Two months ago, Facebook opened up its Instagram platform for businesses all over the world — including India — with a suite of advertising and marketing solutions to help them.

Now comes the hardsell, with Instagram’s Asia-Pacific brand development lead Paul Webster visiting India as part of a road show across the region.

The aim is to evangelise how the creative visual canvas can be used for business development.

His key message is that brands can leverage the platform better by using Facebook and Instagram together.

“Facebook plus Instagram offers bigger business impact. There is a 13 per cent lift in ad recall and 23 per cent uplift in conversion when brands are exposed on both Instagram+FB,” he said.

“While Facebook is about friends and family, Instagram is about visual communities. Brands can use the same creatives across both platforms in a unified way at the click of a button,” added Webster.

For Facebook, which paid $1 billion to acquire Instagram in 2012, monetisation of the photo sharing app started in 2013.

But this year, it has upped the ante. Globally analysts estimate that Instagram has already raked in around $700 million for Facebook this year.

In 2016, forecasts are it will bring home revenues worth $1.5 billion for the Menlo Park headquartered social media giant.

According to eMarketer’s forecasts, by 2017, Instagram’s global mobile ad revenues will touch $2.81 billion and will account for over 10 per cent of Facebook’s global ad revenues.

Key market India is important for Instagram, as Kirthiga Reddy, Managing Director for Facebook in the country, pointed out that the platform has more than doubled its user base here over the past year. Instagram has 400 million monthly active users globally (ahead of Twitter’s 320 million).

Of the last 100 million to join Instagram, over half live in Asia and Europe. Facebook has 1.5 billion monthly active users globally, of which 130 million are in India.

When Instagram for Business launched in September in India, four brands had joined as launch partners — Nestle, Hector Beverages, Tresemme (from Unilever) and Gillette.

Today, Reddy claims, many more businesses of different sizes and different verticals have begun using the ad solutions and “their objectives range from driving awareness to driving conversion to getting a loyal customer base.”

Selling solutions While brands can exist as simple users on Instagram for social goals such as engagement, they can achieve their business goals by using the advertising and marketing solutions, said Webster. According to him, the tools offered by the platform help brands achieve reach and relevance, and give them the ability to measure performance.

“The human brain registers pictures 60 times faster than text,” he said, pointing out that brands can weave great stories through pictures and videos.

While the 18-24 age group is the most active on Instagram, Webster says that on most social platforms the fastest growing user group is the 35-plus one.

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