If you spend any time on Instagram lately, it’s all about Instagram Reels. Where to start with Reels eh?
This myth falls in line with the notion that high levels of engagement on social will automatically translate to lots of £££s in your bank account. It’s just not true.
Yes, high levels of social engagement demonstrates that your followers are engaged with your content and want to see more of it. If you have a desirable brand of product, then all that brand awareness and engagement could well translate into sales too. We need to scratch beneath the surface though because this is all ‘top of funnel’ stuff.
At the end of the day, we need to get social media audiences to part with cash rather than just copious amounts of likes. We want them to move ‘off platform’ and onto your website, or into your store. There needs to be some meaningful substance to the relationship, and you need to ask them to buy your stuff from time to time.
Influencers and Instagram experts are all over Reels at the moment; usually making Reels about making Reels. It’s all very meta (and not the Facebook kind). Facebook/Meta recently announced that Instagram was no longer just about photos and has put more emphasis on video content, which is important to note, but don’t let the hours you need to be spending on creating videos take over the point of why you are on social media in the first place.
The whole problem with obsessing about your numbers on social media is that it’s a bit of a navel gazing experience. If your grid is on point, and you have some killer Stories, Reels and the occasional well-subscribed Live session, then all power to you, but the question is, how many of those fans are buying what you are selling?
Yes, video is important, and increasingly more so as we move along hearing from Google and Facebook about the preferences they will give to video content over static. Don’t let video production distract you from your own social media persona and how much time you have to give to it though. Instagram was all about quality photography yesterday, it’s all about trending video today, and it’ll be something else tomorrow. So unless you are a bleeding edge brand that needs to keep up with fashion, you might find that it’s a waste of time, money and effort to jump in and try and make your brand fit into a space it simply is not comfortable in.
Bossing it at Reels is all about jumping on trends. Trending music and sounds being the driver – we wrote a blog about that here. But, if you are the MD of an engineering company, who needs to see you dancing around to a trending sound or lip synching to something funny? If it doesn’t come naturally to you, where you need to be thinking about new and entertaining content ideas all the time, you are going to fall short. Depending on how you have your company Instagram account set up, you might not be able to access trending sounds either, and with the new ‘shadow ban’ on TikTok’s shared to Instagram announced just recently, you are effectively going to have to double your output if you want to keep both video platforms alive and kicking.
As for the likes obsession, likes are very good, but they are not sales. This is true whether you are boosting posts for likes and engagement, or you are investing in an influencer program to get your products featured on someone else’s account.
Influencers will say they drive interest that drives sales and with some brands that do influencer marketing well with a good mix of influencer celebs and good quality micro-influencers, this is true. Poor choice of influencer can lead to disappointment though, and there are plenty of influencers out there just looking for a free ride/product/treatment/stay. The involvement of these kinds of influencers won’t shift the needle on your own popularity at all and ultimately getting more people influenced to think about your brand more favourably is the end game with this kind of marketing.
If you dabble with influencer marketing or micro-influencing, engaging brand ambassadors and product sampling, then make sure you choose people that are in your target customer persona and people who can help you spread the word. And remember, keep it true to who you are as a brand.
Take a look at the full series of myth busters about digital marketing:
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