Instagram targets marketers beyond the US

Instagram, the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app, will start to take advertisements outside the US this year, as it begins selling to marketers from the UK, Canada and Australia on the platform.

The app, which was Facebook’s first major acquisition when it was bought for $1bn in 2012, now has more than 200m users, many of whom are millennials – those aged 18 to 33 – that marketers are eager to reach.

The company started rolling out adverts by working closely with a few brands in the US late last year. It said on Monday the results for US advertisers had been positive and, in some cases, outperformed other marketing methods.

“We gave people the ability to provide feedback on ads so we could learn what people liked – and didn’t like – and improve over time,” the company said in a blog post. “So far, our community-focused efforts are working.”

Instagram is one of a new generation of social media companies including Twitter and Pinterest that are approaching advertising very cautiously. It is working closely with partners to agree a formula that works for marketers without disrupting the user experience and potentially pushing them on to other apps.

The image-focused app has proved popular with the fashion industry in particular as fashion designers, supermodels and style bloggers took to the platform long before it began to take advertising.

Michael Kors, the designer, was the app’s first advertiser with a glossy image of a watch on a table set for afternoon tea, which would not have looked out of place in a fashion magazine. Instagram has also tested sponsored 15-second videos with partners including British fashion brand Burberry and Levi’s, the jeans maker.

But other brands have also experimented with the app, from Starbucks, the coffee shop owner, to Taco Bell, a US fast-food chain. Sports clubs, carmakers and publishers all appear in the top 50 brands on Instagram by numbers of followers, compiled by analytics company Nitrogram.

Instagram does not break out its international user figure but eMarketer, a research company, estimates about 35m users are in the US, leaving about 165m in other countries. The company said that, after the UK, Canada and Australia, it plans to expand its advertising platform elsewhere in the world.

The smartphone-focused company uses some of the same sales infrastructure as Facebook, which has surprised Wall Street for four consecutive quarters on the back of soaring mobile advertising.

Like Facebook, Instagram first enticed big brands with the offer of reaching its users for free by collecting followers for their accounts. But now they can pay to be seen by users who do not choose to follow their brands.