3 Instagram Updates You Need to Know in 2021
With 500 million daily active users, Instagram continues to be an incredibly popular social media platform. Over the past few months, Facebook has announced some exciting updates that can benefit your business if you follow a few key steps.
Since the sale to Facebook in 2012, Instagram has been one of the trickier social media platforms for content strategy. With a constantly-evolving algorithm and privacy laws impacting ad targeting, marketers and content creators have learned to adapt quickly. Late last year, the social media platform announced a new set of updates that are pertinent to your success on the platform.
If you’re like us, you aren’t just curious about the updates—you want to know how you can leverage them for your business. Keep reading: we’ve got you covered!
1. In-App SEO
Until now, search on Instagram has been limited to hashtags, location tags, usernames and profile names. This has led creators and businesses to rely heavily on hashtags to obtain organic followers. Eventually, they got to be overwhelming, so the platform imposed a limit of 30 hashtags per post, but this tactic was still cumbersome to the user experience.
In an effort to be more search-friendly and simplify the platform, Instagram announced that keywords would be searchable without the need for hashtags. While this opens the door to new possibilities, it also means a strategy overhaul is imminent.
If you’re looking for how to update your Instagram strategy, here’s a guide to get you started.
2. Better Shopping Experience
In November 2020, Instagram announced a major shake up their homepage layout. This new design would add two tabs—Reels and Shop—to the main menu bar. Because of this, the Post and Likes tabs were relocated to the upper-right-hand corner of the app. The decision caused quite a bit of stir online, with users complaining that the app was too focused on ecommerce. To this, Instagram stated:
“This year, with the pandemic and much of the world sheltering in place, we’ve seen...an incredible amount of shopping move online, with more and more people buying online and young people looking to their favorite creators for recommendations on what to buy.”
That being said, now is the perfect time to invest in your Instagram ecommerce strategy. Not sure where to start? We’ve got you covered.
3. The Rise of Reels
In response to TikTok’s popularity, Instagram created Reels—short-form videos with an emphasis on the accompanying sound or music. While they’ve been keeping official numbers secret, adding the Reels tab to the main menu indicates that it’s here to stay.
This isn’t the first time Instagram has adopted a feature from a rival social media platform. Instagram Stories were created after the success of Snapchat Stories with the clear motive to keep users on their platform.
“‘For a long time, people’s profiles were filled with Snapchat links,’ (Instagram co-founder) Systrom said. ‘It was clear people were trying to bridge the two products. So we gave them what they wanted.’” (Source)
While TikTok is still thriving, Instagram has stood the test of time thus far and clearly hopes to do so with Reels. We’re not sure about you, but we’re excited to get creative and see how Reels can help our clients!
Instagram is an ever-changing platform, which gives marketers the opportunity to create new and exciting content. The platform also has a history of rewarding those creators who embrace these changes with a higher ROI. We’re looking forward to trying out these new features and hope you’ll join us!
Looking for help with your social media strategy? Contact us for a consultation!