Instagram is a highly useful marketing tool for businesses, emphasised when you consider that 90% of Instagram users follow at least one business.
Ads created by businesses could reach an audience of 1.4 billion users, which is why so many businesses choose to capitalise on the vast reach of Instagram.
There are also a range of features of Instagram that are useful for businesses. However, if you’re new to using Instagram as a business, you might be forgetting some.
Below are 5 features of Instagram that your business might be forgetting.
1. Multiple stories and stickers
2. Instagram shops
3. Carousels
4. Interactive bios
5. Collaborations
1. Multiple Stories & Stickers
Firstly, there is the Instagram Story and Stickers feature. Stories are short content that last for a period of 24 hours before they disappear from your profile.
If you’re new to using Instagram as a business, you might be adding a few stories to your profile inconsistently in the same way that you would for your personal Instagram profile.
That said, Instagram stories and stickers are one the most interactive features on Instagram, with 500 million people using Instagram stories every day.
Bearing this in mind, using the Instagram story feature to post multiple stories at a time and on a consistent basis gives you the opportunity to capitalise on engagement.
When it comes to using this feature, you can add multiple stories at once allowing you to get more information out there as well as add engaging stickers.
There are multiple stickers available. For instance, Questions and Poll stickers allow you to educate your audience as well as collect information on them. Location stickers create a tappable link to the location of your business to generate more traffic and interactions.
2. Instagram Shops
Following the pandemic in 2020, Meta launched the feature Instagram Shops, which happens to be another feature you might not yet be using as a business.
This feature allows customers to shop around and buy products without the need to visit a physical store, hence why it became so popular during the lockdowns when no one could shop in person.
To put into context just how popular Instagram Shops is as a feature, 130 million people tap on an Instagram shopping post every single month.
What makes Instagram Shops such a convenient feature is that they’re accessible from a business’ Instagram profile, allowing customers to browse, explore, and purchase products all in one place.
In addition to this, customers can follow a link to a product that they’ve viewed on your feed, and buy it from your Instagram shop without leaving the app.
It couldn’t be easier and is mutually beneficial for both the customer and your business.
3. Carousels
Another important feature on Instagram that your business might have forgotten is Carousels.
Carousels are highly popular amongst users for both personal and business accounts alike on Instagram. In fact, they are one of the most engaging formats brands can use on app, as people are often tempted to swipe through the content out of curiosity.
Carousels are great for businesses, as it allows you to showcase a variety of products in one go, meaning customers can scroll through multiple slides with ease.
In addition to this, businesses can use image carousels to create engaging and interactive content, as well as post multiple images that tell a story that inform their audience about their brand.
Creating carousel can seem like more work when compared to creating single image posts, but there are a lot of Instagram tools that offer templates and editors that make it a piece of cake.
4. Interactive Bios
Many businesses forget about the Interactive Bio feature, but it’s an important feature to take advantage of.
This comes down to the fact that your bio for your business is one of the first things that new customers are going to see when they first click on your Instagram profile, so it’s important to make it engaging.
A bio needs to contain important information regardless of whether you make it interactive or not. However, an interactive bio is both informative and functional, allowing you to get the most out of your bio.
Adding clickable links, hashtags, Instagram accounts, as well as emojis can help to make a bio both more eye-catching and can help to drive the traffic from your Instagram page to your site.
5. Collaborations
The last feature your business might be forgetting is Collaborations. Collaborations allow more than one Instagram account to co-create content.
As a result, the collab Instagram post or reel will be available on both users’ profiles and will also have the same number of likes and comments.
This can be a useful feature to use if you’re a business, as it exposes your business to a larger audience.
That said, for collaborations to work in the best way possible, the content created needs to be in line with both of the collaborator’s Instagram profiles and not too much of a departure from what they’d normally post.
Provided that this is the case and with more people becoming aware of your business, collaborations can be a highly effective way of receiving exposure and potentially bringing in more customers.
Hopefully this article has given you a better understanding of the 5 features of Instagram that your business might be forgetting. Also read: How eCommerce video marketing agency can help your business to grow on Instagram with their Instagram growth services.