Listen:
If you’re invested in social media marketing for your business-and I sure hope you are-you know just how quickly things change. It seems that every week there is a new feature or trend emerging.
Here are 4 Instagram Trends You Need to Know Now:
- If you’re trying to reach a younger crowd, be aware that younger users want to see the real person so think photos that are real, flawed, and authentic. They’re even using apps to make their photos look like they were taken on a 90’s era film camera. Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean your photos can be of poor quality, they just don’t have to be overly perfect.
- A story was leaked last week that Instagram is rumored to be playing around with the idea of hiding newsfeed post likes. The account owner will be able to see the number of likes that a post receives, but users will not. The rumored idea is to put more focus on authenticity and less focus on a popularity contest.
- If you’re on Instagram, you absolutely must use Stories. If you’re relying on Newsfeed posts alone, you’re missing out on reaching a lot of people. People are more interested in scrolling through Stories these days. Studies have shown that Stories are growing 15x faster than Newsfeed posts. That’s a good thing for businesses since Instagram’s algorithms make it challenging for your Newsfeed posts to be seen by all of your followers.
- Speaking of stories, our last tip is about a new Stories sticker feature that Instagram released just last week. We already know people love to watch Stories, but they also like to interact with them. Because of this Instagram is constantly updating ways people can do just that. Last week Instagram introduced a quiz sticker. This is a fun way to see how much people know about your or your business. If the user selects the correct answer, they are shown confetti on their screen. Account owners can see who chose an answer and what answer they chose. You may even want to use that as an opportunity to reward followers who got the answer right with a coupon or other reward. The possibilities are endless. Update: Within a couple of hours of writing this post and recording the audio version for our Alexa Small Business Digital Marketing Flash Briefing, Instagram announced the release of another new sticker that allows users to collect donations for non-profits in their Stories.
The biggest takeaway is that people want less perfection and more real-life posts. So, post on Stories and aim to share authentic content instead of overproduced content. And finally, give them something to interact with and then reward them for doing so.
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