A year ago, Facebook formed a team whose sole purpose was to improve Instagram and turn it into a platform that could facilitate online shopping. The team seems to have done its job rather well, because Instagram is now going to offer advertisers far better analytics in order to get them to the people that would be most likely to buy their products.
If you use Instagram a lot, you would have noticed the tool that popped up recently. This tool was a bookmark option, it allowed you to save certain posts that involved products that they wanted to buy. While the primary purpose at the time seemed to be allowing users to optimize their experience and find products that they might buy at some point in the future, it seems that the actual reason that this feature was introduced was to gather data on what users wanted to buy.
This is good news for brands but some users might not like the fact that an innocuous bookmarking feature could lead to them getting ads about the products that they are bookmarking. This is an element of the internet within consumer culture that remains inescapable, and it’s clear that Facebook is intent on taking it to the next level.
Read Next: Small Business Growth Hacking - A Guide to Instagram Ads (infographic)
If you use Instagram a lot, you would have noticed the tool that popped up recently. This tool was a bookmark option, it allowed you to save certain posts that involved products that they wanted to buy. While the primary purpose at the time seemed to be allowing users to optimize their experience and find products that they might buy at some point in the future, it seems that the actual reason that this feature was introduced was to gather data on what users wanted to buy.
Related: How to Save Photos From InstagramInstagram has been recording this data and will now be giving this data to brands so that said brands can better understand what products users are looking into and which of these products should be further advertised on the platform. According to Instagram, in September about 9% of its user base, that’s about ninety million people, were using the tags that brands were adding to pictures that featured their products. This means that a lot of data has been collected, and Instagram intends to launch this feature in the first quarter of 2019.
This is good news for brands but some users might not like the fact that an innocuous bookmarking feature could lead to them getting ads about the products that they are bookmarking. This is an element of the internet within consumer culture that remains inescapable, and it’s clear that Facebook is intent on taking it to the next level.
Read Next: Small Business Growth Hacking - A Guide to Instagram Ads (infographic)
