Where Blogging Campaigns Beat Instagram Every Time

Amber, VP at Pixo and social media guru, recently made some interesting observations. There has been a trend in the industry towards campaigns on Instagram and away from bloggers in recent years. I get that. You go where the people are and Instagram is the current darling, with double digit growth in recent years. To some degree moms have been replaced with the "pretty people" on Instagram. Again, somewhat understandable, but there are some missed opportunities when doing an Instagram campaign verses a blogging campaign.

Yes, sometimes you want an overall campaign to look sexy, but advertisers at the end of the day also want to move product. The shelf life of an Instagram campaign is very short. Being able to share meaningful information and for that information to be searchable on Google are very limited. Audiences want quick snippets of information fast sometimes but not all the time. If your campaign is meant to be passive, then Instagram isn't a bad choice, but you are much more likely to have an active campaign via blogging and it will have longer value.

The brilliance behind Dove's campaign for real beauty with "ordinary" women was obvious. Real women connected with it. The value of a blogging campaign is the same. Real women (defined as women that other women can connect to, relate with and cry/rejoice with) writing about real products has real value. All the research shows that one mom (or other person appropriate to the category) will highly trust another mom's product review. Can that be done on Instagram? Yes, but not always in the same way and on the same level. And you certainly can't search engine optimize it.

Some of the beauty of a blog is the passion. A good blog shares hard things, imperfections, successes, tips, failures and life. Instagram is a just a snapshot of that and often times a plastic, made up, unrealistic version of reality (at least in much of the more recent campaigns I've seen).

Some interesting insights to audience sizes for social media sites in 2017: