Sponsored posts and microinfluencers deliver greater engagement on Instagram

Maya Yegorova

Users of Instagram, the photo-sharing platform owned by Meta, typically engage more with sponsored posts than non-sponsored content, a study has found.

Consumers engage with sponsored posts more than organic content on Instagram, and often respond more favorably to material from microinfluencers on the photo-sharing platform.

These insights were drawn from a study, entitled “Influencer Marketing on Instagram: Empirical Research on Social Media Engagement with Sponsored Posts”, published in the Journal of Interactive Advertising, and written by Jana Gross and Florian von Wangenheim (both from KEDGE Business School in France).

How the study worked

  • The study assessed 64,438 Instagram posts uploaded from 2015 to 2019, of which 8.71% were sponsored posts, while the remainder were non-sponsored posts (NSPs).
  • In measuring...

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