{"id":25,"date":"2015-02-25T06:01:20","date_gmt":"2015-02-25T06:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/richardgiraldi.com\/blog\/?p=25"},"modified":"2015-03-09T06:11:47","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T06:11:47","slug":"popular-pays-instagram-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/richardgiraldi.com\/blog\/popular-pays-instagram-marketing\/","title":{"rendered":"Popular Pays: Instagram Marketing"},"content":{"rendered":"

My girlfriend works at a prominent Chicago area bakery, and one of her coworkers runs a very impressive food-specific Instagram account<\/a>. It features some extremely delicious looking photos featuring some culinary highlights from restaurants all over the city. In a recent conversation, my girlfriend told me her coworker who runs the Instagram account sometimes uses an app called Popular Pays<\/a>. Having never heard of the app, I did some research and discovered it\u2019s an extremely interesting Instagram marketing tool.<\/p>\n

The concept of the app as displayed on Popular Pays<\/a> landing page is, \u201cGet free products or cash in exchange for posting about brands on Instagram.\u201d And a 2014 Chicago Tribune article <\/a> gives a more complete picture of what the app actually does:<\/p>\n

The concept is simple. Instagram users can sign up on the Popular Pays app if have at least 500 followers. Participating merchants offer free goods if users promise to post a picture of the product, ideally in a creative way, on their feed. Sometimes companies offer higher-quality products to users with even more followers, Drummey said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Drummey to which the above quote refers is Corbett Drummey, the CEO and co-founder of the Chicago-based startup. The article details how the company grew quickly from 600,000 impressions to over three million between February and March 2014, which is the result of and effort to sign larger brands to the platform. Additionally, Corbett said it\u2019s the smaller companies that come to them rather than vice versa. <\/p>\n

\u201cCompanies pay Popular Pays based on performance, on a cost-per-engagement basis. A typical fee would be 5 cents per \u201clike,\u201d Drummey said, meaning a company would pay $50 if a photo receives 1,000 likes,\u201d the Tribune article<\/a> reads.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a YouTube video of Drummey explaining Popular Pays in his own words:<\/p>\n