Instagram is effortlessly trying to improve its functionality and features day by day. And recently they have been giving out new updates and features one after another which each of them Is useful for a specific group of users, and Instagram thinks about all of the users whether they are marketers, businesses or just personal accounts who use Instagram just forfun.
The new Instagram updates have been a great move for the community. Upgrades such as: adding join chat stickers, donation stickers, the emergence of @shop, and also the ability to view IGTV in landscape mode. There are several more new Instagram updates which are predicted to be added soon, by peoples like the reverse engineer Jane Manchun Won, and Matt Navarra. These two people have been the first to spot several unannounced features from Facebook and Instagram in the past before it was officially rolled out by them.
Below, we are going to know about some of the features which are going to be available soon to all Instagrammers and are now just being tested. The first upcoming feature I am going to discuss is how Instagram is making Advertisers able to Boost Organic Posts as Feed Ads.
Instagram Lets Advertisers Boost Organic Posts as Feed Ads
On June 4th, Instagram announced an update on a blog post which informed the brand owners about their new ability to promote organic posts they paid an Influencers to advertise, into Instagram feed as ads. This means the posts will get to a broader range of audience and attract much more engagement since they are not limited to only the Influencer’s followers, and will be seen in the feed and stories of the people who neither follow the brand, nor the influencer.
Take the example of a beauty brand paying Kylie Jenner to promote their lasts product to her followers. The advertiser can later, take another step if he feels the post is doing well, and decide to boost the post as an ad on the Instagram feed.
This surely would be much more beneficial since the posts and the product promotion would be seen by a lot more people rather than just the Influencer’s followers.
How to get the sponsored posts into the Instagram feed?
The influencers who have sponsored a post for a brand from Instagram’s “paid partnership” tool, need to tag the brand in the post and opt into “Allow Business Partner to Promote” from the settings. When the ad creator wants to get the post to Instagram feed, they’ll see some options to choose from as an objective:
- Reach
- Brand Awareness
- Video Views
- Traffic
- Engagement
This way, the branded post will soon find its way to Instagram feed to reach wider audience and to perform even better.
What are the benefits of promoting organic posts as ads?
If you choose to boost your post as an ad, it will have benefits for you, your chosen influencer, and Instagram itself. The branded content ads would improve the influencer marketing campaign massively because it allows businesses only to get their posts to be noticed by people more than the followers of that specific influencer. When the post which is shared by the influencer, would show up on Instagram feed or stories of other accounts, it helps to build up the image of the influencer and the brand awareness of the business.
This partnership between brands and creators would let Instagram make a lot of money in the way they never could before, because when a business used to pay someone to promote their content, Instagram could not even make a penny. But now it has an opportunity to earn something from these sponsored contents.
Instagram is testing to add an “order” sticker
Another upcoming update which was discovered not so long ago is the “order sticker.” This feature, which is being tested was first discovered by Matt Navarra, a social media consultant which has previously spotted and predicted so many of Instagram features. Matt has just saw a new option besides his other story stickers on Instagram which was titled “order” with a dollar sign ($) with it, and he captured a screenshot of the update and posted it to his twitter right away.
Since nothing official is out about this sticker yet, its function is not known, but there are guesses going around about it. Since it came with a dollar sign, it is supposed that the sticker is 100% accompanied with payments. Some have guessed that it might be something like placing orders for an event tickets. Instagram has been paying much attention to its shopping features a lot lately, so another guess is that this sticker is also something related to shopping again.
Anyways, it is still what this sticker actually does and whether it will be rolled out or rejected on its beta mode.
New Instagram story format for Pride Month in June
Instagram has decided to offer something much more special and cool for this year’s Pride month, a new rainbow color ring for Stories which include a Pride-related hashtag. This features was spotted by reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong and was shared on her twitter right after she figured the change out.
Like I mentioned above, this update turns the border circle of the stories which contain a pride-related hashtag, into a colorful one, rather than the usual red and orange color pattern which we all see around our follower’s stories. This is one of the updates Instagram has decided to roll out this June for pride day like last year that features such as a rainbow background in type mode of stories and rainbow version of mentioning, tagging and locations.
Instagram updates for the pride-day might be even more intersecting with more options that nobody still knows about since none of them are officially announced yet.
The benefits of new rainbow color ring for Stories
This update which is going to come soon, would give us some advantages and might be a move towards being able to differentiate the color of our story borders to vary the different type of stories. Now when the pride-day arrives, anybody using the related hashtags of that day on their stories, can be easily identified even without having to open the stories.
This conception can be used to understand what different stories are about. Imagine this being applied to different kinds of subjects for stories. For example, a breaking news kind of story with relevant hashtags would have a blue color border or a sponsored ad would turn pink. This way, it would be much more convenient to watch the content you are interested in, and using stories would be more relevant. We hope such an option would be available on Instagram in future that the pattern or the color of Instagram stories would tell us what they are about even without seeing the story.
Here were the 3 of the upcoming features that would roll out soon. The platform is always trying to keep its users happy by giving out updates for their Instagram accounts. And new features now and then on special occasions and for specific uses. Wonder what the next Instagram features will be? Just keep track of our blogs with the latest updates on Instagram, as always.
