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Instagram offers to help local SMEs with ad campaigns
With its increasing popularity as a free platform for advertising and brand building for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), mobile photo sharing app Instagram says that it will continue to educate SME players to use the service to its fullest extent
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ith its increasing popularity as a free platform for advertising and brand building for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), mobile photo sharing app Instagram says that it will continue to educate SME players to use the service to its fullest extent.
'Focusing on community aspects and user passion points will continue to be really important, such as educating SMEs to stay relevant to their customers and provide advertising solutions,' Instagram's Asia Pacific brand development head Paul Webster said at an Instagram event in Jakarta on Thursday.
'Some Indonesian SMEs I've seen have managed to successfully create an engaging ad campaign and are able to translate that into web conversion and foot traffic into their retail stores,' Webster added.
The key focus for businesses, he said, should be on measuring their goals, because the engaged Indonesian user base tended to have high expectations of what appeared in its social media feeds, especially from businesses.
'I think people and brands are learning all the time. We don't want people to think that the creative benchmark [to create an effective Instagram ad campaign] is too high, but we do want to see what brands can achieve in the next level, and we are able to help them with that,' he said.
Instagram usage is reportedly seeing 100 percent year-on-year growth in terms of daily usage in Indonesia, with Jakarta, Bandung, Yogyakarta and Bali the cities with the most users.
According to GlobalWebIndex's fourth-quarter report in 2014, Instagram and social media channel for professionals LinkedIn have around 17.8 million users each, accounting for 7 percent of the Indonesian population of 255 million. The most popular social media platforms for Indonesians are Facebook (14 percent), mobile messaging app WhatsApp (12 percent), Twitter (11 percent), Facebook Messenger (9 percent) and Google+ (9 percent).
Meanwhile, global market research company TNS reported in a recent analysis that 89 percent of Indonesian users were made up of young, educated and upper middle class users. Females make up 63 percent of the entire Indonesian user base and Indonesia's user base doubles every year, according to the analysis. The photo-sharing service reportedly reaches 400 million active global users per month.
Other statistics show that 46 percent of Indonesian users tend to like brand posts, with 41 percent of them reportedly engaged by short video clips in ad campaigns. Meanwhile, 43 percent of users tend to visit a specific brand's official website when they come across it for the first time on Instagram, with 31 percent tending to follow the brands on the service.
Fashion, travel and technology posts are among the most popularly liked in Indonesia, which Paul said would benefit SMEs and e-commerce players trading in those categories, especially if they stepped up their use of the service.
'There's a big fashion and art culture in Indonesia, and [Indonesians] also love to travel: sharing posts of places they have been to or want to go. Brands that plan around that fact tend to do well in their Instagram ad campaigns,' Webster said
