Instagram for brands after the Facebook deal: should you post?

A quick reality check, because the acquisition headlines have made the app sound bigger and more commercial than it is.

• Roughly 30 million users at the time of the deal, growing fast since the Android app launched on April 3. Most users are in the US and skew under 35.
• Mobile only. There is no website where people browse feeds. If someone is not on an iPhone or Android phone, they do not see your posts.
• Square photos, one at a time, with optional filters and a caption. No video. No scheduling. No posting from a desktop.
• One link, in your bio. Captions and comments are plain text.
• Hashtags are the main discovery mechanism, alongside the Popular page and cross-posting to Facebook and Twitter.
• No official metrics. You can count likes, comments and followers by hand or use a third-party tool such as Statigram or Webstagram that reads the public API.

The audience is real and engaged. A photo from a brand with a modest following routinely gets a higher percentage of its audience interacting than the same brand's Facebook Page post. What is missing is everything a marketer normally uses to justify spend.

Ask three questions in order. If you answer no to any of them, claim the username and wait.

1. Does the business have something worth photographing? Products, a workshop, a kitchen, a job site, a team, customers using what you sell, the city you operate in. Restaurants, retailers, fashion, food and beverage, travel, fitness, real estate, home services and anything with a making process all qualify. A payroll software company mostly does not, at least not yet.
2. Is someone on the team already taking photos with a phone? Instagram rewards an authentic, slightly imperfect look. A person who is there and cares beats an agency shooting stock-style imagery. If nobody on staff is comfortable doing this, it will stall within a month.
3. Are your customers on smartphones? Look at your Google Analytics mobile segment. If mobile is under 10% of your site traffic, your buyers may not be here yet.

If all three are yes, commit to three months. That is long enough to learn whether the channel earns a place in your plan.

Brands that are doing this well right now, Starbucks, Burberry, Red Bull, Ben & Jerry's, GE among them, share a few habits. None of them post product shots from the catalog.

Frequency: two to five posts a week. Daily is fine if the quality holds. Twice a day is usually too much for a brand account, because every post lands in the same chronological feed and followers notice.

Practical rules of the time:

• Shoot with the phone camera app first, then import. The in-app camera is limited and you lose the original.
• Use filters sparingly and consistently. Pick one or two that suit your brand's look and stick with them.
• Write short captions. Ask a question when you want comments.
• Use three to five relevant hashtags, not twenty. Make one of them a brand hashtag you use every time.
• Cross-post selectively to Facebook and Twitter. Every post pushed everywhere trains your other audiences to ignore it.
• Reply to comments. Most brands do not, and it shows.

You will not get a dashboard, so build a small one. A spreadsheet updated weekly is enough.

• Followers, likes per post and comments per post, tracked as averages per week.
• Engagement rate: likes plus comments divided by followers at the time of posting. Brands typically see 1% to 5% on Instagram, far above Facebook Page norms.
• Click-throughs from the bio link, using a tagged URL such as a bit.ly link or a Google Analytics campaign parameter.
• Mentions of your brand hashtag by other users, counted by searching it inside the app.
• Instances of customers mentioning Instagram in store or on the phone. Low-tech, but it tells you whether the channel is reaching buyers.

Do not expect to attribute revenue. If a client asks you to prove a sales return in the first quarter, the honest answer is that nobody can on this platform today. What you can show is whether an audience is forming and whether it interacts.

Instagram itself is free. The cost is time and, in some cases, a better phone.

• A capable iPhone 4S or a good Android handset: $200 to $650 depending on contract.
• Staff time: two to four hours a week for someone to shoot, post, hashtag and reply.
• Third-party tools: Statigram is free. A paid social media management tool that adds Instagram monitoring runs $10 to $100 a month.
• Agency content support, if you want help with photography standards and an editorial calendar: $500 to $2,500 a month in most US markets.

If a vendor quotes you a large monthly fee for Instagram management alone, ask what they will be doing, because they cannot schedule posts, buy ads or produce reports beyond what you can do yourself.

Posting the catalog. Clean product photos on white backgrounds are what the website is for. On Instagram they read as advertising in a feed full of friends' photos.

Buying followers. Services offering thousands of followers for a few dollars deliver empty accounts. Your engagement rate collapses and anyone who looks can tell.

Ignoring the rules. Instagram's terms of use prohibit running contests that require users to follow or like without a proper disclaimer, and US sweepstakes law still applies. Keep giveaways simple and compliant.

Treating it as a Facebook clone. The acquisition does not mean the platforms have merged. Instagram has stated it will remain a separate app. Content that works on a Facebook Timeline page, long captions, link posts, event promotions, performs poorly here.

Not claiming the name. Even if you decide to wait, register your brand's username today. Squatted handles are already appearing, and there is no verification process to reclaim one.

We treat a new social platform the way we treat any channel: discover, plan, build, improve. Discovery means looking at who your customers are, where they already spend time on mobile and what in the business is worth showing. Planning sets the role of the channel, brand awareness in this case, the content themes, posting cadence and the handful of numbers we will track. Build is the practical part: photography guidelines that match your brand identity, a shot list, a caption voice and a simple weekly routine that a named person on your team owns. Improve is the monthly review, where we look at what earned engagement and adjust.

Because brand, growth, web and technology sit together in our team, the Instagram work connects to the rest. The bio link points at a landing page built to convert mobile visitors. The brand hashtag appears on packaging, receipts and the website. Customer photos get reused, with permission, in email and on product pages. That is the difference between an account that exists and one that does a job.

A representative engagement is the content program described on our content work page. A consumer brand with a strong visual product but no in-house photographer needed a steady stream of material for social channels. We set photography standards, trained a staff member to shoot on a phone, built an editorial calendar and set up a simple measurement sheet. Within a quarter the brand was posting consistently, engagement per post was rising and the same images were being repurposed on the website and in email campaigns. The lesson that applies here: the system matters more than any single photo.