Tag: instagram

Instagram Presents New Ad Opportunities With Revamped Search Page

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Wired

Instagram has been making strides in making its platform more brand-friendly, and earlier this week, the photo-sharing social media debuted two new features that would offer brands more ad opportunities.

Firstly, Instagram updated its search bar to include trending locations, based on the geo-tags of the trending pictures. This could easily be utilized by hospitality marketers to serve interested users with location-specific native ads.

Moreover, it also debuts a revamped Explore channel that includes Trending Tags, which organizes and presents content channels based on popular hashtags in real time. Although Instagram has yet to reveal whether brands could buy a “promoted tag” or not at the moment, history seems to suggest that it will become open to brands sooner or later.

On Trend: Social Commerce Heats Up Again With “Buy Buttons”

Posted on by Lab Team

It all started last summer with Facebook testing “buy buttons” in newsfeed ads, which Twitter quickly followed by rolling out its own “buy now buttons” in September. Neither really gained much traction in the following months, and the race towards social commerce dominance seemed to cool down a bit—until last month. During May, Mondelez International, Google Search, and YouTube all announced their plans to insert their own version of “buy buttons” into their respective digital ad products.

Flash forward to today, both Pinterest and Instagram are making a big push into social ecommerce. Just one day after Amazon “ripped off” its visual layout for its new product curation page Stream, Pinterest has fought right back with “Buyable Pins”. Partnered with Shopify and Stripe, Pinterest will soon let its app users to browse products and make purchases with a few clicks. Not to be outdone, Instagram is also beefing up its ad tools with the addition of “Shop Now” buttons, along with buttons for app installs and sign-ups. Instagram’s API for ad campaign management is also updated to add “interest and demographic targeting” to make it more appealing to marketers and brands alike.

We have long expected social networks like Instagram and Pinterest to enter the commerce market directly, instead of just driving traffic to retailers’ websites. Now that Facebook seems finally ready to scale up the ad offerings on Instagram, as does Google on its search platform and YouTube, brands need to figure out the platform(s) that best suits their needs among an increasing number of viable platforms. Brands should also start developing strategies for social ecommerce in order to translate the convenience of “buy buttons” and the network effect on social platforms into actual sales. And although it’s in its early stages, social commerce will be an important aspect of attribution, finally allowing brands understand how their marketing converts to sales.

Why Instagram Launched Its First Official Content Vertical

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: The Verge

Taking a page out of Snapchat’s playbook, Instagram just made its first step to transition from a photo-sharing social media to a media content platform with the launch of its first-ever official content vertical @music. The account will update six times per week, sharing photos, lyrics, and videos to showcase some of the up-and-coming and popular artists to Instagram’s over 300,000 users. As of now, the account has already gained over 46,600 followers. We expect similar vertical content channels to appear if this experiment turns out successful.

It’s A Match: Tinder Integrates with Instagram

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on TechCrunch

Tinder’s latest update allows users to uncover more information about their potential matches by showing all Facebook interests rather than just common ones, shared connections, and most importantly, it deep-links Instagram. The Instagram integration is most significant as users already include their Instagram usernames on their profiles to provide an additional window into their lives. As reported in TechCrunch, cofounder and President, Sean Rad, noted “If we can provide our users with more relevant information for each connection, we can take them halfway  there in terms of getting the conversation going”. The app has continuous plans to suggest ideal matches and take conversation starting to the next level.

Instagram Debuts Crucial New Features for Brands

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: AdWeek

After using Instagram as a digital billboard for years, brands on Instagram can now finally drive traffic to webpages of their choice via the new “Learn More” button unveiled yesterday, along with a new “Carousel Ad” feature that enables better storytelling through multi-image sliding.  These crucial new ad features signal a maturing Instagram, slowly growing into a more brand-friendly platform.

Instagram Is Now Bigger Than Twitter

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: TechCrunch

Instagram is now claiming over 300 million monthly active users, surpassing Twitter’s reported 284 million active users as of six weeks ago. Also impressive is its rapid growth rate, as the news came just nine month after Instagram hit 200 million users earlier this year. As marketers always follow where the audience goes, it looks like Instagram will be moving up on the priority list.

Instagram Wants Brands To Know Its Ads Work

Posted on by Lab Team

Instagram is trying to prove itself as a legitimate ad platform by announcing three new marketing tools for brands: two analytic tools named Account Insights and Ad Insights, along with a collaboration platform dubbed Ad Staging. All three features are expected to roll out “over the coming weeks and months”. At the moment, advertising on Instagram is still quite limited in scale, but Facebook, which owns Instagram, clearly has big plans for the platform previously known for its filters and selfies.

Instagram Testing Its Snapchat-like App Bolt In 3 Intenrational Markets

Posted on by Lab Team

No longer satisfied with merely being a photo-sharing social network with pretty filters, Instagram is moving in on the ephemeral messaging territory currently dominated by Snapchat. Selecting Singapore, New Zealand and South Africa as the three initial test markets, Instagram is looking to work out the kinks before pushing for a domestic launch in the States.

For now, Bolt seems to lack a unique feature that would set it apart from the myriad of other “speed-first” messaging apps currently on the market. Even Facebook, who owns Instagram, already have a similar messaging app Slingshot, whose fate now looks troubling with Bolt entering the picture. Still, given that messaging apps are the new leading force of social platforms, it makes sense for Instagram to at least take a bolted shot at this for Facebook.

Insta Bolt

Mercedes Recruits Instagram Influencers To Target Millennials

Posted on by Lab Team

Starting last month, Mercedes-Benz has been seeding their ad content to various recruited “Instagram influencers” to market the car on their respective feeds. This effort is part of the #GLApacked campaign for its GLA sports utility vehicle scheduled to launch later this fall. In addition, a GLA cross-country excursion is also being documented on Instagram as native ad content. Since visual storytelling is a really powerful tool for the younger consumer, Instagram seems to be a great fit for this campaign. As brands continue to explore the new and exciting territory of social media marketing, the luxury car company’s move to tap into these influencers’ following is no doubt instrumental. How many impressions would actually turn into purchase though, would a lot harder to measure, and that’s what we marketers need to figure out.

Gen Z Week: Vogue Tests Instagram Commerce

Posted on by Lab Team

We have continued to see the purchase funnel being squeezed at both ends as companies strive to satisfy consumers’ need for instant gratification. Content and commerce used to be different, but now we are starting to see the two come together as is the case with Vogue’s recent entry into Instagram commerce.

Utilizing rewardStyle’s adtech tools, Vogue users can effectively “add to cart” by liking product photos on the Vogue’s account. It’s a great affiliate marketing program as Vogue can leverage their influence to drive purchases on behalf of their retail partners, receiving as much as 20% commission rate on sales.  According to rewardStyle, the new offering has generated 1.5 million emails per day across it’s 100,000 account which include Vogue.

Why It Matters For Gen Z

Only 23% of teens now see Facebook as the most important social network, down from 33% six months ago, and 42% from last year. And though status updates are on the wane, teens are gravitating to a more visual web, sharing photos and images to Instagram and Pinterest. To Gen Z, photos represent an authentic visual cue to illustrate a more real version of life. More importantly, they don’t like to be sold to directly so leveraging an affiliate like Vogue lends credibility to retailers. While Instagram has yet to prove its value for brands, testing the waters is critical to engage a generation that is not married to any one platform or service.