NEW! Instagram Features for E-Comm Businesses!
With Christmas just around the corner, Instagram has released a very exciting new feature for E-Comm businesses and customers on the platform.
When we think of some of Instagram’s biggest feature releases over the past year, none quite compare to the launch of shoppable posts.
With the introduction of shoppable posts, customers have even more opportunities to connect with the brands that they love.
Given the e-commerce and on-platform purchase trends, Instagram is shaping up as a key platform for shoppers. Over the past year, Instagram has made huge efforts to make organic shopping on the platform easier and easier. With just a single click, a user can find information about a product without ever leaving the app, making Instagram the perfect platform to browse, explore and then shop directly from a business.
And now, with around 80% of users following business accounts and over 130 million users tapping away at the shoppable tags per month, Instagram is excited to introduce new experiences.
With this in mind, Instagram has been quietly testing and introducing a new feature that is now available for a small subset of e-commerce businesses on the platform.
Introducing shoppable tags in sponsored posts!
As Instagram shopping behaviour has blossomed organically, Paid Posts with Shoppable Tags is an exciting new feature from an advertising perspective. As businesses can begin to reach their target audience, whilst showcasing products through the shopping format that so many Instagrammers are already familiar with!
Why Should We Care?
From the business side, it allows brands to push content with even more product relevant information direct into customers feeds. How great will it be to start tagging our pretty and well-shot lifestyle images with the actual products they show rather than just mentioning them in the headline or ad copy.
From a consumer’s perspective, we can begin to discover more brands, products, and businesses to connect with.
This is just the first step into experimenting with shopping posts as ads, with Instagram stating that they plan to build and test checkout as part of these ads.
OMDIGI THINKS:
We would love to see a similar implementation on Facebook where products can be tagged in ads and then used in Facebook campaigns natively. At the moment the only way to use tagged products in an ad is to set up an Instant Experience or use an organically tagged post in paid promotion, but then you forego some of the control over customisation of the ad appearance when going this route.
There’s clearly a massive interest in Instagram on-app purchasing, which translates over to Facebook too naturally. The ability to reach users whilst they are active and tapping into their subconscious shopping intent will be of significant interest to so many brands.
We hope that these shoppable tags in paid posts will be readily available before the e-comm Christmas rush, but even if it’s not, it points to a HUGE potential for e-Commerce businesses in the very near future!
