These features make Instagram more attractive than ever for brands in 2018
In the past, the photo-sharing service Instagram has already added various features for brands, including Business Profiles, Instagram Ads, and Stories. In 2017, Instagram expanded its functionality with four new features—here’s an overview.
Moses Velasco, Chief Product Evangelist at Socialbakers, explains how brands can leverage this to their advantage. Socialbakers is a company specializing in social media management, analytics, and optimization. It monitors more than 10 million social media profiles across all major social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, and VK in Russia.
All of the features listed here are also available in Switzerland. Post Promotion is available only to Business Accounts; the others are also available to personal accounts.
Instagram Live with a friend
Instagram didn't launch this feature until late October—and it's particularly interesting for brands. Until now, brands could interact more closely with their followers during Instagram Live videos. However, followers only had a chat function to respond. With the «Go Live with a Friend» add-on, brands can invite another account to join the video chat. Users who follow both accounts can see the entire video conversation. This opens up many new possibilities: Brands collaborating with influencers can, in a joint live video, essentially address that account’s users directly or offer exclusive content—such as interviews—to their own followers. A Q&A session for fans is now much more personal as well.
Post promotion
It’s finally here: Post Promotion on Instagram. Whereas brands previously had to create ads separately in Ad Manager, they can now boost organic content that their followers have already responded well to with advertising. Moses Velasco welcomes this new feature: «We’ve learned from Facebook that content which has already achieved good organic reach is the best content for advertising. Post Promotion allows brands to better assess the success of a campaign, use their budget more efficiently, and—in line with the Instagram algorithm—deliver only the best content.»
New Instagram API
Instagram took a major step forward in 2017—not only in the app itself, but also in data analysis and optimization—with a new API for third-party services. This API enables services like Socialbakers to delve deeper into the image platform’s data. As a result, Socialbakers introduced a series of new features in October. Using the new interface and a self-learning algorithm, the social media analytics and optimization tool can provide performance predictions for organic posts (Performance Prediction). Promoted Post Detection reveals where competitors are allocating additional budget. In addition, Socialbakers now offers an inspiration feature for Instagram as well. To use it, marketing managers simply enter a search term and are then shown a wide variety of content on that topic.
Instagram Polls
Instagram Stories also feature a number of new functions. The most exciting ones for brands are likely Instagram Polls. You can add a poll with two answer options to a photo or video. Users can then vote directly within the Story. For businesses, there are countless use cases, ranging from product A/B testing («Copper or gold—which version of the shelf do you like better?») to pure audience engagement («Who’s interested in an Instagram Live about trips to Bali?») to service and convenience questions («Do you want the new product before Christmas or would you prefer it in the new year?»)—anything is possible.
