How Instagram is leading the war through continuous innovation.
Last week, Instagram announced its new album feature. Yet another major updates, that will reinforce Instagram’s position in the war for one of the most engaging social media platform.
Instagram was all about sharing photos in a creative way. When it launched Stories, it seemed that I was one of the few people who didn’t appreciate it copying Snapchat. But it took me just a few days to say that, from a UX point of view, Instagram stories feature was far better than Snapchat’s UX! I didn’t want to repeat this mistake of being too critical initially with the new album feature. So I kept exploring my feed to experience the new update.
Within an hour of the launch, I saw people on my feed using this feature — and believe me, I love it! This new album feature also lets you choose the thumbnail for each album. I believe that’s great because it allows you maintain a certain level of consistency in your profile style.
If you follow photo bloggers, keep an eye on your feed for some amazing panoramic shots in album form or explore the hashtag #SwipeLeft to see how Instagramers are using this feature. You can also look forward to getting some emotive and inspiring content from all big and small brands.
Since 2015, this feature was available to advertisers by means of carousel ads. However it was limited to only 5 pictures.
From now on, any Instagram user can share a photo album, or a mix of video, photos, and boomerangs. The limit has now been increased to 10. Now we don’t have to spend hours picking the best photo or be scared of spamming the feeds of our fans.
This feature is also interesting for small businesses who might not have had any advertising budget allocated to Instagram in order to be eligible for the carousel ads in the past. They’ll now have the opportunity to create compelling content like any other advertiser on Instagram.
It will be interesting to know how the analytics will change following this update.
As of now, engagements (likes, comments…) are aggregated for the entire album which prevents us to truly understand which element is the most compelling for our followers. We can only assume that the first element of your album will get the maximum exposure.
Additionally, if you upload a video as part of your Insta album, you will not get the number of views on your videos.
Hopefully, Instagram will soon update the way it will provide analytics to its users and advertisers to reflect the recent changes. We can hope to get more engagement and thus more ROI on our creative content on Instagram.
