Instagram Introduced New Features Especially for Marketers

Using Instagram as Your Social Marketing Platform

Popular online mobile photo-sharing and video-sharing site Instagram is now going through the same path as its counterparts such as Pinterest and YouTube in helping marketers and advertisers to carrying out their promotional campaigns. Now, the social networking site is allowing marketers to target customers from its 200 million registered users by introducing 3 new tools. Instagram has finally adhered to the demand made by businesses and marketers as they want more insight into how users engage with and respond to their photos and videos. The social media site’s new tools will help marketers in three important areas:

• Account Insights – Account Insights allow marketers and businesses to see how they are increasing brand awareness on Instagram through impressions, reach and engagement.
• Ad Insights – This tool displays the performance of your paid campaigns by analyzing factors such as reach, impressions and frequency for each individual ad delivered to the target users.
• Ad Staging – Ad Staging tool allows advertisers and marketers to preview, save and collaborate on ad creative for upcoming promotional campaigns.

According to Instagram, these new tools will help businesses to monitor their posts and ad campaigns by providing info on reach, impressions and engagement. For example, a marketer will now have access to real-time ad campaign summary and information showing how their target audience is responding to each of their sponsored photos. Also, marketers and advertisers will be able to understand the best time of day to post a photo or video.

Few Instagram Marketing Tips

You may have a better social media presence in Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, but you can also invest your time in promoting your brand via Instagram. As visual content creates more user attention, you can post images and videos in Instagram which can attract more quality clicks for your business. With the help of the tools mentioned above, you can create a strategy with Instagram as your online marketing platform. Here are some tips that can get you started:

• A Thorough Research – You need to perform a thorough research before creating a marketing strategy. What your business can offer people who are on Instagram? Why should they follow you on Instagram, when they are already following you on Twitter and Facebook? When using Instagram, you need to think of personal engagement and the genuine interest of your audience instead of posting content that speaks only sales and promotions.
• Create a Posting Schedule – You need to create a posting schedule so that you can post content when your followers are most active on Instagram. This can be after business hours or during weekends or in the night. Also, check out which content gets the most likes and comments and start sharing similar content. You must add some variety in the content before posting it on the social media site.
• Utilizing Hashtags – Even though hashtags are popular in the social media network, there are those who didn’t really know how to use them. But you can use it as a marketing tactic in which hashtags allows your posts to be visible to people who search for certain hashtags. You can use 4-7 hashtags and ensure that you make use of popular trending ones.
• Try to experiment with Creating Images that features Your Products/Services- Products or services in new or interesting locations can attract the attention of your Instagram followers. Think of it as including creative photography to your product or service shots. There are many ways you can do this with regular products/services.

So, you can use Instagram for marketing your products or creating brand awareness by posting interesting images or videos. Just like its counterparts, Instagram is working closely with its marketing partners to perfect their business-centric services and to make sure that they meet the needs of marketers and advertisers.