The best part about these 3 new Instagram features is that they're all user facing
so businesses don't need to put in any
additional work to reach more users
on the platform
Hey this is Chia from Brand24! Welcome back
to the #SocialRecap, our rundown of
the latest highlights from social media and digital
marketing news. So it is
almost December now, which means
we are already midway into the busy holiday
season (AKA shopping season)!
Unless, of course, you're like me and
you have not even started your holiday shopping
in which case, let's just take a quick
break from all the madness and look at how
Instagram is helping businesses grow
and gear up for one of the busiest times
of year in retail and commerce.
First of all, Instagram has just
recently come out with 3 new features to help
businesses and retailers put their
products in front of even more shoppers
without having to come up with a whole new
Instagram strategy. So, the first
feature is the Shopping Collection.
Instagram users are now able to save - or
Pin - products that they like to
a personal shopping collection. This way,
they can remember which items they
liked and return to them anytime
like when they're finally ready to purchase.
So, the second feature is
shoppable videos. Users can now view all the products
featured in branded videos that have been made
shoppable and find out
immediately how much the items cost.
So, the third feature is the new shopping tab
in business profiles. The new Shop tab
is a place where users can see
all the products that a business is offering on
Instagram, without having to click
through a bunch of individual posts.
So, the best
part about these 3 new Instagram
features is that they're all user-
facing, so businesses don't need to
put in any additional work to reach more
users on the platform. Anybody
can create their own Shopping Collection,
view product information in videos, or
browse through offered products from an
individual business - all on
their own. Brands just need to keep
doing what they've been doing all along
and create engaging images and videos
for Instagram. And
no discussion about retail and
Instagram would be complete without
mentioning influencer marketing.
So, there are over 800 million
monthly active users on Instagram
making it the ideal marketing platform
for most retailers, especially
considering the fact that over 31%
of Americans on Instagram
earn over $75,000.00 a year
a generous amount of consumer power.
And working with influencers is
a proven way to help your products get seen
by those consumers,
provided you work with the right people.
But with so many third party apps
selling likes, followers and comments
for dirt cheap nowadays, how
do you know which influencers are real
and which ones have been buyingn engagement?
A really quick offhand way to tell
is to first look at an influencer's
profile and see how their number of followers
compares to their number of likes they get for
their content. So, if there's a really
big gap, they may have been buying followers
to grow their account Although, this
isn't a foolproof way to tell. A
much more in depth method of measuring
influence is by seeing how much talk or
discussion an influencer is able to
generate online, especially in
relation to the product that they are promoting.
This is really best done with a good social
media monitoring tool that will help you
monitor key mentions and analyze
all of the data. So, influencer
marketing, or even micro-influencer
marketing - what have you - especially
on Instagram, is a really powerful
way for businesses to amplify
their voice and reach a much wider audience
We can see that in the fact that the
top 50 Instagram accounts alone
have amassed a total of 3.1
BILLION followers. Imagine if they were
to promote your product to even a fraction of
those followers. The connection
between Instagram and influencer marketing
makes authenticity
a crucial part of the platform and
it's why Instagram recently announced that
they'll be taking action against behavior
that appears to be inauthentic.
They have long been working on
detecting and deleting fake accounts, and now
they're extending this to fake likes
and follows.
Users who are connected to inauthentic
activity have likely shared their account details
with third party apps, which also
compromises account security. Instagram
has already start to directly remove
inauthentic activity from user accounts
notifying affected users to change
their passwords. With these
recent new features and actions to
preserve authenticity, Instagram
is making it even easier for businesses
to reach more users and gain
more followers - all without having
to put in extra hours (yes!). If your
brand isn't on Instagram yet, or if you just
haven't heard about these new features, consider
checking them out and using them to improve
the Instagram experience for both
your business and your shoppers.
And that is it for
episode 23 of the #SocialRecap
If you want to hear more about key developments in
social media and how they will affect your
strategies, just subscribe to the
#SocialRecap on YouTube, and just in case you
prefer, we also have an audio version
on Soundcloud, plus a readable
version on the blog. You can find the links below
in the video description. Thank you
for tuning in and I will see you next
time. Bye!