Instagram advertising was bound to happen sooner or later. What? Did you think that for-profit Facebook (Instagram owner) intended for it to be without a revenue stream forever? About four days ago the first ever advertisement showed up for many Instragram users in their feed from user “michaelkors,” and it was a picture of a watch. Like many in the watch industry I gravitated to Instagram as a preferred social media tool to share images of mostly watches that I see in the name of aBlogtoWatch (Instagram feed here).
It is a great tool when your bread and butter are visual things, and many watch lovers use it almost religiously to share #womw (watch on my wrist), #watchporn and other fantastic timepiece related items. Don’t forget #ablogtowatch either… It is then perhaps fitting that a wristwatch be the focus of an Instagram ad, the very first one that is. Michael Kors produces watches in partnership with US-based Fossil, and aren’t exactly high-end timepieces, but they do sell like mad in the US and throughout the world with their mostly sub $500 pricing. The featured Michael Kors watch is presented without even so much as a model name, with the short description of “Pampered in Paris #MKTimeless.” It isn’t clear how many people viewed it, but as of writing, the image has about 230,000 likes. The michaelkors Instragram account has over 1.3 million followers.
The image showed up to Michael Kors account followers and a series of others who experienced it as a pop up (though not myself oddly).
It isn’t abundantly clear yet how Instagram advertising works, or how much it costs. As is the case with most advertising on Facebook, it will likely be deployed slowly and selectively. Though before long it should be available to most Instagram accounts. This will also usher in the beginning of users being able to legitimately pay for “likes” and followers. Instagram is among the last major social media platform not to have had a widely reported “follower cull.” Like Twitter and Facebook before it, efforts are taken to remove or reduce “ghost accounts” and other methods of inflating a user’s follower and like numbers using fake accounts created by software.
Such efforts to clean up the system have often taken place by sites such as Twitter and Facebook before advertisers are asked to pay for certain amounts of exposure, etc… as a way of ensuring real people are using Instagram. That may soon happen and brand users like michaelkors that have millions of followers may have their numbers reduced. Nevertheless, for those with big budgets, Instagram ads will offer a safe way of gaining new fans and likes through the platform itself, and it is great to see that from high-end to low-end watches. This will continue to be a big deal on my favorite social media tool and we look forward to seeing how the watch industry adapts to the platform and uses its new advertising tools to promote their brands.