Traditional media is losing its significance within the market as digital marketing and online activities continue to grow in popularity. Social media encourages connectivity and creativity and with that brings more opportunities for businesses. Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms around with its extensive visual nature, it allows everyone from big brands to small businesses promote engaging content to attract new customers and engage with their existing customers. Instagram now hosts 25 million business profiles; with 2 million of them being active advertisers as well having 1 billion active individual users.
As we all know, social media platforms continuously change and alter their platforms to ensure users have the best experience whilst businesses can gain more from the platform. It will be to no surprise that they’ve recently changed their platform to help e-commerce businesses boost their revenues and grow their customer base. Their latest changes to the platform allow businesses to add new shopping options to their content posts which are designed to help boost their potential revenue and drive sales without taking the customer away from the Instagram app.
So what’s new?
First of all, Instagram is now expanding their experiment and use of shopping tags within Instagram stories. Back in June, Instagram made this change to their platform where they added shopping tags to their stories but these were limited to a specific group of business profiles. This has now changed! The shopping tags will become available to more than 46 countries which is a huge difference to their original testing allocation. Product tagging is a great way of ensuring the customer’s sales journey is simple as they can very easily and quickly, find out more information about a specific product including price and are able to make the purchase there and then.
Previously, businesses could use website links within their stories whilst creating engaging and creative content to keep their audience engaged with their brand but when they inserted a link to their website, clicking the link would take users out of the Instagram app. Losing the customers attention could potentially lose the sale. But this is no longer the case! Businesses are now able to add shopping links to their stores which is not only a free service but allows users to directly buy an item without leaving the Instagram app.
In addition to this change, Instagram is also introducing a dedicated shopping channel within its original newsfeed. This will allow users to explore more of the interests they want to view/shop and explore more. The channel will include posts of the brands you follow and like to ensure you’re viewing items that you want to see and not be spammed with irrelevant content.
Why now?
Instagram have witnessed the huge rise in popularity of their stories and how they’re more and more frequently being used by not only individual users but businesses too. Facebook have seen this as their future and have focused on this as their next project. It may seem a bit far-fetched that Instagram has dedicated a channel to shopping only but it is has been reported that 90 million accounts are posting ‘tap to reveal tags’ in their shopping posts on the platform per month. This demonstrates the popularity of this channel and how effectively it is working so they want to take this further.
Instagram wants to make the platform the best place to shop for your favourite brands and the place to go to find inspiration. This is only the beginning for Instagram… it is reported that there will be even more changes made to the Instagram platform which will make it more competitive in the marketing world as they battle against other platforms such as YouTube and Snapchat for example.
Why is this good news for businesses?
With the recent changes and never-ending growth of the platform, it is wise for businesses to invest their time, effort and money into using the platform to grow their business, reach a wider audience and boost sales. No matter what industry your business is in, your social media presence is essential and portrays an overview of your brand for customers and potential customers. The growth of your audience is an important factor for any business and is always one that you want to see an increase month on month. As an e-commerce business, this opens up a great, new opportunity to boost sales, grow your customer base and introduce another sales channel to your business.
However, your online presence isn’t something that will develop overnight – it takes time, effort and needs to be managed carefully on a regular basis for consistency and to ensure the business is getting the best ROI possible.
Do you require assistance with your Social Media Marketing? For more information and advice, contact our friendly, knowledgeable and professional Social Media team today! Call us on the phone number 01754 252 152, fill out our online form submission or visit our Social Media Management page on our website!
