Instagram’s Most Used Hashtag #Ad Make Top With 42% Rise In 2018

With 400 million daily users worldwide, Instagram has indeed dominated its place in the digital world. An average user is not only using this giant social media platform but the brands, service providers and influencers are a considerable part of it.

Features introduced for e-commerce by this tech mogul has made it an ideal place to engage and convert customers for retail brands and influencers. A recent study by an influencer marketing company Buzzoole showed a 42% more usage of the hashtag #ad in 2018 on Instagram. The study was conducted to focus on the most commonly used hashtags for transparency such as #ad, #sponsored and #sp. The interactions on the posts with #ad were 1 billion in 2017 whereas 2.9 billion in the last year, showing a rapid growth on the influencer generated posts.

According to the Buzzoole research, influencer market has shown a rapid trend of growth and is continually growing despite the statements of some analysts calling 2018 a difficult year for the industry. Sarah Whitfield has spoken on the importance of this gradual trend saying, “This is probably due to one main reason as brands are looking to build long-term relationships with Creators, a higher level of loyalty becomes crucial. That ultimately translates into more transparency towards their audiences, which means making clear that an ad is an ad and more budgets invested in influencer-created content, which means more #ad content is shared online.”

So Which Industries Had The Most Investment On Influencer Marketing On Instagram?

According to Buzzoole, Fashion (32%), Beauty (16%) and Food & Drinks (12%) were among the most active brands in influencer-generated posts in 2018.

As high as 600k creators were involved globally showing an increase of 7 p.p. compared to the previous semester.

Buzzoole’s data gives a closer insight into the tremendous growth of influencer marketing, despite being termed as a difficult year by some analysts.