When Kodak’s shares peaked in 1989, it employed over 145,000 people. Just 13 people were working for Instagram in 2012 when Facebook acquired it for 1 billion dollars. Instagram didn’t just create a new category and kill off an old one, it changed the way we see the world. In 2022, Instagram is now changing the way we shop.
The future is now! Rethink your Insta social commerce strategy to prepare for whatever’s next
Social commerce is changing so quickly that by the time you read this article there might be a new feature to read about. The only way to keep up is to prepare for the tools, services, and features that will determine how you can market to those trends in the future.
1. Digital twins and NFT collectibles
For fans of the non-fungible world, NFTs connected to open blockchains will soon be displayed on Instagram. Meta is currently only testing this development with a select group of creators. The plan is to roll it out to everyone. This isn’t just about art, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are already comfortable buying everyday fashion items in digital and physical forms.
2. Live Shopping via Instagram
Live shopping in the form of shopping events and live product launches is back with a bang, and Instagram is right at the core of this trend. Although live shopping experiences first took off in the Chinese-speaking world – $423 billion in sales expected in 2022 – you can expect this trend to be making digital waves around the world soon.
3. Instagram Stories with augmented reality filters
With the whole physical world talking about metaverse and augmented reality, Instagram is working hard to provide more immersive experiences in its Stories feature. What began as rabbit ears and monkey noses on static photos is set to become fully immersive and commercial as the technology advances. Think of trying on clothes and showing a friend in a different city from the comfort of your own home. This is huge.
4. Pop-up stores for top-trending items
With omnichannel shopping the new normal, Instagram is also considering popping up pop-up stores to sell some of the top-trending products on the platform. You can expect this development to link up with Live Shopping events.
5. Check out Insta’s new Checkout
The holy grail of social commerce is a seamless in-app checkout experience. The company is already testing a Beta version of Instagram Checkout in the US but will almost certainly be rolled out globally as soon as it’s ready.
Instagram Shops and ads will become central to future Instagram marketing efforts
As Instagram continues to throttle back the platform’s organic reach, ads, Shops, and shopping tags are becoming more critical than ever. With so many changes happening so rapidly and at different timescales for different markets, it’s crucial to have a product-to-consumer (P2C) social commerce service provider who is partnered with Meta.
Study Instagram’s shoppable stickers that are available for the Stories feature. These shopping stickers are similar to Instagram shoppable posts because businesses tag physical products from their inventory or ecommerce platform. When you click on an item on Instagram, you can see the item name, price, and description.
Also, be clever with your product tags. Use the right tags to ensure the images with your products are clickable and automatically redirect potential customers to your store. North American businesses with early access to Instagram’s checkout feature can already use Product Mentions to highlight products in their image/video captions and their bios.
Connect your product catalog to Instagram easily with the Productsup P2C platform
At Productsup, we’ve spent the past years developing our social commerce solutions and video designer tools with Meta and other leading social commerce providers in mind. We can automatically add millions of SKUs wrapped in various Instagram ad formats, including carousel ads and video ads in a fraction of the time it would take a team of designers and marketers to do the same.
Productsup’s P2C solutions will automate almost all of the time-consuming manual product catalog work. AI-powered feed management will save you days or even weeks of time as you get products to market faster and easier and with less risk of errors in product details or item availability.
Download our free Instagram guide below for more tips and information on the future of Gen Z’s favorite shopping channel.
