TrackMaven releases 2016 Social Media Inflation Index: Instagram growth is huge

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Content analytics platform TrackMaven has released interesting data in its 2016 Social Media Inflation Index, a report that deeply analyzes brand audience growth across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn throughout 2015. Looking at nearly 27,000 brands in all industries, the report sought out the average growth of audiences for each brand on each social network.

The hypothesis, based on research, is that with more and more people actively engaging on social media, a brand’s audience should grow (It is postulated, after all, that nearly 1/3 of the projected global population will be on social networks by 2018). But will it?

The short answer is “yes.” Here are the findings from the analysis:

• Instagram has seen pretty significant adoption rates, with month-over-month increases of six to eight percent. This is twice the growth rate of LinkedIn and more than three times the growth rate of Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Compared to last year’s data, most brands saw their follower numbers double.
• Across all social networks, brands saw an annual follower growth lift of 42 percent year over year.
• Pinterest’s follower growth exists on seasonality. Follower growth was big in summer months (July and August), then dipped in the fall, but saw a holiday season increase in December.
• Facebook had an account cleanup in March that hurt a lot of brands (See the chart above). A lot of big brands, such as Pepsi and Dr. Pepper, lost a substantial number of fans.

These findings don’t sound that surprising, as Instagram has definitely been building momentum, and visuals are the best way to follow a brand one loves without the clutter of the written word. Still, one looks ahead to see what the landscape would look like in the future. Will visuals beat out video, which is gaining tremendous steam these past few months? It would be great to see how SnapChat’s influence for marketers in 2016 might change the landscape in terms of network popularity in 2017. Hopefully, TrackMaven will start monitoring available data on SnapChat to see how this newer promising social network may change the game for brands in 12 months’ time.