- Instagram.
It's one of the most popular social networks out there.
You know, we all talk about Instagram marketing tips,
I've created a ton of videos on this,
but is Instagram really worth it?
Is it going to drive you business?
Is it going to drive you revenue?
Is it even worth you spending time on Instagram?
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today I'm going to break down
if Instagram marketing is really worth it.
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How many of you guys are on Instagram?
Let me know your user handles
so that way I can check your profile out
and hey, I may even follow you.
But, we all talk about Instagram, we all use it, I have it,
my follower count's continually going up,
is it really worth it?
And I wanted to create a video
that would answer that question and the reason being is,
I wanted you guys to have realistic expectations
because everyone continually ask me like
hey how do I get more followers on Instagram?
You know, how do I get to 100,000 followers?
When you think about Instagram,
from a B2B standpoint, and I'll cover B2C as well,
in B2B if you're expecting
to generate a lot of business from it, don't.
You may get more brand awareness
and indirectly, yes, that can help you generate business,
but you're not going to get someone buying
$10,000 products from you all day long on Instagram.
I'm not saying Instagram isn't profitable.
I'm not saying you can't generate sales.
If you look at I've spent on Instagram
and what I've generated in revenue,
I've generated a hundreds of thousands,
if not millions of dollars from revenue.
Actually, it's in the millions of dollars in revenue
and I haven't spent nearly as much.
Now, you may look at that being like
oh that's awesome, that means Instagram's worth it.
Well, if you look at how much more revenue
I've generated from SEO or paid advertising,
it's way greater of a return then Instagram.
You can't do everything so you got to focus your efforts.
In B2B, I do believe I'm not a anomaly,
but it's harder to do what I'm doing and most people can't,
and for that reason you're not going to really get
too much of a ROI, but hey, it's a good place to be
because there's a ton of business people.
You won't see a ROI just pitching
your products and services.
You will see a better ROI if you just create content
that other successful B2B people that want to follow,
they'll get to know you, and eventually some of those
indirectly may turn into customers.
On the B2C side, you know, I know a lot of people
who pay the Kardashians money
and other people like that for advertising.
Here's the thing.
Like, I had someone the other day and they're like
yeah, I paid Kris Jenner $85,000 for a post.
Now, what do you think happened with Kris Jenner
when she took that money?
She promoted that product,
but what do you think happened to that company?
They generated less than $85,000 dollars in sales.
On top of that, they have a physical good
so there's cost involved in their product.
They're hoping they can make it up
in the lifetime buy up of the customer,
but still, they lost money.
With influencers, and Instagram,
if you want to pay micro influencers,
that works well as long as the pricing is right.
You can go to places online,
there's a lot of communities like TheInfluence.cos
where you can find them.
And you can find all of these people who are influencers
and potentially get some of them
to, you know, pay you or talking more so you pay them
and they can promote your product or service.
But in general, unless their prices are reasonable,
it's not going to work too well
and if you only get one influencers to post,
it's not going to work too well.
Yes, a Kardashian is different,
and even that doesn't really work most the time.
You need a lot of micro influencers at once
and create that big splash for it to work
and if you don't time it right,
and you just spread it out over a period of like six months,
it's not as impactful versus
if everyone in a two or three day period
within your space started talking about you.
It's just like, you know when Facebook gets a ton of press
for breaching privacy or user's passwords
or whatever issues or government regulations,
I don't know what, press issues their running into
and I'm not saying they're doing
wrong things or right things.
It's just, whatever press they're in,
when everyone talks about them at once in the news,
they're more likely to be the trending topic.
That's the same thing that happens with influencers.
So if you're in the B2C space, paying influencers works
if you get a lot of micro influencers,
that they talk about you at once.
For in the B2B space, indirectly,
yeah you may be able to make money.
If you're in the B2C space,
you can also consider creating your own profile.
Yes, it helps a little,
make a little bit when it comes to making money,
but if your profile's not popular
and you're not leveraging some of the other Instagram tips,
and I have a lot of videos on that
so I'm not going to regurgitate those tips
on how to make your profile popular, you won't do well.
But if you do make your profile popular
by using those micro influencers,
you're using all the stuff that I'm talking about
from stories, posting frequency, micro content,
all that kind of stuff, sure, yeah, from B2C it can help.
But Instagram for most people, it's not as effective
as let's say Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube,
and the biggest reason is,
is it's hard to link people from Instagram
and get them to buy.
Yeah, you can do things like swipe up,
you can add links in your bio, but unless you're willing
to spend the money on the paid ads,
it's hard to get people based on Instagram's restriction,
to just have your post linking out
to your latest product or service.
And that's why it's really hard
to generate a ROI from Instagram.
Now, does this mean I'm going to stop using Instagram?
No, I already mentioned I make decent money from Instagram.
But also another reason I use it,
isn't for the reason you may be thinking.
I really use Instagram so I can see what my family's up to.
It's a more of a personal social network for me.
From that standpoint to me, Instagram is priceless
and that's why I love it.
If you need help with your social media marketing
check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital.
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tell other people about it.
Thank you very much.