Maisie Lloyd
I'm passionate about recording the world, but most of all driven by creativity and collaborative environments. My experience revolves around the production of digital content, pertaining to graphic design, writing copy, and video and audio content.
Harnessing the features of Instagram is essential when creating a well-rounded business presence. In this article, we explore all the features you can use to enhance the quality of your business’s social presence.
Link in Bio & Link trees
Including a link within your bio is a great way to provide upfront access to your website or affiliate websites. Displaying a link or using a link tree can help your audience reach the product or service with ease, making it simpler for creators and brands to promote consistently across platforms.
Link trees make it possible for creators and brands to display all their relevant links in one place. Audiences have easy access to the pages they want in just as little as two clicks.
Connect your store
Both Instagram and Facebook allow businesses to connect their stores to the platforms, tag products, connect ads to the store, and have direct access to the store via the business’s profile. Businesses must make use of connecting their store to Metas platforms, so their customer’s journey to the products or services is simplified.
Connecting your store offers so many benefits to your social media marketing. Keeping your social media marketing campaigns cohesive across all platforms is likely to optimise the potential audiences and customers seeing and connecting with the brand. This creates opportunity where otherwise there would not be.
Instagram offers great insight into how to set up your shop.
Reels
Reels offer up to 90 seconds per video, ideal for short-form content surrounding campaigns, ads, and recycled content. On public accounts, reels have a large reach that encompasses non-followers of the brand too.
Creators can produce videos to trending audio, this feature is especially practical for brands when producing relevant and engaging content. Remixing allows creators to produce reactive content, displaying as a split screen. Creating content that is responsive to events or trends is made simple, duetting the content will also enable the brand/creators to reach the other creators’ audiences.
Live streams
Live streaming is a fantastic way to reach newer audiences and can even be done in collaboration with other accounts to connect different audiences. Additionally, live streaming offers audiences real-time insight into how a brand chooses to present itself, showing personality can be represented authentically and naturally with the use of going live.
Livestreaming also gives audiences the capability to respond to content in real-time, giving clear insight into their engagement and responsiveness. Being able to see feedback from customers as it is happening will allow brands to tailor content to the audience’s wants and needs.
Collaborative posts
Though the feature is not yet available on desktops, those controlling their accounts from mobile apps will find they can create collaborative posts. Collaborative posts are displayed across any accounts that have collaborated.
To enable this post feature, you will need to navigate to the ‘tag people’ section and then locate the ‘invite collaborator’ button.
Collaborating allows brands to share audiences, leading to greater exposure and brand awareness. Collaborate enables brands to explore topics that may not be relevant through just the perspective of their stand-alone brand. Brands displaying, they have built a rapport with other brands and creators demonstrate the connective power of the collaborate feature.
Instagram stories
Stories give insight into the daily on-goings of brands or creators as it is happening, making it one of the most useful features of the app. The live updates can be especially great when trying to bring personality to a brand’s reputation.
Public story threads also known as ‘add yours’ stickers are small stickers that can be added to a story to publish it to a public story. The feature allows brands to hop onto trends, showing real-time responsiveness to the current internet cultures adopted by many users on Instagram. The feature works like a chain, and as such, enables non-following users to access and respond to the content.
Stories also offer a brilliant feature which allows creators to retrospectively mention other users after the story has already gone live. This can be done by clicking on the three dots, locating ‘more’ and then selecting ‘add mention’. This feature is especially handy when accidentally forgetting to tag other users.
We’d love to know, do you use Instagram or any of these features already? Feel free to contact us if you’re looking to expand your business’s social media presence or are interested in growing your brand’s online presence.
