NEW Instagram Tools for Business

January 5, 2020

Published by

jasonhunterdesign

In December, Instagram made several new additions to its platform with businesses in mind. The launch is part of efforts to grow its business toolkit as Instagram increasingly becomes the leading platform for advertising online.

"Millions of businesses big and small, use Instagram to connect with people, build lasting relationships and grow their communities. As connections grow, so does the need for a broader set of professional tools. With this in mind, we’ve recently launched new features to help businesses better understand their community and better-control their presence on Instagram," announced Instagram.

The updates are focused on measuring the effectiveness of your posts and controlling who has access to your account. Updates also allow improved control of your inbox and communications.

New Insights

New growth insights improve users' ability to monitor the effectiveness of their accounts. Primarily, you can now see which posts and stories generate the most followers. This data can help businesses and advertisers make better decisions on the type of content that attracts new audiences.

This update also improves the level and frequency of data about your users' activity. You can now access and monitor these changes by day or week. Users will be able to, therefore, make immediate accommodations to respond to a campaign's effectiveness.

Instagram allows for three primary insights: interactions, discovery, and insights. Businesses must be monitoring this data or their campaigns may be a waste of their time.

Stories

Now stories that mention you within the past 24 hours are aggregated for review on the Activity tab. This feature will only appear under certain circumstances. For example:

"The Stories About You feature is only available to Instagram users with a Business Account or Creator Account. Eligible accounts will only see Stories About You if they were mentioned in a story at least once in the past 24 hours," says Instagram.

The update makes interacting with story mentions far more convenient. Previously, users needed to respond and interact via the message inbox. Now mentions are displayed as a reel, allowing users to easily respond and share.

Age Gating

Now users can control who see their accounts by limiting ages. Users can seta global minimum age, or more specifically, restrict ages by country of origin. This new feature can be accessed in the Instagram settings panel.

Users with questionable or controversial content may choose to restrict access to their accounts. The new age gating feature is a preliminary to far stricter Instagram feature restrictions in the future.

Flexible Profile Displays

"Share the profile information that works best for your business. With this feature, you have the option to hide contact information and the business-category label on your profile," according to Instagram.

Businesses can now make their profiles far more cleaner and sleeker with fewer options in their profile. You can now choose to hide or display your business category. This update is likely a huge relief to businesses who felt the required category description was redundant and potentially confusing.

Contact Cote Media

Looking for help managing your accounts? We can manage them for you or we can teach you how to manage them using these and other best practices. Contact us today and learn more about our services on our shop page.