The picture-sharing social media platform has gone through another change this week– one that has been much more well-received than their last change.
This move is meant to cater towards brands in industries such as fashion, food, cars and other consumer goods. Businesses can then view how many times their posts are shown to their audience as a way to keep track of conversions. Just like Facebook’s Insights tool, Instagram’s business profiles now allow businesses to assess and parcel out their followers by demographics, age, gender and other categories to help better market their services or products to target audiences.
What makes this change so necessary and welcomed by the business community is that prior to the update, no brands were able to measure how many people even saw their post. Just as it’s important to time a Facebook post or Tweet a message at a certain time to capture the majority of your audience, companies spent too much time trying to figure out when their users were checking their feeds on Instagram.
This is all changing now for brands as the social app begins to introduce tools that mirror those of Insights and Twitter’s Analytics. Brands are now able to see number of impressions and see which photos or videos that gathered the most impressions. One unique trait Instagram’s new tool offers that no other social media sight provides is the ability to show companies the number of accounts that the post was displayed to.
We can expect to see an improved interest in brands wanting to display their products on Instagram in the coming months. However, in order to have access to this data, your Instagram account will need to be submitted to a business-specific profile. Be patient though, as we can’t expect to see these changes roll out globally until at least by the end of the year.