Instagram: Marketing to Millennials

Hmmm....how to market a Millennial market. That's sure the gazillion dollar question. First off, I think I'd kill off twitter altogether except to use it for customer service. Prompt, fast customer service that is. I don't personally believe Millennials use twitter to close a sale when they're looking for things to buy.That being said, Instagram is the way to go. I actually use it already (follow me!) although I admit that I could do it a lot more affectively. I think the key is consistency and I am surely not consistent. In the wedding business Instagram ends up being a giant Pinterest board in which everyone wants to be found and hired. It's naturally a super visual social media experience and is a great way to link to all different vendors and locations for which you're trying to target a certain demographic. Plus, it's fun to explore, it's very lighthearted, and you don't have to commit to being somebody's friend or following somebody.It seems to me that every social media stream out there is a way to be digitally popular. All the cool kids have a lot of followers and a lot of companies that do well on social media seek out those cool kids and turn them into ambassadors or product evangelists. Finding out who those cool kids are takes a lot of time and effort. One easy way is to pay a celebrity to be that cool kid. If the celebrities are wearing it or think it's cool then sales usually do well. Just look at how celebrity magazines used to influence our purchasing in the past. Social media has replaced those old school ways of marketing so the simplest thing seems to be to pay people to promote. While it's not been decided by the higher ups if this against the rules yet, assuming that Instagram is like the wild, wild, west seems like the way to go.For a successful brand I looked at airbnb to see what works for them. I found their Instagram to be lovely and fun to follow. The only problem I found with it was that it causes major jealously and looks unattainable. But I'm not a millennial. I think millennials would be much more drawn to this feed because they don't have the costs of living that a lot of the rest of the world has and can travel at the spur of the moment. Which is nice so it's very clear that they know their target audience. The other brilliant thing about their feed is that they crowd source their customers by using hashtags. That has to be very cost efficient for them since I'm guessing there's no pay involved. People probably just give their photos over because they think it's an honor to have airbnb pick them.While I don't plan on subscribing to airbnb's feed, I've enjoyed looking at it!