Australia has a ‘woeful’ lack of hashtag brand activity on Instagram
An agency boss has criticised Australian brands and agencies for failing to take image sharing network Instagram seriously as a marketing medium.
Douglas Nicol, creative partner at ad agency The Works, told the Mumbrella360 conference: “In many ways Australian marketers and agencies are failing to use this fast growing medium in an interesting and engaging way.”
In the first study of Instagram usage in Australia, The Works, in partnership with UTS, sampled over 3 million Instagram posts across the country.
“The sad thing is if you look at the overall list of hastags in Australia… you will see that the current number one overall non-brand hashtag is about 1.6 million uses… McDonald’s, for example, has only had 6800 uses of their hashtag” said Nicols.
Joining McDonald’s in the top ten hashtagged brands were Apple, Nike, and Ford.
Nicol highlighted Instagram’s popularity explosion in Australia as one of the key reasons businesses should start marketing from the platform.
“All the current data points to a 330 per cent growth, year on year, leading to around a million users in Australia… in terms of growth Instagram is also way ahead of where Facebook was, and where Twitter was, at year three” said Nicol.
Instagram is currently the fastest growing social media platform in Australia, according to estimates from socialmedianews.com.au, with in excess of 1.08 million users as of April this year.
Nicol’s study suggested that Australians were most likely to use Instagram on Sundays at around 5pm, compared with weekdays where peak usage was around 8pm. Sydney Instagrammers were the most active posters – followed by Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and the Gold Coast – with Australian users overall posting an average of 2.3 times per week, or nearly 10 times a month.
One Australian brand which has so far had great success with Instagram is Tourism Australia – ranking number one in hashtag usage.
Jesse Desjardins, social media manager at Tourism Australia, who joined Nicol on stage, attributed the organisation’s achievements to the strength of the community they had built.
“I don’t feel like I run the account, it’s an account run by a massive community of people. We get sent around a 1000 photos a day through Instagram and Facebook. For a small team… it’s absolutely incredible to have more content then you know what to do with,” said Desjardins.
From there, Desjardins said, it was simply a matter of featuring “the best photos that align with our brand values”.
Julian van der Zee
Feels like QR codes all over again.
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For the love of God leave Instagram alone.
Just because you can doesn’t always mean you should.
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Maybe Australian’s have the best grasp of what Instagram is, i.e. a fairly dull and one demential platform.
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