From Instagram marketing buffs to naysayers, the digital community has been closely following the photo and video sharing site’s success in the past few months, commenting on its recent rapid growth as well as the announcement that the platform had surpassed Twitter with 300 million monthly users. With a simple interface and entirely visual style, Instagram continues to gain a foothold in the social media market, rolling out new features with surprising frequency to keep the competition on its toes.
Amid a series of changes to improve user experience, Instagram has quietly rolled out its new advertising API, giving social media marketers the opportunity to promote their brands and content on the platform in new ways. While the service has launched with comparatively fewer built-in tools than Facebook’s suite, Instagram’s service is already being supported by a number of popular CRM software, including Salesforce.
Between the company’s continually growing popularity and constantly updating functionality, it’s time marketers start considering a place for Instagram marketing in their strategies—but what exactly does this entail?
What Integration Can Do for You
New promotion platforms—particularly for social media—often come as a bittersweet opportunity for marketers. Along with the allure of new channels, audience, and growth, comes the reality of new testing, new demands for content, and community management. For small brands, this can pile up to an insurmountable strain on budget and manpower, while for larger companies there’s always the risk that a slight oversight might result in public embarrassment that can harm your brand.
However, these considerations can be greatly mitigated with Instagram’s CRM integrations. By bringing your Instagram campaigns immediately into comparison with your other efforts, testing and management can be streamlined, allowing marketers to more simply apply principles from their other efforts to their new Instagram marketing campaigns.
The most popular software currently supported is Salesforce, boasting a range of analytics tools and management options. Considering Salesforce integrates with many other marketing services, it will offer marketers the widest range of comparisons for testing and learning.
Along with Salesforce, marketers that use Brand Networks, SocialCode, Nanigans, Unified, Kenshoo, and Ampush will also be able to incorporate their CRM or automation with Instagram. Integration can help reduce micromanagement while also providing quick insights into both successful and problematic content.
For those who haven’t jumped on automation yet, choosing the software that is best for you may not necessarily be a question of popularity, but rather a question of specialization—different types of automation can take over different elements of community management based on your needs, allowing one or two marketers to operate as if they had the skills of a full team. If you’re already working with software that Instagram doesn’t yet support, consider reaching out to either Instagram or the software’s developer—you may be closer to integration than you think!
Instagram is continuing to grow and adapt at a rapid rate. While it may never unseat Facebook, it has already made a strong bid for second place in social media relevance. If the platform previously felt inaccessible to your brand, their new advertising API might be the perfect mix of power and functionality to make the platform viable for your company.
Having trouble generating the right content for your audience? Check out Skyword’s free eBook, 6 Critical Challenges That Sabotage Quality Digital Content Production.
Instagram Marketing Gains Powerful Advertising Platform
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Erin Fegely. Used with permission.
Barney Cox. Used with permission.
Samantha Zimbler. Used with permission.