Book publishers mostly post photos over videos on Instagram, and research suggests they won't be changing that any time soon.
As Instagram continues to grow as one of the largest social media platforms, its marketing techniques have been evolving. One of the newest additions to the platform, video posts, have become increasingly popular, and some experts suggest that Instagram users engage more with these posts than picture-based posts.
A study by Quintly in 2018 found that videos can gain up to 21% more interactions than other posts. However, an analysis by Hootsuite suggested that photo-based posts receive more engagement than video posts. Furthermore, the success of video posts could vary depending on the type of account and target audience. When it comes to book publishing Instagram accounts, do videos perform better than other types of posts?
To answer this question, I analyzed ten posts from the Instagram profiles of three book publishing Instagram accounts—thirty posts total. I used the accounts for three major publishing houses:
- Penguin Random House (@penguinrandomhouse)
- Simon and Schuster (@simonandschuster)
- HarperCollins (@harpercollins)
All posts were selected randomly, and all of them were posted in the last year. Five posts from each profile were video posts, and five posts were photo posts. Then, I calculated the engagement for each post by combining the number of likes and comments.
After determining the average engagement for each type of post, I found that in general, pictures received 2.4 times more engagement than videos. But, surprisingly, the one GIF that was posted in the past year by HarperCollins received more engagement than any other video post. Since this GIF is the only one posted by all three of these accounts in the past year, it is unclear whether other GIFs would perform similarly.
Based on these results, book publishing companies should rely mainly on picture posts to increase their engagement on Instagram. However, because these accounts don’t seem to post many videos, if they posted them more frequently, they could possibly achieve higher engagement rates. Thus, these companies should experiment with different types of posts to see what receives the most interactions.
For more ideas on how to grow your company’s book publishing Instagram account, read the rest of the article, “Twenty-Two Ways to Increase Engagement on Instagram,” from Hootsuite.