Instagram is Working on a New DM API for Brands

Instagram’s relationship with brands is one that has proven to be extremely profitable for the social media platform. Whenever certain kinds of brands would be looking into maximizing their profit margins and sales, they look to Instagram for their marketing which means that the relationship between these two is more or less symbiotic. In order to further improve these relationships, Facebook has been adding a lot of functionality to its subsidiary’s messaging capabilities. One example of this can be seen in the WhatsApp for Business integration into Instagram’s DMs, but it seems like functionality improvements to facilitate business interactions aren’t going to stop there.

Instagram is reportedly working on a new API, one that would make it so that brands wouldn’t have to log in to Instagram at all in order to access their DMs. Much on the contrary, they would be able to access messages that their clients and customers might have sent them through third party apps. This can be useful for brands since they can create dedicated apps that would deal with messages they receive and integrate messages from all platforms into a single app, although this would require similar APIs in other sources that are not owned by Facebook.

This does indicate a shift in the way Facebook is doing business. It seems like the social media juggernaut is no longer all that concerned about whether or not brands stay on the platform while messaging, just them using the messages in and of itself would be enough to give the platform the kind of profits and influence it needs. It will be interesting to see whether or not brands start using this feature, although it’s safe to say that Instagram would not have started working on it if they weren’t already reasonably sure that brands would end up wanting something like this.



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