Is Instagram the new king of sales?

20th September 2018

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll definitely have heard of a little app called Instagram. Allowing users to share images and interact with those posted by their friends and celebrities, the platform has become one of the best ways for individuals and brands to create a following online.

Recently integrating e-commerce into their app, Instagram now promises to make it even easier for businesses to sell their products.

What Instagram can do for your business:

It’s no overstatement to suggest that from a businesses social perspective, Instagram should be thought of as your brand’s best friend! Indeed, with over 1 billion active users, the platform is thriving with people who could well have an interest in your products.

In order to convert these people into customers, you’ll first need to convert them into ‘followers’ who will see everything that you share on Instagram. To do this, you’ll need to create an Instagram feed that your target audience wants to see and engage with.

This can be done by sharing well thought-out, high quality, interesting and original content that these people will naturally engage with, in the form of comments and likes.

But what if after this hard work you still find that followers aren’t converting into customers? Then it is time to utilise some of Instagram’s interactive shopping features.

Using Instagram’s features to sell your products

Perhaps the best way to sell products on Instagram is via the new ‘story shopping’ feature. Instagram stories have taken the social media world by storm and have over 400 million daily users, knocking snapchat (who offer a similar 24-hour sharing feature) off the radar, dropping to less than 200 million daily users.

Instagram stories had previously only allowed users to link through to their website with the ‘swipe up’ feature. As of this week, you can now tag products in stories directly from your Facebook catalogue!

This feature has been available on Instagram posts for a while now, and after proving popular with over 90 million people tapping the shopping tags already, the feature has been implemented on the stories, too.

The feature allows accounts to tag products from their Facebook store in the stories for followers to then click through to the brands website and shop the products directly. By bringing shopping to stories, brands are naturally able to extend their reach. According to Instagram, one third of the most viewed stories are created by businesses, which is why this tool will be vital for a thriving Instagram campaign.

Instagram TV and paid advertising

Another one of Instagram’s more recent features, Instagram TV, hasn’t been given the shopping feature as of yet. The team at Instagram have also announced that they don’t plan to add this feature any time soon.

The company launched the long form video app back in June 2018 to allow users to upload video content that’s up to an hour long. This content could then be pinned to the ‘highlights’ section on a user’s personal page.

The feature may well be stepping on the toes of YouTube, but as we’ve seen with the stories feature, Instagram isn’t afraid of challenging their rivals.

In addition to these built in shopping features, Instagram allows paid advertising. The posts are integrated into the users experience either on their home page or in the stories section. This advertising technique allows your business to select an audience with already similar interests, therefore making your ads subtle and less pushy.

To recap, Instagram helps to makes your business more shoppable through:

• Instagram shopping
• Stories
• Posts
• Swipe Up
• Paid adverts

Clearly, Instagram is ahead of the game when it comes to getting your products in front of your target audience.

To help you get the most out of this opportunity, our social media experts at our digital marketing agency will be happy to manage your accounts, to increase your conversions and sales on Instagram. Call us on 01603 859007.