Many businesses use Instagram to support the promotion of products and services. Instagram allows users to post visual content such as photos or videos but it’s changing all of the time. Here are some of the key updates to Instagram in 2022.
Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms for both personal and business use. With a high character limit on captions and the ability to share multiple images at once, it generally performs well for a platform. Over the years, there have been many updates to the platform, including the addition of stories and on profile highlights to share your best bits. For businesses, these may include behind the scenes in the office, recent projects or just general information regarding your business.
So let’s see how Instagram has changed in 2022
Like count
Previously, Instagram allowed all users to see all likes on posts, but now users have the ability to hide their likes from followers. This means that only the account owner would have the ability to see the exact number of people who had liked the post. Others will only be able to see who has liked the post but not the exact figure. This seems to be a positive update from Instagram.
Stories
Instagram stories have been around for a while now, but some features were only available to users with a high follower count. The key feature that has been added for all is the link sticker.
This feature can provide many benefits to businesses such as allowing them to send followers directly to the website. Imagine you’re promoting a brand new product, you’ve shared a post about it but as you’re probably aware, Instagram won’t allow links within the caption, this new feature means you can use stories to direct people to your site.
Insights
Insights into your content’s performance have been made more accessible and clear. These metrics include the number of accounts you’ve reached, number of accounts engaged and your follower count, all of which are shown over a selected period of time. These metrics allow you to see which types of content perform the best and which could do with some improvement.
Reels
Reels are a great way to provide information in a more relaxed way. Maybe you’re showing your customers how you make a product or telling them about the next sale you have coming up. Instagram has made it easier to use reels allowing users to edit their content from within the app. This includes trimming videos and rearranging content.
Feed order
This feature may not be available on all accounts as of yet as it is currently being tested on some accounts. This feature allows users to have more control over the order of their feed, this comes in 3 selections ‘home’ which is selected by Instagram based on who’s content you usually interact with, ‘following’ which involves seeing every post in chronological order and lastly ‘favourites’ where you’ve manually selected other accounts as your favourites.
For businesses to really benefit from this change, they will have to ensure that meaningful content is created and shared so that users are more likely to see it or even add it to their favourite accounts.
There are many reasons to use Instagram for business, whether you’re thinking about the amount of users or even how successful it could be for your business, you’re sure to reach more of an audience by having a presence. Before creating a business account on any platform, we would advise you to ensure that your audience is present on the platform so that it will be beneficial for you.
If you need any help with your social media strategy, don’t hesitate to contact us, we’re more than happy to help.