In a recent visit to Facebook’s new Toronto offices, Marne Levine, Instagram’s COO, announced that of the 400 million monthly active users on the platform, 8.5 million of them are Canadian. In conjunction with her visit, Instagram posted on its blog a new initiative to support brand pages (similar to brand pages on Facebook). While these pages will be coming to Canada before the end of the year, here’s what the business community and advertisers can expect:
Profiles. Similar to Facebook, the obvious benefit for having a business profile on Instagram will be the insights available to page managers and advertisers. Companies will be able to understand who their audience is and what they are interested in.
Insights. With only comments and likes to currently lean on, brands will be excited to unlock a vast treasure of insights into who their audience is and what they like. This is also good news for the Instagram community as a whole. By understanding what resonates with their audience and target market, brands will be able to publish more relevant and timely content on the platform.
Amplify. Now that Instagram’s algorithm is serving content in a similar fashion as Facebook, the ability to amplify and serve content to a specific demographic and audience is a huge boon to brands. Marketers will be able to measure which posts are gaining good organic reach and engagement and then apply media behind it to increase its reach and effectiveness.
In an interview this past week with the Financial Post, Levine said, “When you can combine a creative, visual canvas like Instagram with the targeting that Facebook offers, you can get the right story in front of the right person at the right time… it’s relevant and it’s connected to their interests. We want to make sure we get the experience right before we roll it out broadly.”