Instagram announced this week that they will be releasing a suite of tools to help businesses get the most out of Instagram.
Featuring better ways for users to get in touch with the business, insights and tools to promote themselves, these tools will be available in the US, Australia and New Zealand over the coming months (with the rest of the world to see them by the end of the year).
So what’s new?
Contact Button
Previously the only way you could add some kind of contact details to your Instagram post was to put your email address or phone number in your bio, and users would have to copy and paste it in order to reach out. Maybe you’d put a link to your website in there too, but that would be the only clickable thing on your profile.
With these new business profiles, you can now add a contact button to your profile to make it easier for customers to get in touch. You can choose what you’d like the contact button to do, whether it’s call, text or email, and give them directions if you have a physical location.
Insights
Having some kind of analytics is something that Instagram users have been crying out for for as long as businesses have started to use it. While there have always been third party apps out there that can track your account, trying to get any kind of data beyond the recent posts, number of followers etc isn’t always accurate (trust us, we’ve tried!).
That’s why the feature that people are most excited about is Instagram’s new Insights tool. Techcrunch have reported that this will include data such as “top posts, reach, impressions and engagement around posts, along with data on followers like their gender, age and location.”
(On a neatly.io related note, we’ll be keeping an eye out to see if this kind of data becomes available on Instagram’s API. As soon as it is, we’ll look to adding it to our dashboards.)
Promote
Currently if you want to promote an ad on Instagram, you have to use Facebook’s Ads Manager, and you can’t promote an existing post. While Ads Manager is available on mobile as a standalone app, the team at Instagram wanted to make it even easier to create ads from within the app itself.
You may not have all the functionality of the Ads Manager available, such as the highly specific customer targeting, but in the same way that you can simply boost a post on your Facebook page, you’ll be able to boost an Instagram post. Maybe a post has had a good response so far from your followers? Boost it out to a wider audience!
As I mentioned before these features are rolling out over the next few months and should be available to everyone by the end of the year, though according to Techcrunch, you might have to have an existing Facebook page in order to be eligible.
While you’re waiting, make sure your Instagram profile is optimized to generate sales – check out LemonStand’s 5 tactics!