3 Lessons I Learned from Instagram Content Marketing Strategy

Looking on how Instagram launch these days their Partners my eyes saw something bigger – they way they categorized their Partners: Ad Tech, Community Management & Content Marketing (and I’m wondering what Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose will say about this category in their This Old PNR Podcast)

And I want to take a moment and look closer on this photo sharing application. What can brands learn from it?

Instagram is currently looking to hire at least five more people to help with “daily editorial” production, and it wants candidates with legitimate editorial bonafides…In February, Instagram hired Alex Suskind as the platform’s inaugural music editor. Suskind has written for Esquire, New York magazine and Sports Illustrated. But it does see an editorial infrastructure as integral to the platform’s success. By highlighting lesser-known talents such as Mar, Instagram is able to up their numbers of followers and, in turn, increase user engagement.

And user engagement is arguably the most important metric for any digital media endeavor, platform or publishers.

If we’d take a look at everything Instagram does we could summarize it in a few key words from which we could learn a few things for our business or our department: Community Management, User Engagement & Content Marketing.

1. Community Management

I’ve written before about Instagram’s community management and I am sorry if I keep repeating myself but I believe this job is one of the most important responsibilities a man can have in a communication/marketing and/or social media department.

Why? It’s all about the relationship.

Instagram has community managers for USA, UK, Brazil and they are now in search of a community manager for France. That’s right. It’s all about getting closer to the community. And that’s why I believe the social media manager job is starting to disappear and be replaced with a whole department (but we’ll talk about this in a different article).

2. User Engagement

If we take a look at the latest Instagram updates we can see that users have received the opportunity to connect with each other in a much easier and simpler way. From Direct message to Tag and video posts. Right, this is what it’s all about in a company, a product, a community.

Give the users/consumers the opportunity to connect with each other.

Why do you think Facebook is the hottest social network? Why do you think Whatsapp is still growing? Why do you think Snapchat is catching on more and more among young people? That’s right. The engagement. What is the level of engagement you have with your clients (not just on Facebook, in your whole communication strategy).

3. Content Marketing Projects

What Instagram does at the moment with the blog and the WHP challenges they launch every weekend falls into the category of Editorial Projects + Community Management.

Why editorial projects? Because, first of all, on their blog you will find not jut promotion stuff but a whole story of accounts no one has heard of. That’s right. People there are researching and looking for Instagrammers that inspire.

And I think this is a job done best by a journalist. Then there are the offline projects: The “Community First” book or the animal calendar. Little things but that will directly reach the clients (looks like old newspaper?).

Instagram realized the power of brand journalism and it certainly wants to take advantage of the whole content their 400 million active users create. Simple as that!

These are just 3 points I wanted to point out in the work Instagram is doing for the whole world.

But these are 3 important points that might help you, if you know how to manage them.