9 Lessons You Can Learn From Nike’s Instagram Strategy

Nike is clearly at the top of its game when it comes to marketing on Instagram. After all, it is the 16^th most followed account on Instagram! Excluding celebrities and Instagram itself, it is the 2^nd most followed a brand after National Geographic. Instagram is a vital part of their Social Media Strategy

Let’s take a look at some statistics:

@nike:

Followers: 73M

Posts: 900

Absolute Daily Growth: 851K

Growth rate: 1.2%

Analytics of the latest 20 posts:

Likes: 6.9M

Comments: 51K

Key Takeaway: It doesn’t matter whether you have the resources to create video masterpieces or simply have to make do with what you have, make sure your visuals captivate, intrigue and inspire your audience.

2. Inspire Action

Instagram inspires and motivates people to try new and different things – a cool recipe, a well-deserved holiday, a better lifestyle. Nike inspires their audience to get up and “Just Do It”. Learn from the inspiring stories of the biggest athletes and face their biggest enemy – themselves. Even their captions are highly motivational. The posts also inspire people to buy Nike products.

Key Takeaway: Focus on enriching the lives of your audience by inspiring them to take action.

3. Build a Community

Nike has built a global community of athletes through Instagram. It has handpicked the best athletes to become ambassadors as Nike Athletes and inspired the masses to look up to them, train with them and grow with them. The ambassadors also post pictures of their Nike merchandise thus becoming influencers for their followers.

Key Takeaway: If you are building an aspirational community offline, get them online so they can inspire more people.

4. Quality beats Quantity

You will find various articles and blogs out there that will tell you to post 1-2 posts per day on Instagram. But they are only looking at one side of the coin. Sharing 2-3 high-quality and breath-taking posts per month will give you a much higher ROI in the long run than sharing 30-60 low-quality posts per month. Nike knows this and posts on average only 3 posts per month.

Key Takeaway: Invest your time in creating high-quality and beautiful posts that people will like to see.

5. Go Beyond and Behind the Product

Despite its range of products, that’s not all Nike talks about. The lifestyle, the grind, the hustle, the victory… Nike inspires people to get up and change their lives to become fitter than they were yesterday. However, when they do talk about the product, they give an interesting twist to it like a stunning product teaser or talking about the vision behind an innovative product.