Instagram is one of the most popular social media channels. The number of users recently passed the 800 million mark. People love pictures, so it makes sense that we love a platform focused on sharing photos quickly and easily. Instagram’s latest change is to their popular Stories feature. Initially, this feature was created to allow users to share a series of photos of their day apart from their mainstream posts so it wasn’t overwhelming.
With this newest change, the stories feature is less instant. You can now add content that is more than 24 hours old. That means you can do more planning and editing when creating stories. The photo-sharing platform also recently added a tool to share stories with Facebook automatically, greatly increasing the reach and power of shared stories.
People also love stories, so photo-based stories are an obvious winner. Specifically, stories and photos are powerful marketing tactics that promote engagement with your audience. With this kind of reach and flexibility, it’s hard to think of a reason not to use Instagram to boost your marketing. The stories feature is an excellent way to show how a product is created, share a day-in-the-life story about your company or explain how to use a product.
Yes, Instagram is making a lot of changes lately. That might raise some eyebrows. It should definitely get us all thinking. Life is change. Your audience changes. Therefore, your product and your marketing need to change too. Instagram is not only staying ahead of the curve, they are showing what it means to be deeply engaged with your market. They are responding to and anticipating their market’s needs in a way that should inspire all of us.
The old adage ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ applies to many things – but not to marketing. If you wait until it’s broken to fix it, you’ve lost a lot of sales. Instagram picked up 100 million new users in less than a year. They seem to be listening to what people want. Listening and responding work.
With sales, you can’t tread water. While you might be satisfied with your current volume of sales if you don’t keep up to date with what people from your brand, your sales will drop. That means paying close attention not only to what they want in terms of products and services, but also to how they want to learn about your brand.
By Irene Hislop
By Jeff Sheridan
By Matrix Internet