Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Instagram ads are coming. We don’t know what they’ll look like or when they’ll arrive. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised that Instagram won’t be ad-free forever. The world’s largest brands are already using the photo-sharing app and its new video tool to pimp their products.

Facebook is betting big on mobile ads, which went from being a blip on the social network’s radar to accounting for 41 percent of the company’s ad revenue in just one year. The network reportedly plans to run 15-second, TV-style ads in users’ News Feeds, which could cost advertisers $2.5 million a pop. If that 15-second limitation—as yet unconfirmed by Facebook—sounds familiar, it’s because 15 seconds is also the cap that Instagram put on its new video tool.

Companies are familiarizing themselves with Instagram video as they prepare for the inevitable launch of video ads and seek to avoid angering Instagram devotees in the process....

Vine's microvideos have rapidly waned in popularity following the debut of Instagram's competing service. But don't count it out yet. The competition continues...

The Twitter-owned microvideo service Vine has had better days. Earlier, Marketing Land revealed that user sharing of six-second Vine videos plummeted after Instagram debuted a competing service last week. But Vine isn't Internet roadkill quite yet. Marketing Land conjured data from Twitter-metric firm Topsy, comparing how many times people shared instagram.com links on Twitter against the frequency of vine.co links.

Its most stunning revelation: Sharing of Vine videos dropped by almost 40% on June 20, the day Instagram launched its video service. So far, there's no turnaround in sight....