Yesterday Instagram announced a “new suite of business tools for brands” that will be rolled out over the next weeks and months. The suite included long-needed tools for account insights, advertising insights, and ad development. They also announced the rollout of these tools and Instagram ads for all Instagram brands in the coming future, not just their original launch brands.

Instagram, now a “community of more than 200 million worldwide”, is quickly becoming a powerful platform for businesses. There were some of the first to jump on Instagram videos—a study late in 2013 found that 40% of the top 1,000 most popular Instagram videos were from brands.

Here are just a few quick stats touting the explosive popularity Instagram continues to see:

200 million monthly active users
65% of users are outside the U.S.
20 billion photos shared
1.6 billion likes daily
60 million photos posted per day

This popularity with brands inevitably led to its announcement around the introduction of sponsored posts last year. Now Instagram is giving brands and social advertisers deeper insights and tools to make it easier than ever for brands to see success using the platform.

Here are my five takeaways and marketing wins from the announcement:

1. Instagram’s Evolution into a Major Platform for Social Media Marketers
Brands have been using Instagram for social media marketing since its inception. Until now, though, brands have had a hard time creating campaigns and posts, managing campaigns, and measuring results. These new tools are giving brands who have been using Instagram for marketing more control over their campaigns and measurement. Instagram is positioning itself to be in the same ranks (and of the same importance in a brand’s budget) as Facebook and Twitter.

Instagram account and ad insights look very similar to Facebook “Insights”, giving brands deep analytics for impressions, reach, and engagement. Marketers will now have the tools to fully implement an Instagram marketing strategy and measure its results. These tools will continue to bring more and more brands to the platform.

These tools are vital to Instagram’s adoption into social media marketing strategies. If you haven’t yet started using Instagram in your social marketing mix, now is the time to act.

2. Data Beats Opinions
Our Director of Global Content Marketing & Research Kyle Lacy lives and dies by this phrase. Good data should outweigh any opinion. Data gives you the ability to measure performance and act upon the data to develop better decisions and results.

The more tools like these are available to social marketers, the better decisions brands can make on what users want to see and how to engage with audiences. Ultimately it benefits both the brands and the users as brands develop more interesting and engaging content.

3. Increasing Instagram Engagement
We recently wrote about Instagram engagement rates compared to other social networks:

According to a recent study conducted by Forrester,Instagram generates a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21%, blowing away Facebook and Twitter engagement rates at 0.07% and 0.03%.

These tools will hopefully only continue to increase the engagement brands are seeing on the platform. Instagram may have less monthly active users than Facebook or Twitter, but brands are seeing very successful engagement rates using the platform.

4. The Virality of Visual Content
Instagram users are a different niche of social users and use the platform for very different purposes than other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. It’s important to understand your different social audiences and engage with them in personalized, relevant ways. Instagram presents new and interesting opportunities for you to connect with customers on their journey with your brand in a very creative way.

The successes Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, and others have seen point to the power of visual content. Studies have even shown the increased engagement seen when using visual elements in Facebook posts and tweets. When it comes to online content, it is certainly true that a picture is worth a thousand words.

The more Instagram invests in its business tools and ad platform, the more opportunities there will be for marketers and for creativity to shine on Instagram.

5. Democratization of Social Advertising
Instagram’s blog post notes that they will release the tools and advertising capabilities to additional brands later this year. Their ad insights and “ad staging” features are the first steps toward becoming a full self-service social advertising platform like Twitter and Facebook. This is big news for all social media marketers.

As social advertising continues to grow and become more democratized among brands, it will become more and more important for marketers to develop a holistic paid/earned/owned marketing strategy.

Being a Facebook-owned company, I also wouldn’t be surprised if advertisers will soon be able to use Facebook data to segment and personalize Instagram ads as well.

For more information on how marketers can advertise on Facebook and take advantage of its increasingly-mobile audience, check out our new guide, Facebook Advertising: The Mobile Opportunity.

I originally publish this post on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Blog.