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Instagram is one of the hottest social media platforms with a whooping user base growing by the day. Instagram has over 1 billion active monthly users, a number too big for any brand or marketer to ignore. Instagram has about 2 million monthly advertisers and 44% of Instagram’s active users use the platform for researching and discovering brands and a good 53% of Instagram users follow their favourite brands on the platform.

Today we look at some of the key features to not miss if you are making your business out of Instagram or even if you just have a brand presence on this influential platform.

Instagram Stories Rule

Instagram Stories have been fast-growing and IG is making it easier to share your stories with more and more people with the option to share all IG Stories to Facebook automatically. Instagram also has many great features to add excitement to your Stories like music to make them interactive, animated stickers and more. The multi-photo Layout collages are also very popular and was a great addition to the platform.

What to do

• Fast and real time story content.
• Updating your Stories daily.
• Cross-promote content to your Facebook Page.
• Use tools in Stories, like fonts, coloring tools, Boomerangs, stickers and more.

IGTV for the win

Although IGTV had a troubled start, a few changes has this feature changing the Instagram platform as a whole, and IGTV continuing to rise in importance as we step into 2020. Instagram has also added an IGTV tab to their Explore page giving users more opportunities to find videos and content creators of interest. The ability to add previews of IGTV videos in user’s regular feed is another boost helping people discover accounts they follow, that are also creating long-form video content. The platform also paved the way for landscape video content, making it even easier to share existing video content your brand has already created.

What to do

• Definitely consider adding IGTV to your Instagram.
• Share existing video content to reach a greater audience.
• Create vertical video content.
• Share IGTV video previews to your feed to reach more viewers

Tweets and memes?

Instagram doesn’t always about having that carefully curated appealing imagery anymore. With several accounts dedicated to memes that have huge followings, brands are also bringing them into their marketing strategy. The trend of sharing screenshots of tweets on IG posts and Stories is going strong this year too and brands can leverage relevant content to their advantage. These can be your own tweets or another user’s tweets, but make note to give the creator credit or you may come under the scanner and you don’t want to, on social media.

What to do

• Create a pattern in your feed for tweets and memes.
• Share thoughts relevant to your industry.
• Bring a casual feel that still sounds like your brand

Interactive content

Interactive content is huge for brands on all channels and so also on Instagram, IG Stories includes features like polls, quizzes, questions and more to give your audience the opportunity to interact directly with you and your content.

What to do

• Create a countdown to a giveaway.
• Add a poll or question sticker.
• Test your audience’s knowledge of your product with a quiz.
• Private Q&A chat with your audience.

Revenue with Instagram shopping

Tap on the popularity of IG with the new shopping features that the platform has introduced, which by itself can almost be an entirely new revenue stream for your business. Stats say that over 130 million users tap to view IG shopping tags on photos by the month. So, if you are an online shop, you should positively get in on it. The features for shopping include the ability to tag products in your posts, tagging products in your Stories, and even checking out and completing entire purchases on the platform.

What to do

• Tag a product anytime in an IG post or Story.
• Enable in-app checkout for easy buying

Authenticity

Instagram was all glamorous and flawless pictures but now it is veering to real life, and what things really look like kind of content especially in stories. Some still stick to photo finished feeds, but more and more users and new age brands are posting photos of real life, behind-the-scenes photos, untouched photos etc. Brands are starting to incorporate this style of authenticity into their own strategies as well.

What to do

• Use untouched photography.
• Share real, behind-the-scenes content
• Try connecting with your audience through your feed
• Carousel post to keep your feed beautiful and also show behind-the-scenes images on swipe.