By Laia Cardona, on 7 July 2016
There is absolutely no doubt that Instagram has been gaining impressive ground over the last few years.
Its significant growth has attracted no less than 500 million monthly active users (placing it ahead of social networks such as Twitter, Vine, Pinterest or LinkedIn).
The new advertising options offered by Instagram for business have made it a very interesting opportunity for marketers also.
A time of big changes in the social networks is approaching, as we began to see with the change of their logo, shown below.
After the launch of their new logo and the redesign of the interior of the app to tones of black and white (making images pop more than ever), comes the launch of Instagram’s new corporate profiles. Don’t miss out on the big news!
New corporate profile on Instagram for business
Instagram’s big news for businesses is their new corporate profiles, which show important similarities to those of Facebook for business.
Until now, users and brands had only one type of account to chose from, but from now on, businesses will be able to explore additional features:
- A new contact button that will allow users to contact the brand through the network’s internal messaging system, SMS and by phone, as well as showing maps with the company’s location. With this Instagram is becoming a new customer service channel for brands to keep in touch with their followers, solve their problems and answer their needs at any moment.
- The simplification of their advertising system, which includes the choice to sponsor posts. Just like on Facebook, the system alerts brands of the posts that generate most impressions and interaction and encourages them to sponsor them to increase their reach even further.
These new corporate profiles on Instagram for business will be available in the United States, Australia and New Zealand within the next few weeks, and will be implemented worldwide gradually after that.
Instagram for business: new statistics
But that’s not all! From now on, company marketers will be able to stay much more informed about what is going on with their Instagram corporate profiles.
Yet another amazing new feature is a complete statistics system that keeps you up-to-date with everything going on on the network.
Later’s blog (an app to program Instagram posts) has already published some screenshots that show us these new features.
With the new statistics system, companies will be able to:
- View a complete demographic analysis of their users: age, gender, location and more. The information about age and gender are shown in pie charts, simplifying the analysis.
- Filter users according to their location, programming posts according to time zones and viewing audience preferences in different locations.
- Know the most popular days and times at which users use the network. This allows them to avoid the downtimes and focus their content posts on the most effective moments, increasing their reach.
- Use the new Perspectives section (similar to Facebook’s insights) to view data about impressions, clicks and each user’s activity.
- Classify posts according to impressions received in different periods of time. This is key information to be able to focus your content on topic that are most interesting to your users.
- View the average time followers spend on their profile, in general as well as per days of the week. This is very valuable data to know the quality of your visits: are you capturing your users’ interest.
- Analyze the impact of each post in relation to the size of your account by analyzing the number of users that view the post compared to the total amount of followers. Like this, you can analyze the effectiveness of your content over time.
As you can see, there is a large amount information that will let you analyze your brand’s behavior on Instagram, know what content works best and optimize your strategy to improve results.
In conclusion, the new features of Instagram for business offer great opportunities to promote your brand and reach even further with this social network, so it’s great news for advertisers everywhere.
But don’t forget that most importantly, what will attract most attention on this network is to win your users over with high quality images and videos!
