Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

...If you look up ‘#selfie’ on Instagram you’ll be bombarded with millions of matches to scan through – more than 88 millionto be precise. Everywhere you go you’ll see people, arm stretched out in front, hand hooked round their phone, pouting and flashing peace signs. It’s become so normal that no one even looks twice anymore, there’s a general understanding of the selfie process. And with so many selfies being taken, it’s a no-brainer for brands think about how they can utilise that trend for exposure. And many have already done just that.

Brands and Selfies

There are already a raft of examples of brands building campaigns around selfies, some successfully, others not so much. As with any trend, businesses will seek to access a ready-made audience, but it also takes a level of comprehension on how best to do so – as with all aspects of social media, understanding your audience is critical to success. There is definitely opportunity within the selfie trend, but brands have to establish the best way to realise it, what will resonate with your target consumers. This requires listening, monitoring trends to know what your audience will and won’t engage with. But it also necessitates an understanding of the psychology of selfies, of why people engage in this activity in the first place.

...According to Ben Baker (npEngage), “1.1 posts including the hashtag “#selfie” were uploaded to Instagram every single second, that means 4,000 were uploaded per hour, 95,700 were uploaded per day, and a whopping 34,924,648 were uploaded across the entirety of 2013.”

1.1 per second! And of course, that's just the photos that were tagged and uploaded to Instagram, never mind all those shared on Facebook, Snapchat, etc. 

Understanding how this impacts your communications 

So why should we care that an entire generation (and many of us older folks too) are taking "selfies"? As Baker suggests in his post, while the “selfie” trend might fade away, it offers some insight into an entire generation of Millennials – their social media habits and more generally, the ways they prefer to connect and be communicated with....