These features make Instagram more attractive than ever for brands in 2018

Moses Velasco, Chief Product Evangelist at Socialbakers, explains how brands can use this to their advantage. Socialbakers is a social media management, social media analytics and optimization company. It monitors more than ten million social profiles on all major social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ and VK in Russia.

All the functions listed here are also available in Switzerland. Post Promotion only for business accounts, the others also for private accounts.

Instagram Live with a friend

Instagram only launched this feature at the end of October - and it is particularly interesting for brands. Previously, they were able to interact more closely with their own followers in Instagram Live videos. However, they only had a chat function to reply. With the "Go live with a friend" add-on, brands can integrate another account into the video chat. Users who follow both accounts can see the entire video dialog. This opens up many new possibilities: Brands that work with influencers can virtually address the users of this account themselves in a joint live video or offer exclusive content such as interviews for their own followers. A Q&A for fans is now also much more personal.

Post promotion

It's finally here: post promotion on Instagram. While brands previously had to create ads separately in an ad manager, they can now boost organic content that has already been well received by their fans with advertising. Moses Velasco welcomes this new feature: "We have learned from Facebook that content that is already performing well organically is the best content for advertising. Post promotion allows brands to better assess the success of a campaign, use budget more efficiently and deliver only the best content in line with the Instagram algorithm."

New Instagram API

Instagram took a big step forward in 2017 not only in terms of the application itself, but also in terms of analysis and optimization - with a new API for external services. This enables services such as Socialbakers to delve deeper into the image platform's data. Socialbakers therefore introduced a series of new features in October. The social media analysis and optimization tool can use the new interface and a self-learning algorithm to make predictions about the performance of an organic post (performance prediction). Promoted Post Detection can be used to identify where competitors are spending additional budget. In addition, Socialbakers now also offers an inspiration function for Instagram. The marketing manager simply enters a search term and then sees a wide variety of content on the topic.

Instagram Polls

Instagram Stories are also enjoying a range of new functions. The most exciting for brands is probably Instagram Polls. A poll with two answer options can be added to a picture or video. Users can then vote directly in the story. There are countless usage scenarios for companies, from product A/B tests ("Copper or gold - how do you like the shelf better?") to pure target group engagement ("Who would like an Instagram Live on Bali trips?") to service and convenience questions ("Do you want the new product before Christmas or would you prefer it in the new year?"), everything is possible.