Caroline Haley authors the column “Caroline’s Cloud” and is Vice President, Outreach & Operations for Milldam Public Relations.
Instagram is the photo sharing app taking up lots of space in Facebook’s many data centers. Established in 2010, the app was purchased by Facebook in 2012 for approximately $1 Billion and continues to grow in popularity. As with many social apps, Instagram was quickly seized by marketers to promote various brands, with B2C marketing in particular benefiting from the constant steam of images flowing past its users.
But therein lies the difficulty: those users are typically direct consumers, typically under 30, typically pretty “hip.” Forgive me, but those demarcations rarely apply for the B2B tech industry circles in which I typically find myself.
There are also a few key drawbacks to understand about using Instagram for B2B promotions:
- Currently, you cannot hyperlink in a photo caption, nor can the photo link somewhere in particular. To those of us always dreaming up the next landing page for a website, this isn’t ideal.
- There is (for most profiles right now) limited opportunity in the “profile” section to include information about your business.
The question then remains: despite its general hype, what’s the use of Instagram for a B2B business, especially for businesses that speak to industries of an older demographic or ones that just don’t lend themselves well to a constant creation of photos?
You’d be surprised.
A Bookly blog has pulled together what they consider to be the top 15 B2B Instagram accounts. The piece showcases how companies such as HP, Intel, and Adobe run wildly successful accounts that support strong brand recognition and offer a creative platform to try new campaigns.
One point in particular stands out in this other article by Distilled on why B2B companies can benefit from Instagram. The author insists that Instagram can help to humanize your brand, which is an especially powerful achievement for any B2B company.
We aren’t yet sure whether Instagram will really take off for the B2B brands operating in the industries that Milldam works in most – data centers, energy, telecom, etc., but here are a few points you should consider:
- If you’re thinking about using Instagram for your business, try searching industry hashtags to see what the activity is. As an example, industry-specific tags for Milldam include:
- #datacenter
- #energyefficiency
- #telecom
- #IT
- #techmarketing
- As an increasing number of publications have profiles, Instagram can be another outlet with which you get news and see what’s trending in industry conversations. Data Center Frontier, Building Operating Management, and TechCrunch are good examples of outlets in industries relevant to our clients which post complimentary images to stories they’re writing about. They can also serve as a helpful starting-point for additional conversation and engagement with your brand’s ideas and the perspectives of others.
- Instagram is one of our favorite social platforms to use when traveling or attending tradeshows due to the many opportunities for fun photos! Audiences often love to see a change of pace with unique posts of industry events. Besides being entertaining, the photos can also be a good indicator for viewers if an event is worth attending in the future.
Instagram itself is aware of the increase in B2B brands exploring the use of its platform as another way to engage with audience. Within the last two months, Instagram has allowed companies to “Set Up Your Business Profile.” While this change does officially mark your page as a business (possibly a deterrent to your audience, but in B2B we tend to keep it transparent anyways), setting up a Business Profile also gives you access to analytics that may help you figure out whether using an Instagram account is right for your company.
This tool has only just been released this summer, so we’ll continue to monitor the new analytics from Milldam’s own account and report back as we analyze the data and learn more!
Instagram for B2B is evolving. Like any tool for broadcasting your message or promoting audience engagement, Instagram could provide you with new opportunities for growing your brand and introducing a side of your company you’d like to highlight.
So – should you bother? We say YES!
