedly the center of influence marketing.

Here are a few reasons why Instagram overpowers other Social networking sites:

  • The engagement rates of Instagram influencers are higher than all other social networking platforms

    The main reason why most of the campaigns for influencer marketing takes place on Instagram.

    Since Instagram content literally sees much more engagement than all other social platforms.

    According to a survey, a micro-influencer coming out of Twitter would have an engagement rate nearly equal to 1.46%. Whereas micro-influencers coming from Instagram with the equal number of fan following can see engagement rates nearly equal to 5.7% and which is much more than others.

    As a matter of fact, even Facebook which is Instagram’s parent organization gets less engagement. A study tells that brands on Instagram get nearly four times higher engagement rates than they get on Facebook.

    But why do users engage more on Instagram than all other social networking sites including Facebook which has a lot more users than Instagram?

    Here are the several reasons for this question: possibly, it’s the evident nature of Instagram itself that gets users to engage. Or maybe the users like seeing that they can buy in their Instagram feeds, or the fact that Instagram is actually handier for brands as compared to Facebook, since they get to use all the creative options that Instagram provide to promote their products.

  • Instagram has a huge amount of active users

    Instagram has not only very large but also very active users. As per a research done by Instagram, there are more than 1 billion active users in a month. To top that, almost half of them i.e half a billion people are active on a single day. Whereas nearly 38% users log into their account multiple times in a single day.

    Nowadays, Instagram Stories have become one of the most popular forms of content (since, almost four hundred million users check stories everyday). Viewing this from another perspective, one-fourth of the smartphone users use Instagram.

  • Instagram influencers have disposable personal incomes

    Influencer marketing through Instagram is widely used to boost his/her account engagement and followers or to boost awareness of a particular brand, most of the influencer marketing programmes are about increasing their sales: the more, the merrier(obviously!).

    Well, to sell entities and services, you don’t only need a good programme and a pertinent influencer, you’ll also need customers (audience) who can afford them.

    According to the studies, Instagram influencers have quite high levels of disposable personal incomes (DIP): Near about 31% of the Social media influencers who make more than 75k per year use Instagram, near about 32% of the Social media influencers who earn between 50k-74k per year use Instagram and near about 32% of the social media influencers are earning between 30k-49k are on Instagram.

  • Instagram has a jaw dropping reach

    Except for the large number of users that actively use Instagram, there is one more reason why Instagram is a better platform for Influencer marketing is its jaw dropping reach. Even if you work with an influencer who has a few thousand followers, their content can probably reach a larger audience than their own.
    How? With the help of hashtags.

    Although hashtags got popular on Twitter, they work far better with Instagram’s algorithm. Users not only get to see the content through hashtags, they can also follow it. Hence, in spite of not having a lot of followers of their own, proper hashtags can also help the influencers to reach a large number of audiences.

    That is why, when one plans to create an Influencer marketing programme on Instagram, the influencer must take some time to research the most suitable hashtags: a mixture of popular hashtags i.e. millions of following and posts, hashtags with an average following i.e. tons of posts, along with some hashtags that fewer posts and followings.

    Since, influencers are allowed to use 30 hashtags per post, one can experiment with different hashtags at an equivalent time, more like permutation and combination.

Conclusion

So, to reach a conclusion about how Instagram has got the social game so right that most of the influencers prefer it, the main reasons we got are: –

It provides better functionality for the sponsored content, for example, tagging in the posted contents like pictures and captions, swipe up functionality to open up the joined link, bio links, etc.

  • It allows us to post longer forms of content.
  • It has the ability to post longer/permanent lasting content.
  • The new reel feature is pretty helpful to convey the idea in brief and makes it beneficial for the influencers.
  • It has the highest engagement amongst the other social networking platforms.
  • Most of the brands use Instagram influencers to promote their products and services.
  • Instagram’s micro-influencers receive a disposable personal income.
  • It has better and detailed analytics.