Instagram has started to expand the shopping feature to Stories. For those that routinely use Instagram, you may already be aware that it has been possible to shop from the normal feed as Instagram rolled this out some time ago. The ability to shop from Stories gives brands a new place to sell products to their followers, and turn potential customers into loyal brand enthusiasts. Instagram’s reasoning for adding shopping to Stories is because the feature is a big part of where users interact with the brands that they care about. Instagram notes that around 300 million people are using Stories on a daily basis, with many of them being brands, which can translate to huge opportunities for untapped potential in terms of getting new products in front of the right eyes.
Though Instagram doesn’t give exact numbers on how many users are navigating to Stories to see what new stuff brands have out there, it does state that it figured out this is where users tend to go to for this information as this is the answer a majority of users gave in a survey asking them about how marketers and brands can create ads for Stories that are compelling.
According to Instagram there were five key factors that were learned from the survey which marketers and brands should be focusing on if they want to grab the attention of potential buyers, citing that relevance was an important detail. Other crucial factors included ads lasting for shorter periods of time and presenting the branding earlier on. The same went for ads that had more than one scene. It was also important for brands to focus on making their ads optimized for mobile devices if they were bespoke, and users also wanted to see more product demos so they had a better idea of what the product was like in real-world use. Instagram just went through a recent update on Android devices, so users who do shop on Instagram should start to see these new Stories ads today or relatively soon, and it’ll be fairly easy to tell which Stories from brands offer a shopping experience as they will contain a shopping bag icon on stickers.