If you’re a regular Instagram user, you’ve probably seen posts like these indicating that you’re likely to start seeing (more) ads, some of which may be more relevant to you and your interests.
While we’re awaiting a full roll out of Instagram’s advertising platform to all businesses, it’s worthwhile to consider the impact that increased advertising may have on Instagram in general.
In the case of Facebook, as the platform has become more saturated with sponsored content, it has shifted from a purely social network to one that seeks more and more to connect paying businesses with their potential customers.
While Facebook certainly makes a noble effort to balance that aspect of content, it does represent a fundamental shift in the nature of the platform, concurrent with a very profitable IPO and a huge increase in the company’s value.
While this was all happening in recent years, Instagram came onto the scene, offering users a more “pure” approach to social media interaction in several ways:
- Only mobile
- Image-based (and later video) posts only
- No live URL links outside of the profile description
- No ads
Instagram was able to integrate with the more popular Facebook and Twitter of the time for ease of sharing, and with automation services like IFTTT, to enable users to share content automatically to any number of platforms and accounts, creating an effective and easy-to-use (once prepared) mechanism to generate content on many fronts with a single post to Instagram.
Once Facebook purchased Instagram in Spring of 2012 for (what was then a large figure of) $1 billion, it was clear that there was a massive potential for profit using the service, which Facebook would surely exploit going forward.
As Instagram shifts its news feed structure to include more advertisements, that means a significant loss in news feed real estate which may, proportionately, be much more impactful than on Facebook.
Whereas Facebook has more options for placement on desktop, Instagram is (for the moment) restricted to that one-column mobile-based news feed structure, in which an advertisement of any size will completely cut off one organic post from another.
For a user who may have viewed 10 to 25 posts in a 2-minute visit to Instagram, even one advertisement will result in a 10% to 4% reduction in organic content.
And just as the younger generations are perceived to be moving from Facebook toward platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, it’s possible that these changes to Instagram could spur a similar exodus.
To learn more about how you can use Instagram, Facebook, and more social networks to boost your business without paying for ads, click here to check out the Members Club at Ocean Drive Social.
