Instagram Opens Advertising to All Businesses
If you’ve been following the social media trends favouring increasingly mobile and image-based content, it may be a little surprise that the photo-sharing mobile app Instagram is emerging as one of the best student recruitment platforms. The Facebook-owned app hit 400 million users, propelling it well ahead of Twitter’s 316 million monthly active users, with more than 80 million photos being shared daily. Nearly three-quarters of Instagram’s user base is between 15 and 35, making it a particularly appealing channel for education lead generation. This is why College Instagram Ads is an ideal way to recruit prospects.
Instagram has flourished by providing a fun and fluid platform for expressing and exploring personal experiences. Singularly focused on emotive images, its emphasis on an uncluttered and intuitive user experience has resulted in far higher engagement than other social media channels (4.21% engagement per post compared to Facebook’s 0.07%). Higher education institutions have leveraged its power to give an instant yet in-depth glimpse into life on campus. With Instagram, the context is exclusively in the pictures you post – well-chosen storytelling visuals can compellingly convince prospects that they belong at your school.
Instagram has been slow to introduce advertising to its community, cautious to avoid alienating its user base. When they began experimenting with highly controlled ads from certain significant brands in 2013, the company’s CEO reviewed each to ensure they looked organic and natural. Instagram has finally opened up its paid advertising to all, with exciting new business-friendly services focused on three key areas: “expanding ad offerings to include action-oriented formats, enabling more targeting capabilities, and making it easier for businesses large and small to buy ads on Instagram.”
Big Changes with New Instagram Ads
Before this major move, buying Instagram ads meant directly contacting their sales representative, with a substantial investment in budget and time. Marketers can now coordinate Instagram campaigns with other automated social media ad purchasing, using third-party platforms to organize, cross-promote, and monitor their Instagram activity, including unpaid, organic posts. This “self-serve” integration enables efficient engagement with users from the same social media dashboard managers use to respond to comments on Twitter and Facebook.
Switching on Instagram’s advertising API (application programming interface) will bring many new marketing capabilities to educational institutions. As it is owned by Facebook, prospects can now be targeted on Instagram using Facebook’s sophisticated demographic and interest data, with conversions tracked and measured using Facebook’s conversion pixel.
New targeting opportunities include searching out new prospects with similar persona characteristics as your present data and connecting your school’s existing email data to Instagram so you can reach students who have already engaged with your college. Advanced targeting improves return on investment by delivering highly relevant ad content to the right audience at the right place and time.
Why Choose Instagram Marketing for Colleges?
The soaring popularity of social messaging apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp has coincided with smartphone ubiquity as devices become increasingly affordable and wireless networks faster. According to OnCampus Advertising, mobile is the top medium where millennial students see and respond to relevant ads, so ensure that landing pages connected to Instagram CTAs are optimized for mobile. Of smartphone users, this demographic is significantly more likely to research relevant brands and complete mobile purchases.
Consider these stats for what they’re worth:
- Millennials check their smartphones an average of 43 times per day! (Understanding Global Millennials)
- Instagram is generally their social media of choice, with teenagers 50% more likely to be active on the channel (GlobalWebIndex)
- 48% of high school seniors surveyed were researching colleges on Instagram, up 20% from 2014 (Chegg)
- Clickthrough rates on Instagram ads are 2.5 times higher than on other social media platforms (Kenshoo)
- Ad recall from Instagram-sponsored posts was 2.9 times higher than Nielsen’s norms for online advertising (Instagram)
While novelty is inevitably a factor when evaluating engaging students on Instagram, Instagram’s outreach potential is hard to ignore. Over 75% of its 400 million users live outside the U.S., with rapid user growth in popular source countries for international student recruitment, such as Brazil. Inspiring images targeted towards students in top global markets are a great introduction to your beautiful campus and school spirit for prospects who aren’t able to visit in person.
Understanding Instagram’s Unique Character
To succeed with Instagram marketing, it is essential to understand its unique visual and creative community. The best way to start is by seeing what prospective and current students say about your school and which aspects they choose to share. Social media monitoring can help identify relevant location tags and hashtags, revealing what interests your target audience(s). Develop personas for your various Instagram audiences and occasionally attempt to qualify these niches by accompanying your images with questions relevant to this group.
Consider your goals for this platform, which may vary depending on the campaign. Establish your organic presence and strategy on Instagram before leaping into paid advertising—Instagram advocates this approach. Leverage your existing inbound marketing efforts to adapt your core messaging, varying your themes to engage your diverse audiences at different times. Choose themes that can tell your story through consistent, powerful imagery.
In organic posts and ads, it’s important to respect Instagram’s raison d’etre, an intimate space for engaging with high-quality, artistically-styled pictures. Avoid offending your community by not over-posting – once daily is likely sufficient. “Instagram provides a playground for photos: easily accessible, unobtrusive, and inviting,” writes Sheri Lehman on Chapman University’s blog.
Chapman’s Instagram engagement is regularly at least triple that of Facebook
Natural but High-Quality Images
Although some universities employ professional photographers to roam their campuses for captivating pictures, you likely have someone on your team or student body with a decent camera and a good eye. Student photo contests are an excellent way to accumulate a variety of compelling images, engage your community, and gain followers by imposing rules like “follow us to enter.” Instagram photos typically use their many filtering, effects, and editing features for image enhancement – make the most of their square format to experiment with layout, color, and composition. Images can be processed on specialized photo-editing apps like Squarer, Snapseed, or AfterLight. Bold and vibrant colours often earn the most engagement.
Remember that in between the cute cats and appetizing dishes, students most often feature fun times with friends. Seek to capture those experiences that will make a prospect pause their scrolling to empathize and click “like.” Fortunately, campuses are full of youthful feelings and demonstrations of contagious enthusiasm. Aim to keep pictures on-brand but more candid and natural than your typical glossy marketing. Whenever possible, focus on the students and the inspiring background, such as impressive campus architecture or scenery.
Best Practices for Instagram Marketing in Higher Education
When showcasing your brand’s personality and what it represents, ensure your posts don’t stick out for the wrong reasons. Instagrammers can be passionate and don’t take kindly to sponsored content that infringes upon the traditionally ad-free aesthetic. Prioritize your message’s clarity while creating great visuals that feel at home on Instagram. Congratulate your sports teams, profile student and alumni successes, and find those humanizing behind-the-scenes moments at campus events.
Hashtags are very popular on Instagram, particularly when connected with cross-platform campaigns that galvanize your community. Adding hashtags liberally is the best way of gaining distribution and exposure on Instagram – even more so than on Twitter. Use the Explore page to research popular hashtags and add at least three to each post caption (Piqora advises 7) – you can always add more later in the comments for additional context.
Instagram isn’t as strict as Twitter with character limits for photo captions, but keep them short and sweet, inserting at least a few hashtags and perhaps some humour. Grow your community by promoting your Instagram account across your marketing channels and interacting with other Instagrammers. You can also try capitalizing on trends and popular hashtags like #ThrowbackThursday.
Creating Ads on Instagram
To start advertising on Instagram, first, connect your Instagram account to your Facebook page so you can create ads with Facebook Power Editor. This process allows you to create ads on Facebook and/or Instagram. Under Settings on your Facebook page, click to add an account under Instagram Ads. You may add an existing Instagram account or create a new one directly on Facebook.
Consider what you wish your ad to achieve and choose from Instagram’s new interactive features, many of which can only be accessed by advertisers. These features include videos up to 30 seconds long (whereas regular users can only post 15-second videos) and calls to action (CTAs) that can link to external content, such as installing new apps or university landing pages.
There are three types of ads that colleges and universities can employ:
1. Image (Direct Response)
Instagram’s new action-oriented ad offerings include clear calls to action that allow your prospects to click directly through and take the next steps. Links could previously only be placed in profile bios. Five different CTAs are possible, including “Sign Up,” “Learn More,” or “Install Now” for apps.
Example: Lewisham Southwark College ran the first Instagram advertising campaign in the UK education sector, surpassing expectations with colorful images focusing on their community. The campaign yielded over 9,000 likes with excellent feedback for future improvements. Their website saw about 6,000 clicks from about 300,000 impressions. “Make sure your content is going to resonate with your audience and how they engage on the platform,” advises Sonia Furley, marketing head at the college.
2. Carousel Ads
Earlier this year, Instagram introduced “carousel ads” that enable businesses to share multiple photographs per advertisement that can be flipped through like a slideshow. Schools can include up to four images and a CTA for enhanced storytelling, highlighting various aspects of a college or program, behind-the-scenes insights, tutorials, or procedures (such as “how to apply”), or leading up to a surprise ending. The first image should be the strongest, perhaps hinting that there’s more to the story.
3. Videos
While regular users can post 15-second videos on Instagram, advertisers’ videos can be 30 seconds long. Brands are generally recommended to take photos of 80-90% of their content, but videos can be effective. Remember that audio doesn’t automatically play on Instagram, and videos run on a loop, so think twice about your visuals. Choose a video cover photo that intrigues an essential moment, keep filters consistent, and strive for authenticity. They recently launched a new app called Hyperlapse that could be valuable for schools making high-quality time-lapse videos, even while in motion.
Instagram’s new business tools provide better measurement of impressions, reach, and engagement, and it’s likely that these will continue to improve as the platform adjusts to increased advertising. While it’s easy to recommend creating “native” ads that don’t disrupt the user experience, the challenge for colleges and universities will be to develop concise and captivating images, carousels, or videos that invite Instagrammers to explore their communities further.
FAQ To Consider
How can Instagram be used in schools?
Students most often feature fun times with friends. Seek to capture those experiences that will make a prospect pause their scrolling to empathize and click “like.” Fortunately, campuses are full of youthful feelings and demonstrations of contagious enthusiasm.
