For teenagers, the social world is the untapped frontier of opportunities.
That’s certainly the case with my son. He set up an Instagram account in the early summer focused on the Football World Cup. His idea was to mash up videos and photos and put them on a background he designed. He did this all on his iPhone and told no one about it till he had 50,000 followers. He then created a back up in case the first account was hacked and that swiftly had 25,000 followers.
Within weeks not months! It’s taken me years to grow my Twitter following, which he looks down on as middle age and so early noughties…
He now has 170,000 and is regularly contacted by sports wear companies for shoutouts to his network. He’s set up a paypal account and within the past few weeks has earned more than £100 and has received two football strips of Real Madrid and Barcelona. Interestingly, he refused to do shoutouts till he’d reached 100k – “you need to get the three digits before you can really earn,” he said.
So this hobby has also become a good earner.
To date famous footballers have started following and and even Brooklyn Beckham, son of David, commented on his posts.
What’s also interesting is that all his friends are creating similar accounts and intuitively understand how to mine the Instagram teen market. And it’s worth pointing out that none of this is taught at school or college. So companies should be on the look out for canny young instagramers who treat marketing products as a hobby.
I’ve shamelessly cut and pasted some recent information on the rise of Instagram courtesy of spectate.com. You can read the rest of the article from that link.
Facts about Instagram
In terms of branding, Instagram just became the cooler younger sibling to its older brother Facebook. According to recent research shared by Ad Age, Instagram brand posts have more than double the interactions of Facebook in the second quarter of 2014. The numbers, which were pulled from Shareablee, a social media analytics firm, showed that Instagram users commented, shared, and liked content on Instagram an average of 6,932 times per post, compared to Facebook’s 2,396 actions per post.
- Size: It has over 200 million users. It hasn’t topped Facebook’s 1 billion, but it has considerable marketshare. To see how much their marketshare effected me, I counted over the weekend that 34% of my Facebook friends now have Instagram accounts (507 of 1,494 friends).
- Growth: In 2013, Instagram grew faster than Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest combined. According to a six-month study released by market research firm, GlobalWebIndex, Instagram grew by 23% in active users versus Facebook, which declined by 3% in the same period.
- Activity: Its users are very active. In a January 2014 Pew Research study, 57% of users go to the site daily (second only to Facebook at the time, at 63%).
- Engagement: Its users are engaged. In an April 2014 Forrester-released study, the market research firm studied 7 popular social networks, and found brands that post on Instagram get 58 times more engagement (likes, comments, and shares) than Facebook and 120 times more engagement than Twitter.
- Technology: The pervasiveness of smartphones and advancements to mobile photo and video technology has imagery and video content production more ripe than ever.