It looks as though Instagram is continuing to improve its features in order to appeal to business users. With updated tools rolling out throughout the past year, and new ones just announced, how will the platform now benefit brands? 

Just last week, Instagram revealed that it would soon be allowing brands to have special business profiles, marking them apart from individual account types. Currently, the app is home to over 200,000 business users, who use the platform for brand and product promotion, and sales generation. With the new account format, added features are set to include “Call”, “Email” and “Get Directions” buttons, enabling users to better connect with these brands. These features will only be available for those brands who also have a Facebook business page, and from there they will be able to convert their accounts- clearly Instagram is also interested in boosting brand presence on its parent company!

Instagram also announced that it would be launching a new business dashboard. Over the coming months, the company will be releasing a set of free tools to enable insight into both organic and paid content, letting business users know how their posts are performing. These will cover account metrics such as number of impressions, reach and engagement over the past week or month, and offer weekly summaries. For paid content, ad insights tools will be available to show brands how their paid campaigns are performing, with impressions, reach and frequency data shown in accordance with the business’s campaign goals and target audience. Finally, there will also be an Ad staging feature, enabling brands to preview, save and collaborate on creative content for upcoming campaigns.

The new dashboard certainly sounds like a helpful tool for social monitoring and listening- in the past, Instagram has always been notorious as one of the few social platforms not to offer any analytics features. Up till now, brands and individuals alike have had to rely on external analytics apps in order to gauge their account and post performance. Over the past year though, other business tools have gradually been released to brands, with helpful features such as ad targeting, which let businesses target users with specific ads in accordance to their online shopping carts. There was also the release of video Carousel ads prior to this, which enabled brands to post a series of five videos in one post, which were displayed in a “slideshow”-type Carousel ad format. This was met with huge reaction from creatively conscious brands such as Airbnb and W hotels, who were able to enhance their story-telling abilities. Now, with a more diverse way to post content, Instagram’s analytics features will go the extra distance to reveal how this content is performing, and can be further improved.

Clearly, this is a huge update for Instagram, and one that should hopefully lead to improved results for its business users. With this, the company is particularly focused on helping its smaller business customers, and encouraging them to start paying for ad content on the platform. Jim Squires, Director of market operations at Instagram stated that the tool will be an “easy way” for small businesses and those new to the app “to start advertising on the platform”. Taking this into account then, might the new dashboard really be a way to generate more revenue from brands? By launching these tools, the app will certainly show businesses not already using it for advertising, that paid campaigns are available, and how to go about setting these up.

Will you be making use of Instagram’s latest business features when they become available? Do you think they will benefit small and large businesses alike? We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on the platform, so please tweet to us @PracticeDigital and share your comments on our Facebook page.