Global use of #ad on Instagram grows by 44% in first half of 2018, according to Buzzoole

Influencer marketing company Buzzoole released the results of research on the use of #ad and #sponsored on Instagram in the first half of 2018. The influencer marketing brandtech company was able to measure the growth of Influencer Marketing campaigns run across social media and found that overall, Instagram posts tagged with the hashtags #ad and #sponsored grew by +44% in the first six months of the year compared to the same time frame in 2017.

Buzzoole’s analysis looked at stats such as the number of pieces of sponsored content created by creators, the overall engagement driven by influencer-generated content and the verticals that have invested the most in this space. It also found that Fashion (33%) Beauty (13%) and Food & Drinks (13%) brands were the most mentioned, accounting for almost 60% of global sponsored content production. Globally, more than 559K creators were involved and produced an overall engagement of almost a billion interactions (988 mm), showing an average engagement per post of over 1K.

In 2017, 1.5 million #ad posts were shared on Instagram, 58% of them in H2, the time of the year in which brands invest most of their online marketing budget. If the same trend follows this year, we can expect a significant growth in the final two quarters, with the number of posts predicted to track to over 2 million in 2018.

“The influencer marketing industry is booming. It isn’t just about projections, the data we have collected shows that marketers continue to double down on investment. The challenges we are now working on are helping marketeers answer the big questions around attribution, measurement and transparency to justify continued budget shifts,” says Ian Samuel, Chief Commercial Officer at Buzzoole.

The study is still ongoing and aims at understanding the market size as well as the opportunities presented by the Influencer Marketing sector. At the moment, the aforementioned data doesn’t include Instagram Stories, a format which has been increasingly adopted in the influencer marketing space thanks to functions such as the swipe up.

Buzzoole has recently launched an integration that will allow advertisers to track the impact of this format on the targeted audiences, and that would give results on the adoption of the Stories in Influencer Marketing campaigns. However, this data is not currently available for the campaigns that aren’t run through the Buzzoole platform.

Buzzoole continues to push the boundaries of transparency and measurement in Influencer Marketing and recently introduced its latest collaboration with Nielsen, True Reach.

Source: Buzzoole

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