Influencer marketing company Buzzoole has published a report that reveals #ad and #sponsored posts on Instagram grew by 44% in the first six months of 2018, compared to that of 2017. Buzzoole observed stats, including the number of sponsored content created by the ‘creators’, the overall engagement driven by influencer-generated content and the verticals that have invested most in the space to conduct the findings. The month of May 2018 reached peak #ad Instagram posts, with over 250k mentions compared to just over 100k in 2017. Interestingly, the report found that fashion (33%), beauty (13%) and food and drink (13%) brands were the most mentioned, accounting for almost 60% of global sponsored content production. In regards to engagement by industry, the fashion industry came trumps with 36.1%, while accessories saw a 16.1% engagement rate, closely followed by the food and drink industry at 12.5%. “The influencer marketing industry is booming. It isn’t just about projections, the data we have collected shows that marketers continue to double down on investment,” said Ian Samuel, chief commercial officer at Buzzole; “The challenges we are now working on are helping marketers answer the big questions around attribution, measurement and transparency to justify continued budget shifts.” The study is still continuing with the hope to understand the market size and the opportunities presented by the influencer marketing sector. At the moment, the findings focus on Instagram posts only and don’t include Instagram Stories, which is growing in popularity among influencers. The analysis was conducted through Buzzoole using the social listening tool BlogMeter – it will be interesting to see if the #ad hashtag continues to grow as brands are set to invest more on influencer marketing, despite recent transparency issues. Buzzoole is the first influencer marketing platform to launch an integration with Instagram that will allow brands to analyse ‘stories-based’ influencer marketing campaigns. The company continues to invest and innovate its platform to tackle some of the industry’s ongoing challenges, including transparency in influencer marketing.
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