07 May Ignite Your Week: Instagram Updates
On this edition of Ignite Your Week, we discuss some recent Instagram updates: Story highlights and shoppable ad units.
Instagram Story Highlights
Instagram recently announced Story Highlights. You have probably started seeing these on your friend’s profiles or on brand pages that you follow. The update allows you to create favorite stories to leave up on your page and enables people to click on different stories to get more info about your business. To create a highlight album from your profile, tap on the + sign in the Story Highlights section. When you go to add a new highlight, an archived list of your past Instagram stories appears. Select the post you want and tap ‘Next’. You will then name you album and choose your cover image.
Instagram Story Highlights are a great opportunity to strategically place what you want your audience to engage with. For retail, that may be new arrivals or sale items. For a CPG brand in the food industry, this could how-to recipes, linking back to your site.
Shoppable Ad Units
Another long-awaited update from Instagram is shoppable ad units. Instagram is testing a version of Facebook’s shoppable Collection ads in their feed. These units are currently only available to a limited number of advertisers, but will likely be rolled out to more brands soon.
Users can tap on the photos to open a product catalog. From that catalog, people will then be able to click on a product to see it on the brand’s site. This is another way that Instagram is attempting to show ROI on ad dollars spent on the platform.
Since our update, Instagram has also expanded shopping tags for business to be able to tag products with pricing information.
Keep an eye on our social channels for the next Ignite Your Week video.
