August 7, 2017
Time flies in social media, believe it or not it’s already time to wish Instagram Stories a happy first birthday. A whole year since the launch of Facebook’s first foray into Snapchat territory which inspired so very many knock-offs.
We have recently asked if there is a place for so many Story type platforms and whether they can exist in competition, but we haven’t looked at how the top brands are using the original Snapchat copy-cat.
Ahead of the publication of Snaps Q2 earnings this week we can already see the damage Instagram Stories has done to its progenitor courtesy of data from Social Bakers –
A recent study by data researchers Klear provides us with some valuable insight into how big brands are using Instagram Stories.
45% of the brands studied are using the platform once per week, with merchandise focussed campaigns dominating the spectrum.
When comparing which industries typically made use of Instagram Stories Klear found that the overwhelming majority of brands fell into the Fitness and Fashion categories.
This led to the following breakdown of Story usage by industry –
Without data on the engagement and reception of these Stories it’s very difficult to determine which work best on this platform, but it’s probably safe to say that the most prolific brands have tried and tested various approaches and continued with the ones that work.
In classic Instagram/Facebook style it is notoriously hard to lead users off-platform or link to an external page but Stories have opened up this valuable ability to any accounts with more than 10k followers. So where are the big brands sending their off-platform traffic?
It seems the answer is directly to purchase pages.
How long will Instagram let this opportunity to keep the purchase in-house slip through their fingers? It’s unlike Facebook to actively promote taking any part of their user journey to the greater web, but rivals seem comfortable to do so.
Expect to see much more from all variations of the story offering in the near future.