By Lara O'Reilly
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The once-modest photo sharing app
Instagram is beating Twitter on yet another front: Engagement. Flickr CC/Henry Burrows
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Earlier this
month Instagram revealed it had overtaken Twitter in terms of
users: 300 million to Twitter’s 284 million. Now there’s more evidence
underlining Instagram’s dominant status versus Twitter.
Data provided
to Business Insider from social media analytics company Socialbakers shows
Instagram is not only gaining traction in sheer numbers of users, but posts
from the biggest brands on the photo app are receiving almost 50 times more
engagement (at the highest level) too. More users and more engagement? It’s
easy to guess which medium advertisers will prefer.
Socialbakers
looked at interactions of the top 25 “most engaging” brand profiles globally
across both platforms in the quarter to December 9. For Instagram that includes
brands like Victoria’s Secret, Adidas, Starbucks and Urban Outfitters. On
Twitter, it’s brands like Playstation, Taco Bell, Nike and Paddy Power.
The average
post on Instagram among the top brands had an engagement rate (people that have
liked or commented) of 3.31%. The average tweet from those brands had an
engagement rate (retweets, replies or favorites) of 0.07%.
Socialbakers’ data
doesn’t compare exact apples to apples. The brands in each of the top 25 are
different (for the most part, although there is some crossover: Starbucks and
Victoria’s Secret appear in both top 25s for example.)
The data also doesn’t
include reach metrics: Twitter has been very vocal about the power of its
vastly underplayed "logged-out
audience," which is harder to track. Also, there are completely different
ways to “engage” with a post on each platform.
In addition, most
marketers agree that they shouldn’t be measuring their social media success on
social media metrics — the amount of likes, retweets, and so on. Instead they
should be looking to business metrics: At their simplest, sales; but also brand
metrics like affinity, loyalty, awareness and so on.
However, the analysis
is another indicator that Twitter is losing out, on yet another measure, to
rival social networks.
Jan Rezab,
Socialbakers CEO, told Business Insider: "We were shocked by what the
different was between the difference in engagement between Twitter and
Instagram. What Twitter will say is 'Engagement is easier to do on Instagram.'
But then the question back should be "Shouldn't Twitter have a lighter
form of engagement too?"
It's a fair point.
One of the criticisms of Twitter, and an area the
company itself has admitted it needs to improve on, is that there is a
lengthy onboarding process when a user first joins Twitter.
The company is
trying to reduce the steps when you first register but even then: a
"favorite" means different things to different people even amongst
established users, and some people are blissfully unaware of the subtweet
faux pas many longtime Twitter users detest seeing.
Instagram, on the
other hand, is fairly straightforward: Click the heart to like, the speech
bubble to comment. Simple.
The gap in engagement
rates between Instagram and Twitter may not always be so cavernous, as
Instagram evolves. Indeed, a
separate study released in April this year from Forrester Research, which
looked at Interbrand's top 50 global brands, found that the average Instagram
photo generated 120 times higher user engagement per follower than a tweet. So
that gulf is already narrowing.
At the time of
publication, author of the report Nate Elliott, Forrester's vice president and
principal analyst serving marketing professionals, says the
extremely high levels of engagement on Instagram versus competitors are
unlikely to last as the feed becomes more cluttered and if Facebook tries
to algorithmically engineer the Instagram feed as it has done its own platform,
causing
organic reach of page posts to drop dramatically.
Rezab doesn't agree.
In fact, having just come back from the Middle East where he says Instagram is
even bigger than Facebook in some countries (like Saudi Arabia,) he believes
Instagram will be the next network to reach 1 billion users. Engagement rates
may decline, but with that kind of reach, advertisers weighing up where to
place their social media dollars will drift ever more towards Instagram.
Twitter's founder Ev
Williams might not "give
a shit if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures," but
he might sit up and take notice when brands start moving their Twitter dollars
over to the photo sharing app.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com
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