Social platforms may be less important for content marketing campaigns than they were a year ago, but they’re still favored by marketers over their owned and operated sites. And among those social platforms marketers have a clear favorite for their content marketing: Instagram.
Forty percent of marketers surveyed at last month’s Digiday Content Marketing Summit said Instagram was the best social platform for content marketing, while 29 percent said Facebook and 24 percent chose YouTube to round out the top three.
Because marketers are following users and increasingly gravitating towards video, marketers are likely to turn to platforms like Instagram or YouTube, where video viewing is a central part of the user experience. Vertical-video ads in Instagram Stories have been a hit with marketers like Smirnoff due to their 72 percent completion rate and value for money.
Facebook’s change to its news feed algorithm has also convinced companies such as Fandango to diversify its video marketing strategy and try out new platforms like Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. Because Facebook’s news feed now places greater emphasis on user-created posts, the reach of marketer posts has been stifled. As one marketer at the summit said, “We’ve seen everything go exponentially up on Instagram even as it goes down on Facebook.”
But even as other marketers at the Digiday Content Marketing Summit said Facebook was more useful as a customer service platform than a marketing one, others including GroupM’s chief digital investment officer, Susan Schiekofer, said they are sticking with it.
Meanwhile, Pinterest is making a play for more content marketing spending from advertisers with the release of its new API. Although only 5 percent of marketers said it was their best content marketing channel, Pinterest is hoping the release of new campaign measurement tools will encourage marketers — and specifically influencers — to do more with the platform.
