For the right audience Instagram is the perfect marketing tool. Younger consumers are moving away from Facebook, and with the recent stories of data scraping older users may too. Instagram, while now owned by Facebook, is growing at a crazy rate with more and more people loving sharing their day in pictures.

Instagram works really well for certain markets. One of our clients is Knuma Furniture who make the award winning Huddle Bedside Crib. Their audience is primarily young, affluent, socially aware women. Unlike previous generations they have been brought up on the age of sharing so are more than happy to let everyone they know about their lives.

And what could be more important than the imminent birth of their child. Being able to tap into this market is one of the strategies we use for Knuma.

But how do we turn these pregnant Instgrammers into customers?

Until now the options for selling via Instagram were limited, if your business account has less than 10,000 followers you can’t add active URLs to your posts. The only link available to you is in the bio which makes your options very limited.

Instagram shopping update

It seems that shopping from Instagram is working so well that they are rolling out a standalone Instagram Shopping app very soon. When this appears it is planned to help take away e-commerce sales from the likes of Shopify and Woo-commerce and clear area which Facebook, Instagram’s owners, would like to move into.

In an interim move Instagram is rolling out a feature in the main app which will enable users to shop directly from the Explore tab in the App, On top of that they’re allowing shopping from Instagram Stories for the first time too by allowing sellers to add stickers to their posts.

These updates don’t seem to have rolled out to the UK just yet, but they must be on the way.

Now you can tag products in Instagram posts

Thanks to the tie-up of Instagram and Facebook you can now tag your products in your Instagram posts, giving your followers the chance to buy straight from the feed.

So how is it done?

1. First you need to add your products as a store on your Facebook page, something you’ve been able to do for a long time.
2. Now ensure your Instagram account is synced with your Facebook page.
3. Now you can tag your products in the same way you tagged people previously.

Here are some screen shots on how the process works in Instagram. Once you’re got it all set selling on Instagram just got a whole lot easier.

One downside is that if you tag products you now can’t tag another Instagram account and you can’t promote an Instagram post in which you’ve tagged a product. You can’t have everything though can you.

If you need help selling on Instagram, or any other social media book a place on our Social Media Masterclass.