In the coming months, all Instagram users in the US will have the ability to tag brands and products on their posts within the app, a feature previously reserved for Certified Creators. According to Instagram, this will provide the ability for users to ” support their favorite small businesses “.
Free advertising for brands
” Bought a new pair of earrings from a small business you love? Tag the product in your post (Editor’s note: on the main feed of the application) so that your friends and followers can find out more about the winnings and buy them! People come to Instagram to share and discover trends and inspiration. Product tagging will let everyone support their favorite small businesses, share how they’ve styled their looks with the products they’ve used, and more “says the social network.
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Concretely, this feature will allow users to advertise for free to shops and businesses, because they will not receive anything if a person buys one of the products they have tagged.
On the professional side, they will get a notification when someone tags one of their products, and they can also view all tagged content to avoid negative usage of the feature. Thus, they will also have the possibility of controlling who marks their products and of removing the tags which do not please them.
In these photos posted on Twitter by Alexandru Voica, an employee of Meta, it is possible to see how the new feature will look once deployed on Instagram:
Everyone can now tag products on @Instagram.
Rolling out in the US over the next few months, product tags make it easier for people to share and discover products from brands and small businesses they love. pic.twitter.com/H5JxrKuSuU
— Alexandru Voica (alexvoica.eth) ? (@alexvoica) March 22, 2022
Instagram is betting big on e-commerce
This announcement is part of a larger project to overhaul the Instagram application, which is facing ever-increasing competition, particularly from TikTok. Thus, Instagram has made the decision to make many changes to its platform in order to better compete against the Chinese social network, and e-commerce is one of the major points of this metamorphosis.
Instagram has been growing in the e-commerce sector for several years now, especially with its Shopping tab, and it is very likely that the changes in consumer habits linked to the pandemic have encouraged it to strengthen its activity even more. in this domain. In May 2021, the platform, for example, launched the Community Shopping feature in this direction, since it allows brands to use the photos of any user if their product is tagged on the image they have. job.
From now on, the social network wants to capitalize even more and increase the transactions carried out on its platform. He also explains that more than 1.6 million users already mark at least one brand, on average, each week.
Make the main feed useful again
Taking this into account, if the trend runs its course, then the possibility of more specifically tagging each product could become an attractive and highly used element on the platform. While the arrival of this feature takes Instagram even further away from its original model before its takeover by Meta in 2012, it could still keep the application’s main feed relevant for a little longer, notes Social Media Today.
Indeed, Stories and Reels, rolled out in 2020 to compete with TikTok, are now more popular on Instagram than its main feed, where photos are posted. If this new tool works and becomes popular, it will most likely be rolled out to the rest of the world and could become the app’s most lucrative feature, while its other features remain very engaging… The winning recipe?