Thunderbolt Digital are a professional digital agency with years of expertise in online marketing Surrey, SEO services, web design, and more! As an agency that undertakes a lot of social media management, we know how vitally important it is to keep on top of the latest news and updates to these sites, such as when they appear to be testing new features ready for potential integration.
It seems that Instagram is continuing to adopt Facebook’s advertising strategy after its acquisition by the social media giant, and following on from a focus on video, Instagram now appears to be testing business profiles, which are akin to Facebook’s brand pages. This addition only seems natural, due to the large amount of businesses using various social media platforms to try and promote themselves as well as the fact that most of Facebook’s top 100 advertisers also make use of Instagram!
The new business pages sport an important new call to action button named ‘contact’ which, when pressed, brings up a drop-down menu allowing the user to either contact the company directly or get directions to the place of business.
Currently, some Instagram profiles include a contact email address for customers to use but these can be easily flooded by spam, and are not something that many want to gamble with, which makes the new contact feature a much better solution for businesses who want to keep channels of communication open.
It also seems that business accounts will be able to assign themselves into various categories (the test account having chosen ‘health/wellness’) which can help separate businesses from regular accounts, and help consumers find what they’re looking for and avoid what they aren’t interested in. This new feature should also help with targeting various audiences and associated advertising.
Considering how Instagram has been changing since its acquisition, we think it’s safe to say that we can look to Facebook in order to see what Instagram may eventually end up adopting in future. As of yet, all we know for sure is that Instagram are developing a number of new tools for users this year, including some to specifically help business on the platform;
we know that businesses who post pictures of their products (such as florists, bakeries, make up brands etc) would quite like to see the option to ‘buy’ directly in app, but as this feature never really took of on Facebook, we may be waiting a while to see it come to fruition, if at all.