An "Instagram promotions" is Instagram’s tool for advertising your content. It’s the go-to instrument if you want to get a lot of eyes on one well-performing post of yours, as well as maybe want to attract more people to your business.
However, how Instagram promotions work is basically a black box – if you are familiar with CPC or CPM advertising, you know that it’s difficult to say how good their return will be. Due to this, not everyone will be satisfied with Instagram ads.
Do you have to stick to Instagram’s built-in promotion tools though? No, not really. And today, we would like to talk about SocialShaft and compare it to a traditional Instagram ad campaign cost and easiness of use-wise.
Let’s start with Instagram.
Setting up an Instagram promotion is very easy and straightforward. However, it is only available for business accounts, so you will need to switch to it:
A Creator or a Business account will provide you with not only promotion opportunities but also tools allowing you to get insight into how your audience engages with your posts.
To promote a post:
As we mentioned above, things are straightforward with Instagram promotions. However, a more important question than easiness of use is how much promoting on Instagram costs.
When deciding your budget for your promotion campaign, you will have to set a daily budget for it. Instagram allows you to choose a daily budget from a bit limited range – $1-15, $20, $25, $30, $35, $40, $50, $60, $75, $100, $150, $200, $300, $500, or $1000. You can’t type in a custom daily budget, but these options should be enough for most people.
Then, you need to set the duration of the campaign. It can be set to 1-7 days, as well as 10, 15, or 30 days. Again, not too much flexibility, but this should be enough to get you going.
From here, it’s pretty easy to calculate how much money you will have to spend on your Instagram promotion. The number varies from $1 if you decide to create a 1-day campaign with a $1 daily budget to $30,000 if you set the max numbers, that is, $1,000 daily for 30 days.
For each duration and budget you choose, Instagram shows the estimated number of Instagram users who will see your promotion. This number ranges from 240-630 for a 1-day 1$ campaign to 3.2-8.4 million for a $30,000 campaign.
Keep in mind that these numbers are just estimations based on the data that Instagram has got from promotion campaigns of other users. The actual number of people who will see your post may be lower or higher than the shown range.
Are these numbers good? Well, it depends on how your ad has performed. The effectiveness of your promotional campaign and its ability to drive conversions is the thing that decides whether your expenses were worth it.
It turns out that Instagram promotions can actually be very effective, especially when compared to other social media platforms. Let’s have a brief overview of a couple of reports on ad performance of Instagram and other social media platforms.
According to AdEspresso, the average cost of CPC (Cost Per Click) on Instagram was around $0.94 in 2017 (image). There appear to be many factors impacting the average CPC on Instagram like age, the placement of the ad, or the time of the year, but it averages around $0.9.
On Facebook, the average CPC in 2017 was around $0.4 (image). This is much lower than on Instagram, though the average CPC has again differed depending on certain factors.
Here, it may seem that Facebook actually has the edge in terms of cost-efficiency. After all, which campaign would you go for – the one with a $0.4 CPC or the one with a $0.9 CPC? Probably with the former.
But this isn’t everything you should know about. It turns out that Instagram actually has a much higher potential to drive conversions!
Have a look at this 2017 report by Rival IQ. According to it, the average engagement rate on Instagram across all industries was 1.66%. Certain industries like higher ed were much higher than average at 3.55%, but things didn’t go lower than 1.14% in health & beauty.
Now, have a look at Facebook’s figures. Engagement on Facebook across all industries was only 0.17%, which is nearly 10 times less than on Instagram! And all this in spite of Facebook having the edge in the average number of posts per day – 1.1 vs 0.7 on Instagram. This means that on Instagram, relevancy and quality of content mattered more than the number of posts.
We aren’t even mentioning Twitter with its 0.05% average engagement rate!
The same picture was seen in 2018 and so far in 2019, with Instagram retaining its huge lead over Facebook.
We also should have a look at conversion rates across social media. According to data published by Heap in March 2018, the conversion rate of Instagram was at a middle-ground 3.1%, with Facebook having a 4.7% conversion rate. Higher than Instagram were Facebook, Bing with its 7.6%, and Google with its 8.2%.
On the other hand, Instagram was a little ahead of Pinterest with its 2.9% and far ahead of Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube with their sub-1% conversion rates.
In terms of traffic, Instagram was again somewhere in the middle, providing 3.9% of all the traffic that was driven to websites through ads. Facebook and Snapchat were the leaders with their 13.9% and 13.0% traffic shares respectively.
All in all, Instagram seems to be a balanced platform for advertisers to get some conversions from. It isn’t the biggest advertising channel in the world, and nor is it the cheapest. However, it appears to be the most engaging social media platform, which can particularly benefit creators of quality content that makes people write hundreds of comments and start discussions.
The key takeaway from all the data above is that you don’t need to be as active on Instagram as on other platforms when it comes to posting frequency. Judging by the numbers, user engagement matters more than anything else. Thus, “quality over quantity” perfectly applies to Instagram, which can be very beneficial to some people, even though Instagram is on average pricier than Facebook to advertise on.
Our service SocialShaft offers an alternative approach to regular Instagram promotions. In particular, it is more focused on delivering likes, followers, comments, and video views to your page. SocialShaft thus has a little different goal than promoting an Instagram post, but there are certain ways through which SocialShaft can achieve a similar effect.
Let’s now overview SocialShaft services to get an idea of what they are so that we can then compare it with Instagram promotions in terms of cost efficiency.
First comes the Instagram Like service which, as suggested by the name, is created to drive likes towards your posts. SocialShaft offers a variety of packages for a wide range of prices. In fact, you may choose between nearly-instant like delivery and automatic delivery throughout 30 days.
The pricing for Instant Instagram Likes is as follows:
By the way, there is also a free 50-like offer that you may get in order to try out the service!
Automatic Instagram Likes are charged on a monthly basis:
The delivery of the likes as a general rule starts 5 to 30 minutes after the order placement.
The likes may be directed at just one post or spread throughout multiple posts. However, there is a 50-like minimum limit per post, so if you purchase 1,000 likes, you can apply the purchase to no more than 20 posts (50 times 20).
For automatic likes, there is a limit on the maximum number of posts per month – you can receive likes on up to 100 posts.
A nice thing about the Automatic Like service is that it doesn’t renew after ending, so there’s no risk of you accidentally buying new 30 days of like delivery without wishing to do so.
Keep in mind that the Instagram Likes service can be only applied to the latest 108 posts in your profile.
The second service offered by SocialShaft is Instagram Followers, arguably the most crucial thing for any more or less serious Instagram celebrity. While the Instagram algorithm favors engagements (e.g. likes or comments) more than the sheer number of followers, follows may also give a good boost to your Instagram profile.
The pricing of the Instagram Followers service is as follows:
In order to get the follows, you will need to temporarily set your account to public if it is private now. This applies to all other SocialShaft services as well. And overall, if you are looking to attract as many followers as possible – not only with SocialShaft – then you probably shouldn’t keep your profile hidden from others.
The followers delivered via this service are guaranteed to stay with you for at least 60 days. Each of the Instagram Follower packages is backed up by a 60-day guarantee. If you are satisfied with the service, you may purchase additional packages as many times as you wish.
Instagram comments play a huge role in engagement, and that’s why Instagram businesses and creators try to make posts and stories that are engaging their audience. SocialShaft’s Instagram Comments service is made with this in mind.
You have two comment options to choose from – random and custom, with the latter obviously allowing you to customize what is being said in the comments. Custom comments are a little bit more expensive, but they do offer a more personalized approach.
The pricing of Instagram Comments (random) is as follows:
For custom comments, the pricing is as follows:
When customizing comments, you may use any combination of text or emojis. However, you cannot use hashtags (#) or mentions (@) in custom comments.
Last comes the Instagram Video Views service. This service is similar to the Instagram Likes service –namely, you can distribute the views across several videos, but no fewer than 100 views per video. The delivery takes 5-30 minutes most of the time as well.
The Instagram Video Views service is available as a one-time purchase, and unlike Instagram Likes, there are no monthly plans.
The pricing for Video Views is as follows:
Now comes the question – are SocialShaft services better and more efficient than Instagram ads? Well, depends on what you are expecting from your purchase.
You see, when you are promoting a post on Instagram, you can’t really tell what you will be getting in return. Of course, you know that you will spend, say, $500 for 15 days of promotion. However, you have no way of knowing how many profile views, website visits, likes, follows, or conversions you will get. Everything comes down to how engaging your post is, as well as essentially to luck since there are many things that are beyond your control.
There also is a learning curve with Instagram ads, so beginners probably won’t have as good results as seasoned Instagram creators.
On the other hand, with SocialShaft, you are paying for a service and you are getting what you are paying for. There is no guesswork and no playing with chance as with Instagram ads. You pay for, say, 500 comments and you get them.
The setup of SocialShaft is also much easier than in an Instagram ad campaign. No audience selections, no budget definitions, no business accounts – you just click the button and buy the desired service.
On the other hand, the unpredictability of an Instagram promotion campaign doesn’t mean that it will necessarily be ineffective. If you do things right and maybe are a little lucky, then you can get much more out of your promotion. While your main goal may be likes on your post, you may also receive a handful of follows, comments, or maybe even a few conversions if you are selling any goods.
With SocialShaft, you don’t have as much variability since, well, you get what you pay for. You can purchase 5,000 followers and get them, but they won’t necessarily leave a like or comment under your post. Flat pricing for SocialShaft services means less risk, but it also means that you are limited to what the particular service offers.
One thing that SocialShaft also lacks is insight – Instagram provides you with some general stats on the promotion’s performance to allow you to make your future campaigns more effective. However, the nature of SocialShaft is a bit different, and it doesn’t really need such tools since you have follower or like counters to assess how the service performed.
With all of the above being said, let us give you a couple of tips on how you should approach SocialShaft to achieve a maximum result.
If you aren’t too new to Instagram, you probably know that the most valuable thing to its algorithm is user engagement. This was also shown by the statistics that we provided you with earlier in this post. It seems that it doesn’t matter whether you post multiple times per day – even if only a few of your posts get good exposure – views, comments, likes – then the Instagram algorithm is going to push it to other people’s feeds.
What this means is that if you decide to buy a SocialShaft service, you should try to please the Instagram algorithm.
The first thing we’d advise you to go for are likes, comments, and to a smaller degree video views since these are the best engagement markers on the platform. In fact, we’d advise you to choose these three services over Instagram Followers – user engagement is much more important than your follower count. Plus, the Instagram algorithm won’t care about your follower count if the user engagement is low.
Aside from that, if you have a limited budget – say, $500 – you may want to spread it out across the four SocialShaft services so that you get fuller user engagement. And you might want to allocate a little less to followers in favor of other services since they are more important.
Followers can also be impactful though. For example, if some company wanted to sign a contract with you, they would look at your follower count to assess what your reach will be. However, keep in mind that they will also have a look at how your audience engages with your posts – 5,000 users genuinely interested in what you are doing will be far better than 50,000 users who aren’t adding a whole lot to your community.
While Instagram promotions and services like SocialShaft can do wonders for you, you should try to acquire your audience organically. If you have a natural audience that is interested in your topic or product, then you will have higher engagement and conversion rates.
SocialShaft or an Instagram ad campaign can give a boost to your profile in certain ways, but they are much less likely to improve how users interact with your content. This hugely depends on your type of content, but natural followers are valued much more than those acquired through paid tools.
Thus, our main tip for you would be to aim at acquiring an audience naturally. As for tools like SocialShaft or Instagram promotions, view them as instruments for increasing your engagement rate with in order to catch the eye of the Instagram algorithm rather than instruments for merely increasing your follower count.
