Instagram is one of the most used and popular applications in the realm of social media. In Iran, there are 14 million active Instagram users, equal to 17% of the country’s population. Some use this app to keep themselves updated with the news, some to catch up on celebrities’ gossips, and some other to keep in touch with friends and share their photos.
On the other hand, some businesses use Instagram as a tool for their digital advertising campaigns or to communicate with their customers.
Some of the most followed pages are Instagram with 221 million followers, Pop singer Selena Gomez with 122 million, and some other celebrities including Cristiano Ronaldo with less than 110 million followers. In Iran, actors and actresses such as Rambod Javan, Mahnaz Afshar, and Taraneh Alidoosti are followed by roughly 6 million users. Since the very first days of Instagram, we have witnessed many innovations that were also mentioned in previous blogs, such as Direct messaging, Live feeds, Face Filters, and managing multiple accounts. This blog goes over the most recent updates and features in Instagram.
On June 22nd, Instagram released a new option of “Archive” for its users, after testing it on a test group and enabled them to make those photos invisible to other users without having to delete them. If users go into the “...” menu on a photo, where they’d normally see options like edit and delete, there’ll now be an option to archive the image placed right on top. Hitting that button will send the photo to a private gallery — user’s archive — where only they can see it. This is an advantage for the users who were not always sure about posting a certain photo. With this option, they can post their photos with this ease of mind that they can archive at any point. This option also enables brands and businesses to re-post a photo and pull it out of the archives, when a trend becomes popular again among the users, without re-uploading it. In other words, it increases efficiency in digital marketing. Some users, especially teenagers, have the habit of deleting their posts because they don’t garner many likes, or simply based on emotions and feelings. Archiving does not take away this habit, but simply make the photo accessible to users in case they changed their minds. Another feature of archiving is that when a user re-posts a photo, it goes back to its original spot according to the time it was posted for the first time. This service does not make archiving activities public to other users, so that the users could manage their account more privately and confidently.
Another newly released feature is the ability to search for a specific hashtag, location, or even a sticker among posted Stories. Instagram made the competition tighter when it released this feature, only two months after its main competitor, Snapchat, had released the very same option. From now on, users can find the nearby stories as well. The benefits of this feature to its users are countless. For instance, users may search Stories to find out about current weather conditions, social events, or other users’ opinions on a particular news. Businesses and brands can also use hashtags, trendy stickers, and indicating their location to benefit from SEO standards and also update their clients.
Utilizing and optimizing the searching feature in Stories was not the only Snapchat inspired feature that Instagram adopted. By offering Selfie Filters to its users, once again, Instagram made the competition even harder than before. “Face Filters,” as Instagram calls them, work exactly like Snapchat, and let you add virtual koala ears, nerdy glasses, a butterfly crown or wrinkle-smooth makeup to yourself and friends in photos or videos.
Another significant recent update on Instagram aimed at improving user experience in “Direct” messaging system. With these improvements, users now have the ability to send and open web links, directly in the app. Instagram is also adding automatic links to phone numbers and addresses send through Direct, which is useful. Users do not have to crop the photos in weird sizes anymore, as the app enables them to see any image both horizontally and vertically.
Sisarv Marcom Agency makes its clients distinguished from other brands, by providing them with premium services in digital marketing, such as analysis of Instagram pages and the most recent online trends by a team of experts.
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میتسوبیشی - آرین موتور
Issue 60 of Sisarv Marcom Agency's DIgital Marketing Blog
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