As the world's most versatile camera, storytelling through a unique point-of-view is the at the heart of GoPro. Every day we inspire, educate and stoke out our community of over 8M on Instagram with jaw-dropping content. Our objective for 2015 was clear: leverage our community of 140 GoPro athletes, 500 advocates, thousands of power users and every day creators to tell visual narratives on Instagram, reach a new lifestyle audience and dish out stokes through GoPro engagement. To deliver on our goal, we stuck to an editorial calendar, featured a new crop of creators to expand our demographic and double tapped content shared with #GoPro.
As the defending 2014 world champion, we knew that we'd have to innovate and stay competitive if we were to continue our reign as the best overall brand on Instagram. In 2015 we ushered in a new era of creator recognition, product launches and unparalleled community engagement.
We took it to the next level with smarter content strategies aimed at driving discoverability, laser-focused paid integration that delivered unprecedented ROI, and launched GoPro Awards, a tentpole initiative founded with a mission of giving back to the creators who helped build our brand (we're awarding up to $5M annually!). Over 40 recipients have been featured on Instagram, all of whom received a monetary award as well as a healthy spike in followers.
What triggered the spike?
That's the value of a GoPro engagement. And it's impressive.
In 2015 we developed an Engagement Value Model that informed our strategy and demonstrated the ROI of a GoPro action. A like or comment from @GoPro delivers a 543% spike on UGC and a 23% increase on athlete assets. Mention #GoPro in your caption you'll see a 34% uptick in likes and comments on your photo or video. Pro athlete? You'll rack up 15% more engagement thanks to the GoPro love.
The social media landscape is becoming fragmented, with niche audiences gravitating to new platforms. We knew that it was important to have a strong understanding of our Instagram audience – demographics, passions, and interests. An audience deep dive conducted in 2015 armed us with the insight we needed to develop an always-on marketing plan for the channel.
It worked.
We're successfully shifting towards a desired 60/40 Male/Female audience split and have grown from 3.8M to 7.7M followers (+104% YoY). We're staying true to our core with heritage content we were founded on (surf, snow, skate, moto) while also connecting with our new lifestyle fans (animal, family, travel).
We've stepped up our game with the creation of our advocacy program, a group of 500 of GoPro's most influential creators and brand fans. Content posted through our advocacy program has resulted in an earned media value of $5 Million with Instagram as #1 channel. We've supercharged our pipeline of creators and are poised for continued success..
As Instagram evolves, we stay flexible in our strategies to grow followers and reach the next generation of GoPro family members. Trending Tags and the Explore tab play an important role in brand awareness so we consistently program content that resonates within each theme (#MusicMonday, #TravelTuesday).
Instagram is at the heart and soul of our brand and we have every intention of staying on top of our game as our community thrives. We love healthy competition and we're here to defend our title.
We wrapped 2015 with 7.7M followers (+104% YoY), 16M engagements (+89% YoY) and nearly 200M likes across all content.
An organic "Best of" series fueled by user and athlete generated content drove an 80% spike in Instagram followers WoW and 20 Million non-paid engagements in December 2015.
A separate paid campaign was used to target to non-GoPro followers in new lifestyle verticals resulting in 2.5 Million engagements with an eng. rate of 14% - that's 10x above industry average!
