Instagram is an increasingly popular medium, but one that hasn’t always been geared for businesses. It’s a great way to reach out to your customers, to show them the human face behind your brand, and interact is silly and creative ways, but it’s never been a vehicle for sales. Until now.
Some businesses have had access to shopping tags for a while now, but many businesses, especially small ones, haven’t been able to qualify. The territories that allowed for them was limited to users in the United States exclusively. Your account had to also be tied to a Facebook account that sold physical goods and contained a catalog of items. Now, users in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK will be able to take advantage of this fantastic tagging option.
Your first step is to ensure you qualify for shopping tags and submitting your account to Instagram for review. Once you are approved, you can tag your products the same way you tag people. It’s quick and easy!
First, add your image and edit it as you need. Once you are at the stage you write your captions, you will have the option to “Tag Products.,” just like you would a friend in a picture.
Any product you have on Facebook should appear for you to tag. You can only pick one item per tag, but you can tag the image in multiple places with multiple products if you need to.
Once you’ve picked the product you want, a prompt will show up letting people know there are tagged products they can look at.
As simple as that, you have a beautiful Instagram image that will not only engage your audience, but will help drive traffic to your products!
Instagram is focusing more and more on becoming a platform that is business friendly and easy to use without cluttering up feeds, which gives you a new opportunity to reach a new audience and build a visual side to your brand that isn’t possible on other social platforms. Use this chance to build on your brands vision, and most importantly, have fun with it!