With a couple of the latest ads Instagram showed me, engage. One I passed it by direct message to another person, commenting on one of the things they showed, and two I saved them, using that option. It is not the only thing I have saved on Instagram.
Although in reality the saved content that I do see is what I keep on Twitter, I also tend to give that option with those Instagram posts that I find interesting for one reason or another. I’m not the only one and I probably won’t do it for a very different reason than everyone else is doing. Saving seems like the fastest way to keep track of the content that you hope to see or use again in the future. Recipes, shopping ideas, vacation destinations …
If the like works to show certain emotions in front of a content, saving helps not to lose it. And, perhaps for this reason, Instagram is already taking it into account to order content and to understand what is or is not more relevant.
The next big obsession in social media marketing is going to be getting users to save your content. In the English market, influencers and brand accounts are already asking their followers not so much to like them as to save the content.
The accounts already use acronyms such as SVE or in contests they ask not so much that you become a fan, which you will already be, but that you save that content.
They are some of the examples that they have found in Hootsuite about the emerging practice, which led them to wonder if it really makes an impact or not that Instagram users save the content. The company experimented with one of the accounts, programming different content and asking for different behaviors.
What the study concludes
What have been the conclusions? The content that users save does not necessarily achieve more likes or more comments or be more shared than other comments generally do. This, however, does not imply that every time a user saves Instagram content they do not contribute anything, rather the opposite. Hootsuite’s analysis has shown that the algorithm does take this into account.
The posts that have been saved are those that achieve a greater reach. They reach many more people organically than those who have not. Thus, for example, the two breakfast photos in the study achieved the same engagement rate of 8%.
However, the photo that had been saved was the one that got more people to see it. The Instagram feed showed her to more people. On average, the saved posts of everyone who tried and the unsaved ones have the same number of comments and a fairly similar number of likes. What changes is the midrange.
The contents that were saved by users had an average reach of 659.33. Those who did not stay at 480. The reach is therefore greater, although that does not necessarily translate into more engagement (or, as they point out in the study, “valuable interactions”).
Still, this data is crucial for social media marketers, who need to understand what makes their content more or less seen. It is also a very valuable contribution when what interests in social networks is to use them as a platform to create brand recognition.
