Instagram has announced the official launch of skippable, full-screen advertising in Stories – its popular new feature – for thousands of business owners.
With new tools, the social media platform promises to give an immersive and personally relevant new way for thousands of business owners to track the effectiveness of Instagram advertising.
In an announcement, the platform said testing full-screen advertising in Stories is underway for over 30 globally-recognised corporations, including Coca Cola, L’Oréal and Nike, and the feature is to be rolled out to business users of any size in the coming weeks.
Having launched full-screen ad testing in January 2017, new tools such as Ads Manager and Power Editor will enable business owners to target specific audiences, maximise the reach of their adverts and determine how regularly they can be seen, on Instagram Stories.
The platform, which is owned by Facebook, has claimed the new tools will help new brands make social media content that’s more relevant for target audiences.
Instagram’s vice president of business, James Quarles, said in statement: “Businesses are seeing the opportunity of Stories as a new layer of intimacy that is raw and unfiltered. It’s a new way to deepen a relationship between a business and a person.”
Instagram Stories has gained momentum rapidly since the feature launched on the platform last year. Some 50m more daily users in the last three months means some 150m Instagram users now engage with Stories every day.
Airbnb is one brand that has already used Instagram’s measurement tools to provide insights about their social media advertising, using video adverts in Stories boost awareness of new products and offerings.
Global head of social marketing and content at Airbnb, Eric Toda, said: said “We saw a double-digit point increase in [advert] recall from our experiences on the Airbnb [Instagram] campaign that further justifies our investment in ads within Stories as they have made a measurable impact for us.”
In December last year, the Instagram app reached 600m monthly users. The platform first launched advertising tools to its wider user base in early 2016, and has pledged to add further “direct response” options to Stories, and more ecommerce tools, later this year.
Three small businesses making a killing through Instagram marketing
Sign up to our newsletter to get the latest from Business Advice.
