With 400 million monthly active accounts, Instagram is a social media powerhouse for sharing content, finding inspiration and engaging like minded individuals. What’s fueling Instagram’s rapid growth and popularity? Today, consumers have an insatiable demand for photo and video content. Within this visual treasure trove is a plethora of hashtags that build a community and curate content. Like Twitter, Instagram hashtags give individuals an organic way to discover or curate branded content, while amplifying the topics that interest them. That’s why Zignal is excited to announce tracking of Instagram hashtags and authorsare now supported as a core data source within the Zignal Enterprise Platform. This powerful capability will deliver deeper insights about the topics and authors impacting our customer’s brands.

Why Instagram is so Important for Big Brands

Today, Instagram is fueled by a younger and growing demographic of consumers. These consumers arewielding immense power through Instagram, with the ability to influence the perception of Fortune 5000 brands. For Zignal’s customers and big brands, our new Instagram capabilities provide rich context and insight when quantifying the impact of marketing efforts, understanding the competition, identifying important influencers and knowing how to best engage with customers.

Hashtags Matter: How Big Brands Use Instagram Insights

Visual data supporting Instagram images and videos helps brands understand the impact of a company event, track a marketing campaign and monitor the competition. For example, if your company is  attending a tradeshow or convention, know which competitors are attending the show and what they are saying. In the same way, marketing managers can track the performance of a hashtag to quantify the success of a marketing campaign and engage potential influencers.

Let’s say you’re interested in tracking the conversation around ridesharing. One way to start would be to visualize frequently used hashtags. From there, you could drill into each hashtag (or even emoji!) to identify the authors and the images associated with the hashtags.

hashtag-and-emoji-cloud

During the recent Olympics, organizers tracked the performance of “#Rio2016” to promote events, as well as how other authors were posting and talking about the hashtag.

Pro Tip:newsroom Before creating a hashtag for Instagram, use hashtagify.me to see if it already exists and whether or not it’s trending.

Comprehensive Insights for Modern Brand Engagement

Brand marketers can no longer rely solely on traditional media channels to engage consumers. Today, digital influencers on Instagram exert immense power and influence over today’s leading brands, requiring new insights and data-driven solutions. The new Zignal Instagram insights provided through hashtags and authors give brands the ability to pinpoint followers, know what messages are resonating and identify influencers who are valuable to their campaigns. These new capabilities complement Zignal’s expansive cross-media data support — spanning traditional print, broadcast, online and social. Through this comprehensive media intelligence, Zignal’s customers will always know the pulse of the marketplace and the health of their brands.

Contact us to learn more about how you can get started extracting insights from Instagram around hashtags and authors.