We would like to announce that Vantage is now on Instagram and you can follow us at vantagetechnologyconsulting.
Why did we finally make the plunge and how are we going to use Instagram?
Like many other B2B professional firms, we thought that Instagram was built for hyper-sharers who post photos of their pets, vacations, outings, concerts, food and other day-to-day aspects of their lives. We did not think that Instagram would help us in our business and we didn’t think we had any good reasons to participate.
Why Don’t We Have an Instagram Account?
At our quarterly all-hands meeting two weeks ago, one of our newer associates posed the “Why don’t we have an Instagram Account?” question during the marketing team update. Our short answer was, “we’ll look into it”.
After doing some research on B2B firms using Instagram and gathering additional insights from an architectural firm partner who joined Instagram last year, we were convinced that now would be a great time to start an Instagram account.
During our research, we discovered some interesting statistics on Instagram.
- there are 1 billion active accounts on Instagram every month (which means that Instagram is part of monthly life for one in seven people in the world)
- there are 500 million active Instagram accounts every day
- 64% of the Instagram users are between 18 and 34 (and a sizable portion of our employees match that profile and are Instagram users)
- 80% of Instagram users follow a business account
- Instagram has the highest engagement rates across all social media
Armed with this information, how could we not be on Instagram? So, we created an Instagram strategy and developed posting guidelines for our Instagram account.
Creating an Instagram Strategy
First we identified our target Instagram audience. We decided that the people we want to connect with:
- People who work at, used to work at or want to work at Vantage
- Clients, potential clients and partners
- People who care about:
- Technology and anything related to technology
- Design and architecture
- Healthcare design and technology
- Education design, technology and IT for K-12, community college and higher education
Our next step was to document how we are going to use Instagram.
We narrowed our goals for posting to the following:
- Humanize our brand and our company
- Provide a behind the scenes view of our work and day-to-day employee activities at Vantage
- Showcase photos from our current and completed projects
- Share interesting technology and architectural design
- Highlight our culture for potential hires
- Offer unscripted and multiple views into life at Vantage
The bottom line is that Instagram provides us with a way to share our stories in a way that is different but complementary to our social media presence on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Opening Up Responsibility For Our Instagram Account To All Employees is Key
The last point is one of the most important features of our strategy. We are going to crowdsource our posts by opening up the curation and posting to our Instagram feed to all Vantage employees. While some employees may choose to opt out, we calculate that almost half of Vantage employees will ultimately participate in sharing content on Instagram. The point is to provide a view into our world from multiple perspectives and collectively, share the responsibility for posting interesting and shareable content. We are taking a leap of faith that our employees will responsibly handle the opportunity, but we trust our employees to be professional and responsible.
We see our Instagram posting as an experiment and look forward to tracking and measuring the results. In the meantime, please visit our Instagram account and start following us so you don’t miss any of our posts.