According to The Times, the average fee paid per sponsored Instagram post is £800 to £1000…
Once, if you were a small company you stuck an advert in your local newspaper. If you were a big company, you took out an ad in a national one. And if you were a giant you ran a TV advertising campaign.
But the way companies are advertising has dramatically changed.
Now companies are more likely to turn to social media to advertise their products. After all, not only can it turn out to be cheaper than traditional advertising, advertisers can choose the most relevant niches. For example if you are selling cat food you can promote your tins with a cats only website, if you run a furniture store you are obviously going to pick an interior design site.
If you are big on social media and are able to amass a following of hundreds of thousands of followers to a niche instagram site then this trend is great news.
According to The Times newspaper research by marketing agency Takumi found those who offered cash paid on average £800 per post – with one in eight paying more than £1000 for a single photo on a very influential Instagram site.
Indeed Takumi said even those with just 1000 highly engaged followers could command around £40 or more for a post – and expect to receive gifts from organisations hoping for some exposure.
But is this good for the consumer? It seems not.
This is because many Instagram users do not stick to advertising codes of practice which states paid for posts should always be marked. According to the Times article, some aren’t even aware they should be tagging such posts as ‘sp’ (sponsored) or ‘ad’ (advert).
Hence, it is very difficult for followers to ascertain if posts are truly spontaneous – the person has raved about a product because he or she genuinely loves it – or if frankly he or she has simply been paid a wad of cash to say how fantastic it is.
One imagines if Instagram questions someone over whether a post is paid for or not, that person can simply turn round and just claim it was not. And with over 14million of us now on Instagram alone (and undoubtedly this is a problem throughout other social media too) and millions of posts, it’s a tough task.
Nevertheless, while under the code TV has to be so careful not to accidentally advertise something (why packets of ingredients are always turned away from the cameras on cookery shows for example) and newspaper websites must clearly mark a sponsored article, we should all bear in mind all might not be exactly as it seems on sites such as Instagram.
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