On the first day of summer, you head out for drinks with friends. While you're waiting for them, you order an iced tea. On a whim, you take a photo of your ice-cold delight and post it to Instagram with the hashtag #summerdrinks. Impulsive? Maybe, but far from uncommon: today's Instagrammer interested in beverages is swift-thinking, decisive and quick to share.

In a recent collaborative study with our in-house consumer insights team (Facebook IQ), we learned that just like the beverage decision itself, mobile is both impulsive and social – with 41% even agreeing that photos and videos on Instagram influence their beverage purchase decision.¹ And as beverage shopping becomes increasingly diverse and connected, people are using their smartphones to seek out, learn about and discuss their drinks in new ways – particularly in NY, Chicago, London and São Paulo.²

But the activity doesn't just stop there. These Instagrammers are scrolling, sharing and searching Instagram more and more, even visiting the platform 22 times per day – that's 8 more sessions a day compared to the average global Instagrammer. Needless to say, with so much frequency amongst Instagrammers, especially between 3-6 pm PST, beverage brands have more opportunities than ever to connect when thirst (and impulse) strikes.²

To define itself as the official beer of summertime and Carnival, Brazil's best-selling beverage brand, Skol (@skol), partnered with Instagram and agency F/Nazca to launch a video campaign created exclusively for Instagram Stories.

For the campaign, the brand decided to show its innovative side by becoming the first Brazilian company to test stories – and the results were as big as Carnival itself.

Targeted at people all across Brazil (18+ years old), the campaign's message encouraged viewers to think outside the box and enjoy the summer's most outgoing celebration with Skol. As a result, the brand's ad recall jumped by 29 pts, and the total number of people who saw Skol as the beer most closely tied to summer (primarily amongst women) increased by 3 pts.

Looking to raise awareness of its overall brand and products amongst millennials in a fresh, playful way, Italian coffee company, illy (@illy_coffee), teamed up with Instagram and artist/illustrator, Max Petrone to create a series of Instagram carousel ads that told the illy story using coffee as the medium.

This fun campaign proved to be a hit with the Instagram audience, producing a 16-point uplift in ad recall and even rising 21 pts amongst its target of 25-to-35-year-olds.

And it's not just the larger beverage brands using Instagram to reach consumers with memorable creative, it's smaller businesses too – such as BrainJuice (@naturalbrainjuice).

For this Austin-based drink company, who prides itself on being a liquid shot of nutrients for your brain, Instagram is a main channel for connecting with its customers and building a community around its products.

With so many different ways for businesses to connect and share on Instagram, one veggie-first company has the art of posting down to a science – literally. Treating its content like an experiment, New York City-based Salad Power (@saladpower) found which style of posts worked best for engagement by researching and testing everything they shared on Instagram.

As mobile continues to reshape the world around us, it's important that beverage marketers understand its impact and the ways mobile can connect them with their customers – whether it's on the go or in the moment. And while the path to purchase is short and impulsive amongst beverage Instagrammers, the discussion around what and why they drink is anything but minimal.

To learn more about mobile's impact on the beverage industry and how we think about drinks, head on over to Facebook IQ for the full article.