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Instagram is a photo app and is recognized as the fastest growing social media. It has more than 500 million users. Unlike other social media, Instagram is bent upon expanding its activities. Below are the Instagram trends for 2017
- Instagram Stories
Launched in August 2016, the Instagram Stories, ask users to share their best photos, which vanishes after 24 hours. It allows you to tag people in updates besides linking to your content, which is beneficial for brands to direct people to their sites. It supports Boomerang.
- Instagram Direct
Instagram updated its Direct last year. It is the messaging part of the photo-sharing app. The number of users has skyrocketed from 80 million to 300 million since then, which indicates a further improvement in Direct. Like Snapchat, the new feature of Instagram enables users to send their disappearing contents to their friends and followers. Once viewed, the content is removed from the inbox.
- Instagram Shopping
Recently, Instagram tied with 20 fashion brands for providing product tags that could be shopped. Tagging of certain items in the photos was allowed. Users could have a seamless shopping experience. They can click a tag for a detail view of the product. The shopper can continue to research the product without leaving the app. For making a purchase, the user can click on a Shop Now Button for reaching the landing page on the business website
- Instagram Business Tools
A recent update has compensated the hitherto lack of analytics. Accounts could now be verified as a business account, with the help of Instagram Business Tools. You can now add contact methods, unlock access to prompted analytics and post and give directions to your business. Through insight on Instagram, you can now uncover details about your followers, such as their demographics and behavior. From the analytics, you can identify the best performing posts and can optimize your posts. Your brands can reach to more people. It can now be linked to algorithm-based feed
- Expanded Video Options
The latest trend is that the video has a bigger role to play in the app. As against the earlier duration of 15 seconds for videos, it has now been increased to 60 seconds. This facilitates brands to try to engage users. Like Youtube, Periscope, and Facebook, Instagram is now testing for live video. Once the initial tests are completed, you can get this feature.
- Increasing Ad Options for brands
Mark Zuckerberg feels that if the advertisement is overly aggressive, it may seem less attractive to the users and thus growth will be restricted. Instagram has a number of options for brands to put their advertisement on the platform.
Instagram is the platform for driving sales through online retailers because of its visual and mobile-first features. Because of the above trends during 2017, Instagram is poised to look more authentic, compared to Facebook or Twitter. Online retailers can use user-generated Content (UGC), and can thus drive sales on their respective websites. The summative trend is that businesses will invest in selling through Instagram, during 2017.
