More than 60 per cent of all social ad spend is still allocated to the Facebook News Feed despite marketers increasing their overall spend on Instagram, according to Socialbakers’ Must-Know Social Media Trends report for Q2 2019.

20 per cent of spend goes on the Instagram Feed while Instagram Stories, Facebook Suggested Video, and Facebook Instream Video collectively account for a further 10 per cent of ad spend.

The report also shows that around 30 per cent of paid ad spend is being invested in non-performing content that earns a C or D on post quality (an average to below-average score, determined by the Socialbakers platform. The platform scored 62 per cent of posts as an A+ or A, indicating that there’s still room for improvement.

More engagement on Instagram
In other respects, Instagram is matching or outperforming its parent company. The top 50 brands on Instagram now have the same audience size as the top 50 brands on Facebook (measured by the number of followers on Instagram and Page likes on Facebook). The report says this is a key milestone for Instagram and points to how critical the platform is becoming for brands. Moreover, while the audience sizes are identical, the majority of the user engagement happens on Instagram. Instagram performs best for Fashion and Beauty while Facebook News Feed continues to lead for brands in eCommerce and Retail.

Additionally, over the past year, Instagram’s interactions remained steady, while median interactions for Facebook posts are 3.3 per cent down on June 2018. The vast majority of these interactions occur on mobile, with 95.1 per cent of social ad views taking place on mobile devices.

Based on almost 50,000 Instagram brand profiles, Carousel is the leading format for organic interactions, at more than 120 per post. Yet, Carousel is used only 15-18 per cent of the time. Similarly, based on more than 140,000 Facebook brand profiles, Live is by far the platform’s leader in interactions, but is utilised in only 4 per cent of posts.

The data indicates that by utilising a more popular format, brands can avoid wasting resources on posts that won’t resonate with their audiences. As the numbers demonstrate, there is ample untapped potential with Instagram Carousel and Facebook Live. This represents an easy opportunity for marketers to boost their content engagement.

The number of Instagram influencers affiliated with brands who made posts using #Ad increased by 33 per cent in Q2 2019 compared to Q2 2018. As the report notes, this is a big increase, and one that doesn’t take into account the influencers who are required to, but sometimes don’t, include #Ad on sponsored posts.

“The Q2 2019 data suggests that those marketers who aren’t putting most of their efforts into paid social media optimisation, benchmarking, and maximising cross-channel visibility, are falling behind,” said Socialbakers CEO, Yuval Ben-Itzhak. “The importance of closely monitoring and optimising your paid strategy across channels and ad accounts is clear, as you delve into the numbers about what’s performing well and where there’s still potential for the future.”

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