The Strengths and Weaknesses of Instagram as a Marketing Tool

·Instagram has over one billion monthly active users making it a very appealing platform to market a product. If a company's target audience is the younger demographic, then Instagram is the best place to market a product as the majority of its users are younger.

·Instagram also tends to target more urban areas, where young college students and workers will be located, therefore it is beneficial for a clothing company or tech company to have a product page set up on Instagram.

·Instagram is a great place for companies to post rich media, particularly images as that is Instagram's main feature, this can effectively show your audience exactly what the product your selling is and what it looks like, companies can also post short video clips and a short text paragraph to clearly demonstrate how their product works.

·Companies can connect their Twitter and Facebook accounts together with their Instagram accounts, this makes it easy for a marketing team to get their content out more efficiently, for example, if a company posts an Instagram post, they have the option to post a copy of that post on Facebook at the exact same moment thus saving them time.

·Instagram also has its disadvantages, for example, while the platform is good for posting photos and other rich media, these posts have to be of exceptional quality to catch the users' eye and to create a brand image that ensures quality, therefore a company might have to hire a professional photographer to ensure there advertising is high quality.

·Instagram is not great if you’re trying to describe your product through text, it only users to write a short caption post underneath a photo and therefore, companies must know how to communicate their product through visual media and even then, they can only post photos and short video clips, there isn’t a lot of room to describe the product.

·Instagram is not available to everyone, it only available to android and iPhone users, owners of the popular Blackberry phone brand and the popular operating system Linux, will not have access to Instagram, therefore missing out on a lot of potential customers, this is why it’s important to have a marketing presence on other platforms like Facebook.

·It is more difficult to target your audience on Instagram as it has fewer options for businesses to narrow down their target, it also forces more smaller business to rely solely on organic, pull marketing as it is very expensive to pay for advertising on Instagram, the CPC on Instagram is $50-$1.00, making the cost of advertising only available to larger companies. As such, smaller companies need to be smart in what keywords and hashtags they use in their posts, and also the quality of their photos need to be of a very high standard.