Today Nike is the second most followed account on Instagram and the most followed apparel brand on the platform. With 76.9 million followers Nike has grown their Instagram following 134% in less than two years. Between their active lifestyle aesthetic, motivational slogan and their loyal community, Nike has been able to create a brilliant Instagram strategy that brought them all the way to the top. WHY USE INSTAGRAM?Nowadays, your Instagram page is just as important as your website’s landing page. Instagram is different than other social media platforms in that its visual nature allows for brands to highlight their identity through images and create a narrative that lets customers feel the personality of a brand just by looking at the profile. According to Forbes, 80% of the 700 million Instagram users choose to follow and connect with brands on Instagram, making their consumer to brand engagement 10x more than Facebook, 54x more than Pinterest, and 84x more than Twitter. This makes Instagram a fantastic platform to highlight your brand's story and connect with consumers. LEARN FROM NIKE’S IMMEDIATELY RECOGNIZABLE BRAND IDENTITYIt’s a Lifestyle — Nike’s brand identity is so strong that you can pinpoint one of their products, advertisements, or posts simply by the presence of their swish or their slogan “Just Do It” and sometimes even without those at all. Nike’s motivational identity is at the heart of everything they do regardless of being online or offline. Nike uses Instagram to connect their brand to build the “Just Do It” lifestyle rather than solely focusing on bombarding its followers with product shots and promotional material. According to Inc, they very successfully use Instagram to make customers feel as though they are not buying the products but instead buying the lifestyle that is associated with the products. They use motivational copy that connects with their followers gaining them up to 500,000 likes per post. Nike has been wildly successful when creating a community both online and offline that share the same lifestyle goals as the brand. Nike was able to do this, not only because of their cohesive brand lifestyle, voice and motivational mission, but because they actively reach out to their community. Nike encourages their followers to participate in the Nike community by asking them to share their #Nike lifestyle and then regularly giving customers a shout-out on their page. By allowing your customers to participate in content creating and interact with your brand it creates a narrative that is compelling and worth following. Yes, we want to hear other people's personal stories because it makes us feel like we can share our own and it only elevates the authenticity of the brand. Instagram is a great platform to showcase your brands personality. Before posting you have to consider who you are as a brand and who your audience is. Is your brand “Funny? Inspirational? Heartfelt? Sarcastic?”, figure out who you are and then stick to it. Create an Aesthetic — Although Nike sells work out clothing, sneakers and sports equipment, all things that wouldn’t stereotypically be considered stunning, they play to the nature of Instagrams platform and post images that are visually beautiful and hard not to like. According to Sprout, your Instagram posts should not only connect to the overall personality of the brand but they should also connect visually. Weather that be a cohesive color pallet or a type of camera angle, the composition of your Instagram should reflect your brands lifestyle mission but also your brands aesthetic. When working with Instagram you have to take into consideration the nature of the platform. Instagram is founded on visuals, so in order to be successful you have to post beautiful content that isn’t just a montage of branded images. Remember, on Instagram your posts are selling a lifestyle not just your products. People Like a Good Story — Many think that Instagram stops after taking the photo but captions are just as important when creating your brand's story. According to Forbes, a consistent voice will create authenticity and allow people to connect with your brand. By linking your comments and copy on Instagram to the same mission as your photos you create a brand that has personality and reliability. A brand that people want to follow because they are sincere and interesting on top of posting great content. A "Just Do It" COmmunityHashtags -- Using hashtags allows people to connect their personal pages and posts to your brand, which strengthens the community and allows for content to be shared within it. #Nike, has over 68 million posts on Instagram allowing people to interact with the brand and see how other people are interacting with them as well. Nike used the growth of #Nike as a way to celebrate their community. For 24 hours Nike shared 10 Instagram photos from their customers who had posted using their hashtag thanking them for inspiring the company and highlighting the story of the fan who posted the original photo. Doing this not only build brand loyalty and made customers feel appreciated and included but also gained them thousands of likes and comments, made headlines and created brand awareness. User Generated Content -- Like Nike, when your brand’s community grows large enough for members to start sharing photos that feature your brand, it allows you to repost their content and encourage others to post their experiences with your products. According to Sprout, UGC is extremely beneficial to creating brand loyalty and trust but when using UGC you still have to make sure it is in line with your brands image before posting it to your own page and to give the original poster credit. UGC allows for a “we’re all in this together” vibe that not only gives your brand new content to post but also creates greater brand loyalty. Final ThoughtsNike has done an incredible job of highlighting the personality of the their brand and creating a lifestyle that is associated with their products. But you don’t have to be a huge brand like Nike to follow their Instagram marketing strategy successfully. Once you have a mission statement about who you are as a brand and what you want to portray to the world you just have to stick to it no matter what. Weather it be your voice, your instagram photos, or the narrative you tell through all your content, being true to your brand will make you relatable and trustworthy. If you create your brand as a lifestyle people will want to live it.
Go create an Instagram empire. Nike’s brand started from scratch just like yours did. “Just Do It”.
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When I was little I would beg my mom to let me get a Barbie and her answer was always no. She believed the unattainable dimensions of the doll would have a negative effect on my body image and even though I have never played with one and had a mom who tried to shelter me, Barbie’s ridiculously thin waist and curvy structure have found a new way of influencing how I see myself by taking over my Instagram feed. And if Cameron Diaz can't compete with Barbie then no one can. Instagram & Body ImageA window into my experience -- When I first started using Instagram it was just a way for me to share photos with my friends and see what everyone was up to. My fifteen-year-old-self didn’t follow celebrities, or Instagram models or Fitspo accounts. Now, five years later I don’ t find myself spending most of my time on Instagram looking at people I know, but instead obsessively scrolling though Fitspos like Kayla Itsines and looking at Instagram models like Alexis Ren. Some Intsta Stats -- There is no denying that social media has a negative effect on the way us girls view ourselves. A Common Sense survey found that 35 percent of girls are worried about being tagged in an unattractive post on social media because being “attractive” is so deeply ingrained in our standards of what is expected of girls. With #thinspiration, #thinspo and #ana (hashtags promoting eating disorders in order to obtain an extreme thinness) creeping into the Instagram feeds of young girls it's no wonder that 20 million women suffer from an eating disorder at some point in their life. In an interview with PBS an 18-year-old from Philadelphia explained that “on social media, you have to look like this, your body has to be shaped with way, you have to have this skin color, you have to have this smile to be acceptable to society”. This constant comparison and notion that you must fit into a very specific box of standardized beauty make scrolling through Instagram affect our perceptions of ourselves negatively. Insider found a study that looked at a group of 276 women and determined that scrolling through Instagram for as little as 30 minutes makes us objectify ourselves and UK’s Royal Society for Public Health found that Instagram was the most damaging social network for mental health, affecting anxiety levels and body satisfaction. "too fat" — An obsession with thinnessOn Instagram we have a tendency to glorify “thin” girls who are ridiculously attractive — Just take a look at this list of the top 10 most followed Instagram models. What do they all have in common? A tiny waist and a stunning face. These girls have become the glorified answer to the question “what is beautiful” and who we find ourselves stalking on Instagram at 3 am feeling bad about ourselves after binge eating the whole Dominos Pizza. According to an article on the impact of social media on body image and distorted eating, the ‘ideal’ body shape that has taken over the TV shows we watch, the magazines we read and the accounts that we follow promote an unattainable beauty standard of often photo-shopped women who are young, tall, big-breasted and extremely thin. These “models” of what women should look like don’t represent the average size 14 women and neither do the size 8 so-called “plus sized” models who are still substantially smaller than the average American girl. The fact that we call women who are SIX sizes smaller than the average dress size “plus size” proves that our society is majorly obsessed with thinness and completely delusional to what is actually “normal”. |
HELlOI'm Sydney, a 20 year old from Boston figuring out how to "adult" and not freeze out here in the real world. Archives
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