Last year, Instagram turned 10 years old. Since the beginning, this platform has not stopped evolving by bringing new features to all users and becoming one of the most popular social media networks worldwide.
Today, Instagram has over 1 billion users around the world. It has been transformed from a platform to share your cup of latte with filters to an important (an understatement) tool for businesses.
Particularly during this recent pandemic, Instagram grew its popularity among businesses as it became a key channel to connect brands with clients.
More than 90% of users follow at least one business account, and two out of three people surveyed say that Instagram enables interactions with brands, according to Instagram for Business. Although these facts aren’t entirely surprising, they do help illustrate how relevant Instagram is for businesses and users to create and nurture relationships.
Facebook F8 2021: Instagram Messaging and Its Key Role for Businesses
In case you’re not familiar with this event, F8 is Facebook’s popular developer conference held every year to announce its latest updates, introduce new features, and give us a sneak peek at what’s coming up in the future.
The last conference was held in 2019, where Mark Zuckerberg shared very exciting news for users and partners like the new Create Mode on Instagram or the controversial announcement of Instagram’s test to hide like counts.
Regardless of what they announce, this F8 conference is always an exciting event to learn more about the future of this popular social network whether you are just a user or a creator.
Although last year’s event was canceled due to the global pandemic, this year F8 is back with some really exciting news, both for partners and users.
Instagram for Business: What This Means for Agorapulse Users
This year, in particular, Facebook has a particular announcement that will have a very positive impact on Agorapulse’s users.
“We are delighted to announce that Agorapulse now supports messaging on Instagram from the Social Inbox. The Messenger API for Instagram is now available for all developers who make it possible for brands to improve and enhance messaging experiences with customers. By integrating the Messenger API for Instagram, businesses and developers can effectively scale messaging workflows to better own the customer experience and build more authentic relationships.” (Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, VP of Platform Partnerships at Messenger)
With the new Messenger API for Instagram, brands will be able to reply to more Instagram interactions directly from Agorapulse, which will translate into more conversations with your audience and more opportunities to close deals and to nurture relationships with your audiences.
From your social Inbox, you will soon be able to:
- Receive all your Instagram DMs in one single platform.
Centralize all your conversations from one or more Instagram business accounts in one single platform. Apart from Instagram, Agorapulse currently supports Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. - Reply to conversations using your saved replies.
You can create one or multiple saved replies that will be available to all your teammates to help you save time and keep your brand’s tone in every conversation. - Label DMs to follow up on important conversations or to create custom reports.
Create specific labels to organize your conversations by topic, product, or agent. Then use the Agorapulse reports to understand what are the main trends in your Inbox and how this can help drive your strategy. - Assign key messages to other teammates or bookmark them for later.
You can use the automatic moderation rules to identify key messages, label them, and assign them to the right teammate. - Attach images to give more context to your conversations,
You can reply to your conversations with images or videos up to 8MB. - Oh, and you can also react to your messages with the <3 sign or see if someone has reacted
Who doesn’t love this Instagram feature? (If you don’t, you can also remove this reaction.)
With these new features, brands will benefit from an entirely new way to engage with their audiences through the Messenger API from Agorapulse.
Take control of your social media! Check out our free trial of Agorapulse to help you schedule, track, and measure all your social media efforts.
