What happened to Instagram???
Do you like using Instagram to post your stories? Well, I do post a lot. As you might know, Instagram is one of the most used social media platforms around the whole world. Almost everyone around me is using Instagram, but what happened to Instagram recently?
New sections
Recently, Instagram announced their new feature called “Instagram Channels”. This is the feature that is a group messaging function within the app for people to find their interested topics and things. Then people can simply join the channel, and the group chat would be added to your Direct chat list. Users can see all messages, images, and even polls in the chat.
What do I think?
Well, I feel it is a really interesting feature for social media like Instagram. A lot of people were using Instagram just for posting stories and might be interacting with their friendsmore than other actions. As long as Instagram has launched the channel function, people can simply find their interested topic and join the chat.
What value does this feature bring to us as a marketer?
In my opinion, this is a good way to create a Tribe which is a great way of customer segmentation for users who are sharing the same interest, beliefs, and affinities. Because of the segmentation of users, the benefit of this channel is not only good for people to share their interests, but also good for marketers to learn more about customers’ interests, and can provide more accurate content for different groups of users.
Why is this feature valuable?
We all know that Tiktok is using its machine learning algorithm to separate users into different tribes, recommend more and more same types of content to those users, and make sure almost all the content sent to users is what they might be interested in. I think the channel feature is doing the same thing, but it is letting users choose what they like instead of being chosen by the algorithm. This is the first reason why I think this feature has value for marketers.
The second reason would be there are not so many apps that have the channel function, so whenever people want to share their thoughts about some area, they might need to use Instagram to join the channel, and this would be a great way of attracting more and more users for Instagram. This would lead to more business value.
The last but not the least reason would be that when people are all set for a different interest group, those are customers’ big data, this data can be used in different areas, like advertisement and content recommendation. Not only Instagram, but other brands who collaborate with Instagram would be more and more likely to send their content directly to their target customers instead of sending it to everyone. This will make their campaigns more effective.
Overall, I like this feature, not only because it is interesting and convenient for users, but it is also valuable for marketers. What do you think?
