Instagram: Promote Stories & Fresh Analytics

Everyone knows that Instagram (also known as IG) is a photo and video-sharing social networking service owned by Facebook. Many businesses are obsessed with this social network because of it usability ant variety of audience.

More than two weeks ago Instagram released information about their new “Promote for Stories” feature and advanced Page analytics.

Promote for Stories

Facebook believes that Stories are the future of social media. Instagram is rolling out a new ad format that lets marketers reach target audiences through Stories, the ephemeral feature that strings together images and videos into a single post. “Promote for Stories” is like Facebook’s “boost” tool that lets marketers pay to get their posts into more user feeds, TechCrunch reported.

This fresh feature helps to make the image-sharing app more useful to advertisers that want to reach audiences through Stories, which has quickly grown to more than 400 million daily active users. Instagram has 2 million paying advertisers, many of which are small businesses and creators that don’t have massive budgets to regularly produce full-screen ads for Stories. The “promote” feature lets them transform their stories into ads that can better reach a target audience.

Now that Instagram Stories have become another crowded marketing channel, it makes sense that Instagram is offering this to advertisers. The trick for Instagram is to not let Stories become primarily a space for ads. The trick for marketers is to keep your Instagram Stories entertaining and relatable so they seamlessly fit into your audiences’ feed.

Advanced Page Analytics

Instagram, which has more than 1 billion users worldwide, also started testing Instagram Analytics as part of Facebook Analytics to help marketers better track audiences and engagement.

The software tool expands tracking from website clicks, impressions, new followers and Story exits to show lifetime value, retention rates, audience overlaps with website visitors, app downloads and Facebook likes, among other features.

Improved analytics tools will likely also help marketers measure the effect of their ad campaigns on Instagram and make quick adjustments to their strategies to maximize performance and boost confidence in their ad investments, as they’ll be able to better understand key users’ consumption habits.