Social Media is the best source of marketing. One of the hard things about it (and one of the reasons it will be around for a long time) is that it is always changing and making updates. Instagram has been making some neat changes lately.
- Galleries- Instagram will now allow someone to upload galleries of different pictures. There has been some great utilization of this already by different brands. One of which was the NFL who honored DeMarcus Ware’s retirement by showing all the quarterbacks he sacked in his career, with icons on several different screens of the gallery. One of the questions will be is how is user engagement in the galleries compared to posting mulitple pictures or s grid layout.
- Heart-ing Comments- I am super thankful for this one! This makes interacting with the community much faster. For a while, Instagram did not have the equivalent of the like button for comments, which meant writing a comment to thank people for interacting.
- Story update: Font color- If you press on the color bar when selecting colors for your fonts, it will bring up a color picking screen. This is great if your company has brand colors that are super important to its marketing.
- Story update: Sticker Change- Most people don’t know that if you tap on a sticker you change it to another variation of the same principle. This works really well in the weather and location stickers.
- Story update: Live Live has recently rolled out to all users. Live on Instagram differs from live on Facebook in one key way: Instagram live is there and then it is gone. So if you are going to use live, be sure to have some lead up content to build an audience!
- Saved Things- Now you can save things from your feed to a special saved item menu. This is great for saving inspiration. I use to save good examples of graphic design so I can have a central deposit for inspiration.Â
- Links in Stories: This is only for verified accounts right now but it allows for call to actions within a story with swipe up. I hope we get these soon!
