SWOT ANALYSIS OF INSTAGRAM

1 Billion monthly active users, 100 million+ photos uploaded every day, and 4.2 billion daily likes, that’s the size Instagram has grown to become.

A social networking app made for sharing photos and videos from a smartphone has been quietly picking up traction mostly thanks to everybody’s obsession with mobile photography/selfie etc.

The journey of Instagram from being just a simple photo/video sharing app to being one of the most preferred media to engage and interact with people has been phenomenal.

The app is a powerful storytelling medium and has become the new favorite child of brands to engage with their customers.

Let’s check out what are the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities for this Social media behemoth.

SWOT ANALYSIS OF INSTAGRAM

STRENGTHS OF INSTAGRAM :

We will talk about the strengths of the Instagram from business point of view. One of its major strength is

• Instagram Influencer Community :
  The biggest strength of Instagram is its Influencer community and value proposition. Instagram has grown to become the first choice of the brands to market their business, – retail, fashion, beauty, and food – just to name a few. It’s the strength of the Instagram community that the companies are leveraging to improve their brand awareness, increase engagement with your audience, promote their products or services and company culture and increase website traffic.

• Mass audience reach: With 1 Billion+ monthly active users, Instagram’s wide user base is Instagram’s biggest strength.
  80% of users follow at least one brand on Instagram 60% of users learn about new products through Instagram 30% of users say they’ve bought a product they discovered on Instagram That’s the impact that Instagram has on people’s buying behavior. The rules of buying are changing and shaping the way you crave, you interact, and you build behavioral patterns.

• High engagement levels: Below is an image which shows Average monthly minutes per visitor vs reach. And it can be easily seen that Instagram has grown to be the second highest most engagement social medium, just behind Facebook.

• Usage of Hashtags: For the ones who are not aware as how hashtags function, open your Instagram app and search for ” #fashion” – You will see around millions of post related to fashion. : 7 out of 10 hashtags on Instagram are branded.
  Hashtags are used to help users group content. These can either be general hashtags like “#FASHION” that everybody uses – in which case you are grouping your posts and images with others who upload similar content. Alternatively, many businesses create niche hashtags to develop interest, and to consolidate posts relating to a particular product or campaign together.
  7 out of 10 posts include hashtags in their post and posts with at least one hashtag has an average 12.6% more engagement than those without.

INSTAGRAM WEAKNESSES:

One of the biggest weakness of Instagram in the SWOT analysis of Instagram is the restriction of its web traffic. If you build an audience on Instagram, you’re going to need to engage with them on the platform. There is no way to link to a site or drive traffic from the platform.

Publishers need to make users click on the links to direct them to their website for more information or any for any other value proposition.

INSTAGRAM OPPORTUNITIES:

Though Instagram is a relatively new social media platform—compared to Facebook and Twitter, the monetary opportunity that it provides is much more than its counterparts. Let’s understand how:

Though Instagram is a relatively new social media platform—compared to Facebook and Twitter, the monetary opportunity that it provides is much more than its counterparts. Let’s understand how:

As discussed above, the biggest strength of Instagram is its community of influencers. Companies reach out to these influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers and pay them to show off a product in a photo.

Kylie Jenner charges close to $ 1 Million for a single paid post.

Sponsorship deals have become a viable way for everyday people to make a living.

Growing social media footprint: social media users is expected to grow to 3.02 billion by 2021. This growing social media presence is one of the major opportunities of Instagram.

THREATS OF INSTAGRAM

NSPCC, the leading children’s charity in the U.K. claimed that Instagram has become the leading platform for child grooming in the country.  According to the research that they took out over a period of 18-months, there were more than 5,000 recorded crimes “of sexual communication with a child,” and “a 200% rise in recorded instances in the use of Instagram to target and abuse children.”

Owing to such high and increasing rate of child-related crimes there is a strong need to have regulations on Instagram that could help in having a proper check on such activities and prevent them from happening.

These type of regulations is one of the major threats of the social media behemoth.