Melissa Conlon

When Instagram first launched it’s platform over 10 years ago, it was a fun place to post over-edited photos, cute animal pictures, and corny quotes. While you can still find much of the same today, Instagram has drastically changed their algorithm, marketing strategies, and user experience. Today, Instagram can be seen as an opportunity for brands, businesses, and influencers to gain traction and build their success.

With shoppable posts, analytics, business pages, and interactive stories, it is almost like Instagram has become more of a e-commerce website above anything else. It allows users with little-to-no knowledge or background of marketing to seamlessly target their brand or business to the right audience with the proper use of Instagram promotions, hashtags, and insightful analytics.

Instagram is my favorite social media platform – especially for their marketing capabilities. It is an amazing place to promote small businesses and to build a relationship with consumers. Consumers are intrigued by visuals and video marketing, and Instagram being a visual platform and now offering Reels, it’s a great place for brands and businesses to showcase their products, services, and user-generated content (UGC).

Each social media platform has their own unique ways of allowing brands and businesses to advertise themselves. Instagram provides a cheap alternative to Google Ads and other advertising options and allows users to create promotions and boost their reach on particular content at low costs. Instagram promotions can be especially beneficial for businesses and brands when running campaigns and launching new products.

Instagram is notorious for constantly changing their algorithm and leaving users to guess how they can maximize their engagement and reach – it’s a common joke amongst digital marketers. Ultimately, it comes down to the type of content and users you interact with the most. The more time you spend on Instagram, the better understanding the algorithm will have about the type of content you like and show you more of it.

At the end of the day, Instagram’s goal is to keep users on their app for as long as possible. The more time you spend and engaging on the app, the more it will “reward” you and show you content to more users. Hence why consistency is so important for a platform like Instagram. As Instagram continues to launch new tools such as Reels, live rooms, and IGTV, they will boost the content of users that are utilizing them.

I typically will avoid interacting with advertisements on social media platforms. However, if there is any kind that I will interact with, it’s Instagram promotions. I find them to be the most accurate to my interests, business, and hobbies.

I use the promotions that Instagram shows me to my advantage and see them as an opportunity to attract potential clients for my business as a social media manager. Instagram recognizes the accounts and content that I interact with the most (sustainable and ethical brands and businesses), and feeds me more of that content through promotions. It’s a great opportunity, because as I continue to interact with these promotions, I continue to get more of them. It’s a win-win.

As the digital world continues to rapidly evolve and change almost daily, I will expect to see the marketing implications of Instagram to as well. The platform continues to find ways to seamlessly connect it to Facebook and stay up-to-date with social media trends. It continues to play around with a variety of tools and ideas, like captions for video (available in certain countries), hiding likes from other users, and the idea of incorporating Reels into the Facebook feed (in limited countries as well). It will be interesting to see how it continues to evolve in the future.