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The Most Important 11 Instagram Features

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Instagram is a powerhouse in social media marketing, and leveraging its key features is essential for success. While its simple filters initially made it popular, Instagram has evolved with many powerful tools that can enhance your strategy. 

Although keeping up with all the updates can feel overwhelming, focusing on the top features will boost your marketing efforts. 

Let’s dive into the 11 most important Instagram features you should be using to elevate your campaigns and stay ahead of the competition.

1. Instagram Live Video 

What Is Live Video?

Live Video is a feature that enables Instagram users to stream video in real time. Users can directly communicate with their Instagram followers and engage by comments and reactions.

While users broadcast a live video on their Instagram account, the profile photo, which is in the story section, has a light ring that notifies their followers to join the live broadcast. 

live video Instagram feature

Instagram Live Features

Instagram Live Video includes quite a lot of useful features that enable users to engage with followers. The noteworthy ones are: 

  • Broadcast video in real-time
  • Save your live video to replay in Instagram Stories
  • Followers can comment and react 
  • Pin comments to the top of the video
  • Invite a friend who is watching the live video to stream together
  • View engagement numbers after broadcasting 

Instagram Live Best Practices

Talk to your followers like a friend: Instagram Live lets followers interact with your brand in real time, asking questions and reacting with emojis. Combining this with geo-tagged content and a strong hashtag strategy expands your reach and personalizes engagement. 

Encourage genuine interaction: If you’re hungry for real customers’ opinions or feedback on your products, this is definitely a good chance to ask for that. Let’s say you’re developing a new product, and want to know your customers’ opinion about it. Instead of simply announcing it in a post, stream a video and ask them about it directly. 

Instagram Live ideas: Many brands have incorporated these ideas into their live videos and got better results in customer engagement. You should try them out too:

  • Reveal a new product 
  • Explain a product’s features
  • Announce a sales campaign
  • Show the behind-the-scenes work
  • Hold a Q&A session 
  • Sell products directly

2. Geo-Tagged Content

What is an Instagram Geo-tag? 

Geo-tagging is an Instagram feature that allows users to tag a physical location to your content. When someone clicks on the location in a random post or story post, they’ll be taken to a location library that keeps all the posts tagged with that location. 

Instagram Geo-Tag Features

  • Users can create an Instagram location through Facebook  
  • Add location to posts, stories, hashtags
  • Add location stickers to stories

Geo-Tagging Best Practices 

Let guests check in on Instagram: When you create a location, customers can pin it to photos or stories. It’s a great way to let customers see more than just your Instagram account’s posts and find your content through that location. Also, when checking in at your place, customers spread your brand name to their friends. Utilizing this feature can help you grow your audience, and get more followers on Instagram.

Geo-Tagging

3. Instagram Hashtag

What Is An Instagram Hashtag?

This is probably one of the most popular Instagram features. Simply put, hashtags are a tags in the form of a string of words and symbols. 

Users include this string in the post caption. This tag links all posts that have the same tag and it’s clickable. When someone clicks on it, they’ll be taken to a tag page with all posts with the same tag. 

How to fit hashtags on your instagram post

Instagram Hashtag Features:

  • Add hashtags to stories, images, video, Reels.
  • Create a new hashtag if it hasn’t been created 
  • Search for hashtags
  • Find related hashtags
  • Add up to 30 hashtags on each post

Best Hashtag Practices  

Use the right keywords to let customers find your content: It’s not Google, but Instagram users use the search tool frequently to find people or certain topics through hashtags. Instagram matches the searched term with hashtags to show results. 

So when you add hashtags to your posts they are cataloged, and Instagram users who are searching that particular word or phrase can see them. 

The right hashtags can put you in front of your target audience even if they haven’t followed you yet. The best hashtags are ones that are specific to your brand or most-searched by Instagram users. 

Consider these kinds of Instagram hashtags: 

  • Community Hashtags connect like-minded people. E.g: #travelphotographer, #coffeelover, #healthyeating, #romanticgetaway, #newyorkbar
  • Branded Hashtags that are unique to your brand and help increase brand awareness. E.g: #doveswomen, #lushwomen, #adopnotshop
  • Campaign hashtags which show current campaigns, events or giveaways. E.g: #plantatree, #12daysdiet
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4. Instagram Stories

What Are Instagram Stories?

Instagram Stories are used by 500 million people daily, offering a slideshow of images and videos. To maximize this feature, use Instagram’s editing tools to create engaging content, combine with Instagram Ads for broader reach, and track performance with Instagram Analytics to optimize your strategy.

You can play around with stories feature and don’t have to worry about it will ruining your Instagram style. Why? Because each story only lasts for 24 hours, after that, it will automatically disappear from the story section. However, if you want, you can add your stories permanently to your highlights and organize them in categories.

Instagram Stories Features 

Since the beginning, the Instagram team has been continually adding features to this tool. Here are the best of the bunch: 

  • Unlimited story posts
  • Edit images and videos 
  • Instagram Story Ads
Instagram Stories Features
  • Add stickers to photos and videos
  • Sticker Q&A, poll survey to stories
  • Use hashtags in your stories 
  • Use location tags in stories 
  • Pin stories to your Instagram profile by Story Highlights 

Instagram Story Best Practices 

Shorter is sometimes better:Instagram Stories automatically switch every 15 seconds, keeping followers engaged. For businesses, adding Instagram Shoppable Tags can turn views into sales. Experiment with content, use Instagram Ads and Analytics to refine your strategy, and manage posts through Instagram Creator Studio to maximize reach and engagement.

Carry out interactive surveys: Get your followers to engage with surveys and receive feedback and opinions. There are three options, which are polls, question stickers, and emoji sliders. Just choose a suitable format to show your message. You can use survey templates to get started.

Announce time-sensitive deals: Yes, stories can be the best place to announce good/hot/special offers. Since these stories are very visible on the Instagram user’s interface, they’re pretty hard to ignore.  

Don’t forget these following content types for your stories. They’re also highly interactive types of content that your customers will enjoy:

  • Tutorials
  • Behind the scenes
  • Testimonials

5. Image & Video Editing 

What Is Image & Video Editing? 

Instagram image editing works as an image editor system with various useful filters and editing tools. Users can upload or take a photo in-app then proceed to edit before posting.  

Image & Videos Editing Features 

  • Crop, rotate and resize images 
  • Include up to 10 images and videos in 1 post
  • More than 20 useful filters 
  • More than 10 edit tools 

Best Photo Editing Practices

Best Photo Editing Practices

Make your products look more appealing: If you don’t have a photographer in-house, you can still make your content look stunning with helpful editing tools of Instagram. It enables you to reduce the cost of hiring professional photographers, and still keep the posting frequency on Instagram.       

Utilize multiple-images posts: You can add a collection of images that are related to each other. The following are some ideas on how to use this feature to create captivating Instagram posts: 

  • Add one photo per product and make a product category
  • Tell a story in a sequential series
  • Post a long video 
  • Show before and after shots  
  • Show different angles of the product

6. Instagram Ads

Do you know that 47% of Instagram users search for more information and make a purchase online or offline after seeing a post on the platform? This is the reason why Instagram Ads are increasingly effective for brands.   

What are Instagram Ads? 

Instagram Ads are sponsored content that you pay for, to post on the platform. While there are many reasons behind using ads, this Insta feature is a helpful tool for you to expand your brand presence, generate new leads, increase website traffic, and drive sales.   

Launching an Instagram Ads campaign requires you to have a Facebook advertising account or a Creator Account

Instagram Ads Features

Instagram ads can help you reach many marketing goals:

  • Brand awareness: show ads to more potential people that are likely to be interested in your brand
  • Reach: show ads to a specific number of people
  • Traffic (for clicks to your website or to the app store for your app): send more customers to your website
  • App installs: send more customers to the store where they can purchase your app
  • Lead generation: collect lead emails when they click on your ad and confirm their entry 
  • Conversions: helps you drive leads to purchase customers

To display ads in front of the right people, you have to build the right audience persona. Here are elements that Instagram provides for you to target audiences:

  • Location
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Languages
  • Demographics
  • Interests
  • Behaviors  
Instagram Ads Features

While the location, age, gender, or languages of prospects can be determined easily, analyzing their demographics, interests, and behaviors needs a great deal of market research. Try to learn about your target audience thoroughly, if you want to build a solid audience persona.

How does Instagram display your ads to your audience? Here are the options:

  • Stories ads
  • Image ads
  • Video ads 
  • Carousel ads

To maximize the benefits of this Instagram feature, you need to create engaging stories, posts, and videos first. Then, use this material to run the ads and measure performance. 

Instagram Ads Tips

  • Pay attention to what your audience is saying
  • Create ads that are relevant to your audience 
  • Prioritize visual, make your ads look as attractive as possible 
  • Try different ad forms and split test
  • Use the right call-to-action
  • Match ad content with website content 

7. Instagram Analytics

What Are Instagram Analytics? 

To optimize Instagram performance, you need reliable data about your audience. Who are they? What do they like? What kind of content can trigger their action? These insights can be obtained by utilizing Instagram analytics tools available in the market.

Instagram Analytics is an in-app analytics tool that provides you data to improve your performance on Instagram. It shows data like:

  • Activity
  • Content
  • Audience 

“Activity”, tells you:

  • Interaction: profile visits, website clicks, email, and call 
  • Discoverability: reach, impression

“Content”:

  • Feed: the number of unique accounts that take action because of your post. This includes calls, comments, emails, engagement, follows, impressions, likes, profile visits, reach, saved,  and website clicks.
  • Stories: impressions, reach, exited, replies, viewers, forward, backward, next story.
  • Promotions: profile visits, impressions, reach, engagement, audience’s gender, age, and location.

With this kind of data, you’ll know exactly which kind of posts and stories engages your audience the most. By seeing these metrics for each post and story, you can cater to your Instagram posts and stories marketing according to your audience preferences.

For “Audience”:

  • Age range, top locations, followers, and active time. Using this data can help you get a better understanding of your followers, and schedule your Instagram posts to reach as many users as possible. 

8. Instagram Shoppable Tag

What Are Shoppable Tags?  

Also called Instagram Shopping, this great feature allows people to purchase an item without leaving the app. 

You can tag items in your Instagram posts or stories, and potential customers who click on those tagged items will be taken to the product page on the company’s website.

Instagram Shoppable Tag Features

  • Add tags to images post, and story posts
  • Clickable tags
  • Direct customers to shopping site after they click on tags

How To Take Advantage Of Shoppable Tags

Shorten the customer journey: While users browse around their Instagram, they might discover the shopping channel. If something interests them, they can go straight to the category page and the website’s product page. 

This Instagram feature has seamlessly combined shopping and social media. Utilize it to increase site traffic and drive sales. 

How To Take Advantage Of Shoppable Tags

Instagram Shoppable Tags Tips

  • Use only engaging posts, stories or Reels. 
  • Don’t overuse tags, only use tags that most accurately describe your product
  • Briefly describe tagged items in the caption
  • Use images that feel natural to your Instagram profile
  • Be result-oriented. Make customers picture themselves using your products to drive the most sales

9. Instagram Creator Studio 

What Is Instagram Creator Studio?

In 2019, Instagram rolled out the Creator Account to their accounts list together with Personal Account and Business Account. Creator Account is a product of Instagram for the unstoppable rising number of content creators such as influencers or gurus. 

According to Ashley Yuki, (a product manager of Instagram), “We want to make sure that Instagram is the best place and the easiest place to build fan communities and also build personal brands.” That’s why they created this feature.   

Instagram Creator Studio

Instagram Creator Studio is an Instagram tool that provides audience insights and posting management. 

Instagram Creator Studio Features

Creator Studio brings insights to the next level with detailed data on daily audience growth.

  • Follower insights: ages, genders, and their active time
  • See what actions people take when they engage with your content
  • Access all videos, photos, carousel, stories. 
  • Create and post both Instagram feed content. 
  • Schedule posts
  • Search for and organize content 

How To Take Advantage of Instagram Creator Studio

Manage posts better than ever: features such as search and organize help you to manage your content in a smart way. For example, the post-schedule feature enables you to schedule posts when your audiences are online. 

Instagram creator studio insights

Create Content: Besides visual-enhancing tools that Instagram provides, you can use Sound Collections to add music to your content. This enables you to utilize various types of sounds from already-made or most-liked content, mix them together, or create a new one. There are many ways to utilize this feature, so take your time and experiment with it.        

Optimize content based on data: On Creator Studio, you can see how many minutes your videos have been watched or how audiences engaged with your posts. This data is great feedback to use when creating your content strategy.      

instagram recommended features

Instagram constantly updates its features, but the key changes can offer huge potential for brands. 

While face filters and stickers might not drive traffic, more significant updates, like the new ‘Recommended for You’ posts in the home feed, can increase visibility. 

This update brings even more marketing opportunities by showing posts from accounts users don’t follow, boosting your brand’s reach and engagement.

Mindless Inspiration

Most business accounts are run by a single employee who likely has countless other responsibilities aside from social media updates. With that said, there’s little time to browse through the millions of undiscovered accounts that could be great sources of creative inspiration for your brand.

creative inspiration for your brand

‘Recommended for You’ posts usually appear in groups of five on your home feed, and are clearly labeled as such to avoid confusion with your regular posts. 

Being as intelligent as they are, the Instagram team made sure these posts are purely based on accounts you follow or engage with regularly. 

It’s often considered one of the greatest distractions of our generation, but considering the amount of brilliant concepts posted on Instagram every day, it has become an undeniable outlet for creative inspiration.

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Effortless Promotion

After seeing a few of these posts pop up in your feed, you’ll start to notice an ongoing trend – each post is from highly successful accounts that you ended up engaging with. This is Instagram’s way of sort of rewarding great business accounts and allowing new consumers to view their products or services.

While you’re likely unaware when your posts show up in another’s feed, let this be an aspiration, especially if you’re questioning how to grow Instagram followers organically.

Jump at every opportunity to promote your page without overindulging in self-promotion. Being featured on the ‘Explore’ page or ‘Recommended for You’ posts is a great example of this, and highly attainable for you and your brand.

Potential Networking Opportunities

Particularly prominent in creative fields, this notion of collaborating between artists, designers or brands is currently booming on social media. While Instagram serves as a productive medium for linking like-minded individuals, the addition of ‘Recommended for You’ posts can only help in the creative process.

Potential Networking Opportunities

Being that photography is the primary medium uploaded to Instagram, thousands of photographers and models have found work by merely exploring Instagram. It can be difficult to weigh the significance of Instagram marketing until you’ve created something tangible from it.

Never underestimate the power of social media in this digital age. No matter what stage your brand is currently in, there’s always something to take away from another successful account.

Keep up with Kickstagram for more advice on how to grow Instagram followers organically, and be sure to keep your Instagram app up-to-date to avoid missing out on any new great opportunities to build your brand.

11. How to Use the Instagram Swipe-Up Feature to Ramp Up Traffic

Instagram Swipe-Up Feature

The Instagram “swipe up” feature is a wonderful way to connect with your target audience and score more visits to your website. 

With over 800 million active users (and counting!) to its credit, Instagram is an increasingly important platform if you’re serious about building your brand.

Today, social media marketing consists of more than just posting good content. You need to find new ways to keep your audience engaged.

Utilizing this Instagram Story feature will help you do just that.

So, let’s go over everything you need to know to get started with a bang.

What Is Swipe Up (and How Does It Work)?

If you’re already familiar with Instagram, then you also know that you have two choices as to how you can approach a new post.

You can make a standard post to your main Insta-feed or you can post the content to your story instead.

Feed posts stay up permanently, but stories disappear after 24 hours. At first glance, the story feature may seem unnecessary or redundant, but using it can help your business by:

  • Allowing you to post more frequently and boost engagement without over-flooding people’s feeds with your content.
  • Helping you leverage the power of real-time marketing to build brand awareness and get people’s attention when it matters most.
  • Keeping you as visible as possible when it comes to your followers’ feeds. (Stories always appear at the top of everyone’s Instagram feed.)

“Swipe up” is a handy feature you can use to make choice story posts more powerful.

Swipe up posts look just like any other story share except for a “see more” or “swipe up” arrow at the bottom.

When the viewer instinctually swipes up as directed, they’re magically transported to a destination of your choosing (e.g. a product page or your company website). Pretty cool, right?

How Do I Add Swipe Up to My Story?

Swipe up isn’t available to every Instagram user, so if you’re interested in using it to boost your brand cred and site traffic, you’ll need to meet a couple of baseline requirements first.

  • Is your business’s Instagram an actual business account? (If it’s not, it’s fairly easy to convert it to one.)
  • Does your account have a minimum of 10,000 followers?

Once you can answer “yes” to both of those questions, you can start embedding swipe up links into your stories and reaping all the benefits. 

@faredepot uses the GIF’s and animation to promote their swipe up link:

instagram swipe up feature

Just choose your base image, click the indicated link icon at the top, and paste in your link of choice. That’s it!

Using Swipe Up to Your Advantage

Like stories themselves, adding swipe up to your Instagram strategy is a game changer on a number of levels. The following are just a few of the biggest reasons why eligible businesses should be taking advantage of it.

Boost Your Traffic

Naturally, you have your business’s main website link included in your Instagram bio, but that’s not enough if you really want your followers to check out what you have to offer.

For one thing, people’s attention spans are short, so most aren’t going to click away from a post without a really good reason. Plus, you only have one bio link, so yours may not be an efficient way to showcase new products.

Of course, you can still showcase new additions to your product or service catalog by using your feed, but definitely include a swipe-up link in your stories as well. (Use the same strategy to make customers aware of flash sales, limited-time events, and specials as well.)

People are more likely to actually see the post in the first place. The easier you can make it to click through to your actual product page, the more likely you are to get an actual sale out of the deal.

Stay Visible and Relevant

Posting too frequently to your standard Instagram feed can overexpose you by flooding your followers’ feeds with an abundance of content that may or may not be of interest to them at a given moment. 

Plus, you can never really be sure that everyone is seeing your most important time-sensitive posts in time to actually act on them.

Stories stay right at the top of a user’s feed at all times, especially those of valuable social media influencers, so they’re ideal ways to alert followers to ultra-relevant information, news, or links. 

The format of Insta-stories also makes it easy for people to flip through all your posts quickly, paying the most attention to the ones they’re most interested in.

In other words, swipe-up stories are a terrific way to add more flexibility and range to your Instagram presence as a business, so it’s well worth exploring.

Are You Ready?

Instagram is a great channel to attract customers to your business. One of the reasons why is that the platform is always evolving and adding new features to improve user experience. 

Even though we’ve given you what we believe is the list of 10 most important Instagram features, don’t forget to test out new features as well. 

We hope that you’ll apply what you’ve learned in this post and test it with your own strategies.

Author

  • Nina Benson

    Nina Benson is an Instagram features enthusiast, always discovering new ways to use the platform’s latest tools. From Reels to Stories, she knows how to make every feature work for you. When Nina’s not exploring Instagram, you’ll find her sketching or curating her favorite playlists!

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Picture of Nina Benson

Nina Benson

Nina Benson is an Instagram features enthusiast, always discovering new ways to use the platform’s latest tools. From Reels to Stories, she knows how to make every feature work for you. When Nina’s not exploring Instagram, you’ll find her sketching or curating her favorite playlists!

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