The State of Instagram Marketing in 2017

Instagram spent 2017 consolidating gains it had made the year before, and for businesses that had been slow to take the platform seriously, this was the year that hesitation started to cost them.

Stories became a real advertising surface, not just a feature

Instagram launched Stories in August 2016 as a near-direct answer to Snapchat’s disappearing-photo format, and by June 2017 Instagram reported Stories had reached 250 million daily active users, more than Snapchat’s entire user base at the time. For marketers, the significant shift in 2017 was that Stories stopped being just an organic experiment and became a place businesses could run ads, giving brands a full-screen, vertical, ephemeral format distinct from the traditional feed post.

The algorithmic feed kept rewarding engagement over recency

Instagram had moved away from a strictly chronological feed in 2016, ranking posts based on predicted interest rather than post time, and by 2017 that shift had fully reshaped how accounts needed to think about posting. Consistent posting alone no longer guaranteed reach. Accounts that got meaningful organic reach in 2017 were generally the ones getting genuine engagement (comments, saves, shares) on early viewers, not the ones simply posting most often.

User growth kept climbing, and business tools kept catching up

Instagram passed 700 million monthly active users in April 2017 and crossed 800 million by the end of September, growth that outpaced most other major platforms that year. Instagram responded by expanding its self-serve advertising tools, making it easier for small and mid-sized businesses to run ads without going through an agency, and by testing native shopping tags in early 2017 that let select retailers tag products directly in posts, a feature that would roll out more broadly the following year.

Influencer marketing grew up, and so did scrutiny of it

As brands poured more budget into influencer partnerships, the Federal Trade Commission sent a wave of warning letters in 2017 to both influencers and the brands paying them, reminding both sides that sponsored posts needed clear disclosure. This didn’t slow influencer marketing down, but it did push more businesses toward working with influencers who used consistent, visible disclosure rather than treating sponsorship as something to obscure.

What this meant for a business deciding how much to invest

By mid-2017, Instagram had stopped being an optional extra for consumer-facing brands. The practical questions worth asking were whether your audience spent meaningful time there (still less universal for B2B than for consumer categories), whether you had visual content worth showing rather than repurposed stock photography and whether you were willing to build Stories into your routine rather than treating it as a side experiment. Businesses that answered yes to those questions and showed up consistently through the back half of 2017 were building an audience on a platform still growing fast enough that early, genuine engagement compounded rather than diminishing over time.