Yesterday Instagram officially announced their plans to offer business’ more features to help them make the most from the platform. Soon business’ will be able to upgrade their accounts to business profiles, granting them access to new tools in the process.
Instagram Business Profiles
Those that also have a corresponding Facebook page will be able to upgrade to a Business profile. Doing this enables you to specify your preferred method for potential customers and clients to contact you from a call, an e-mail and text via single tap of a new “contact button”. More information can also be entered, such as the physical address which will the allow users to find directions.
Instagram Insights
Instagram Insights are the platform’s answer to Facebook Insights, reporting very similar data. The Insights are split into two main platforms being follower demographics and post analytics.
Follower Demographics reveals all sorts of data about your followers such as their age, gender and location (which is available by country or by city). You can also track the amount of followers you have gained by the day or hour.
Image Credit: Coming Soon: New Instagram Business Tools
Post Analytics is very similar to what Facebook provides for its pages, providing the number of impressions, the amount of individual users reached, the amount of website clicks and other interactions. In order to quickly help the account owner visualise what is working, the posts are laid out in a grid format, with the number of impressions achieved overlaid.
In-App Promotion
This will be Instagram’s answer to the quick method of Facebook’s “Boost Post” option, which quickly allows you to reach more users without having to go through the more in-depth advertising options. While being able to promote a post in the App with just a few taps will be appealing to many, we’d recommend continuing to create your campaigns via the more robust campaign editor available in Facebook for the time being.
We’re looking forward to the release of these features, we suspect that over time these features will be available to all accounts (most likely beginning with highly followed, verified accounts) and will continue to be developed as Instagram looks to make its platform even more commercially appealing.
