Instagram is one of the most widely used photo-sharing app. While it's trying its best to monetize its efforts, the company is getting a lot of help from Facebook.
Facebook's advertising strategy is one of the most targeted, thanks to its massive resource of user information. By getting familiar with how Facebook delivers ads, Instagram has updated a few of its strategies to make the two business work in a similar way.
According to a spokesperson of the company, Instagram is building a list of new features: specific profiles for businesses which are equivalent to Facebook's Pages, more data on how brands' posts are doing, and the ability to buy ads straight from the app.
In other words, Instagram wants to make things similar to Facebook, and wants to make its feature as appealing as possible for brands to advertise. With their own special profile, Instagram aims to leverage its advertising from people's mobile devices.
With Facebook-like ad targeting, Instagram has one good reason to update: Facebook is prominent on the web, and Instagram has Facebook supporting it. strategy to familiarize itself was first seen in 2015 when Instagram focused on getting more videos to its platform, a strategy Facebook had done a year earlier.
With Facebook's influence, Facebook advertisers that were looking for more places to show their ads, do come to Instagram. This fact was revealed when Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg said that 98 of Facebook's top 100 advertisers also market on Instagram.
Facebook hasn't given the public a very close look at Instagram's business and how it performs. As an example, Facebook doesn't break out Instagram revenue on its quarterly earnings. And according to Instagram's COO Marne Levine, that isn't likely to change despite the aggressive advertisement push.
"I think what's most important is for people to understand that they can advertise on Instagram," she said. "[Instagram advertising] is still pretty new."
Closing The Gap, Closing The Rest
While Facebook is known to "spread" its wings to every places possible, Instagram doesn't follow such strategy. The photo-sharing app that is owned by Facebook, isn't that open to third-parties.
Instagram is drawing a thin as a boundary; a limit where third-parties can feed on it. The app decides to revoke API access, and that doesn't just extend to those that offer an alternative means of browsing the photo-sharing service, but to also that reaches the app by offering any expansions of what users can do with Instagram.
For example, Being allows users to peer into another user's Instagram for the purpose of discovery. By revoking its API, Instagram deliberately shuts down the service.
While having other using its API, like Being did, Instagram has had added tens of thousands of Likes to its service. But leaving its API for others to use has proven some problems to the photo-sharing app. On February 25, without any warning, Instagram simply pulled Being's API access.
Instagram's platform only permits other photo-editing apps that lets users pull in their own Instagram photos, brand and ad management apps, as well as tools for media broadcasters.
What Instagram did was the intention for its own good. But the decision has the potential to harm its growing community. Twitter for example, has taken a similar decision when it blocked other social media from piggybacking its service. Fast-forward, Twitter is stagnating. But Instagram has a powerful community and its a widely popular app with mainstream application and great innovations. The app may not face similar fate as Twitter, but still time will answer.