Instagram Officially Introduces New Business Profiles and Ad Tools
It’s official! Instagram introduced its new business profiles last week, which come with a whole new set of tools for businesses to advertise on the social platform.
According to the company’s announcement, Instagram will be introducing a Contact button, access to data insights, and the ability to create ads within the Instagram app. Overall, the company’s hopes to provide brands with a way to help their profiles and posts stand out, and tools to allow them to better understand their prospective customers.
Business Profiles
The new business profiles on Instagram will allow a subset of Instagram users to upgrade their accounts in order to access an expanded set of new features. This includes allowing users to contact the business via phone calls, emails, or text via a contact button on the business profile. Profiles will also feature map and directions to the business, when applicable.
Not everyone will be qualified to have a business account; however, those who already have a Facebook Page for their business will be able to convert their account. This may mean for publishers and self-promoters who primarily use Instagram to gain new followers will not able to confer their profiles or access these new business features. No telling if Instagram will be changing this feature anytime soon. The company says that it will begin testing insights with verified accounts and those with large followings and consider rolling out the new features to a wider community.
New Insights
With new customer insights via Instagram business profiles, businesses will be able to track which posts are performing well, and other details about the users’ demographics. This will include data on things such as top posts, reach, impressions, engagement around posts, as well as data on users, including gender, and location.
The Insights experience is a mobile-first feature, which means bigger businesses will have to access insights on the go, and smaller businesses will use this as their primary way of tracking Instagram performance.
Mobile Ad Creation
Lastly, businesses will have the opportunity to create mobile ads via the Instagram app. Users can convert well-performing posts into ads with a few taps, and the app will offer suggestions based on audience and budget.
The feature comes with its trade-offs, however; since this feature is meant for users to quickly create and convert posts with a few taps of a button, the tools are not as robust as Facebook’s advertising tools for creating Instagram ads: Ads Manager & Power Editor.
For example, Facebook’s custom audience feature that allows businesses to upload email lists for targeting purposes, landing page pixel, and reporting abilities will not be available with Instagram’s new ad tool. The tool is meant to provide a quick, simple way to create ads on the go. That said, because of Instagram’s ties to Facebook, businesses have the opportunity to define and save custom audiences based on Facebook users’ profiles since the data is pulled form both Instagram and Facebook.
In the future, we can probably expect Instagram’s advertising tools to look very similar to Facebook’s, with the inclusion of several ad campaign options based on objective. Overall, the company hopes to close the loop when it comes to ad performance and ROI. As Instagram mentions:
“We would love to get to a place where we partner with [businesses] to try and track the traffic… a place in the future where we know someone has actually visited the store,” says Quarles.
Instagram Business Profiles will be rolling out in the United States, Australia and New Zealand in the coming months.