Nicole Jensen's Events Career Blog

Instagram is a simple photo sharing platform that allows users to show their artistic side(through their creative choice of filter). Much like other social platforms, many businesses are using it as another way of reaching out to and engaging with their target audience.

The simple way to use Instagram for your business is to upload photos of everyday tasks and anything that would be of interest to your audience. Things like client meetings, occurrences in the office, new staff members, staff birthdays etc. However if you are getting sick of using your Instagram for basic updates there are ways in which you can make your profile a little more engaging and interesting for your followers.

Over the past two months Margin Media has been running our ‘a day in the life’ campaign. Which follows each employee as they take control of the Instagram account for the day and post photos from as soon as they wake up to right before bedtime. It is a very basic idea, but proved to be effective.

How it worked:

Employees were photographed and ‘announced’ (on Instagram) the afternoon/evening prior to their designated day. Allowing users to understand their role and be able to put a face to their name.

On the day the following rules/guidelines were adhered to by each team member:

• Use the hashtags #adayinthelife #marginmeida #(yourposition) - And any other relevant hashtags. 
• Upload a minimum of five images throughout the day. 
• Try and start as soon as possible, so your photo shows up when people check their Instagram first thing in the morning. 
• Be aware of the Margin Media identity, do not post anything that could potentially harm our brand in the public eye.

The results:

The Margin Media Instagram account currently has 264 followers, a lifetime total of 1238 likes received and 262 photos taken.

Over the campaign period:

• 92 Photos were taken
• 499 Users liked photos
• 24 Users commented on photos
• 30 New followers were gained

Now to put these statistics into context we can compare it to relevant Margin Media Twitter stats.

The Margin Media Twitter account currently has 3, 604 followers and has sent out a total of 3,105 tweets.

Over the campaign period:

• 84 Tweets were sent out
• 16 Mentions
• 9 Retweets
• 80 Followers gained

When comparing these two sets of statistics some fairly clear conclusions can be made.

The total amount of followers on each platform are extremely different, with our Twitter following having almost 14 times more followers than our Instagram account.

• The amount of content sent out by each platform was relatively similar, 92 photos and 84 tweets.
• Just under half of our Instagram lifetime likes came within the campaign period.
• The level of user interaction and follows when comparing the above stats show that we had just over 5 times the amount of engagement on our Instagram account than our Twitter account.

This final statistic is the most interesting because of the difference in total followers on each account. Instagram has a much smaller following yet a much higher rate of engagement, showing that our brand awareness is growing faster even with a smaller audience telling us that effort placed on this platform is not a waste of time. 

Another interesting stat is that almost half of our lifetime Instagram likes came throughout the campaign period. The perfect example of how a campaign like Margin Media’s ‘a day in the life’ can boost your Instagram engagement and help you to connect with your users on the platform.

We know that having a presence on various social media platforms is important for all businesses and the results of our social media experiment proves that we all need to be running engaging campaigns via these platforms to see results.