Instagram is rapidly becoming the new social media platform of choice for many brands. With it's user friendly instagram reels and stories, as well as keeping the video at its centre, the platform is the most obvious choice for re-sharing UGV. In comparison to Linked-in, where the business' words take the forefront, or Facebook, whose story feature is only just catching on, Instagram works with it's users in their ever-shortening attention span and googley-eyes for pretty pictures.
In this blog, we outline new September updates to the app, and how this directly benefits the services we are able to provide in our UGC managed service.
60- second stories
Personally, this is a big win for us. As part of our bolt-on service in our package, we offer social media management, involving the re-sharing of content collected on our platform. For this, we like to use Instagram, as the story feature allows a brand to include a call for action button sending them directly to the thread.
Usually, brands are encouraged to share shorter snappy videos that are faster paced and exciting for the short attention span of users. However, in our work with a brilliant intermittent fasting app, Fastic, they proved that authenticity wins! They shared a 60 second video of one of their users sharing their experience with intermittent fasting. The video (screenshot below) halved their customer acquisition cost and was the highest performing ad they'd ever run.
Screenshot of a testimonial collected on Stitcht
Video posts are now reels
As mentioned above, central to Instagram is it's ability to post visually-engaging content to share with your community. This content involves pictures and videos, except the videos are now called 'reels' and can only be found under that tab on your profile. Whilst this may be difficult to manage for the average Instagrammer, it gives brands a brilliant way to easily source their content created during UGC campaigns.
When it comes to collecting the data for the posts, such as the views, comments and likes, this whole process becomes a lot easier. Instead of sifting down their profile to create an analytics report, they are all kept in one neat, time ordered section away from the average picture posts. Of course, for us, this makes our services stand out even more, as they don't get lost amongst the posts.
Photo by path digital on Unsplash
Posts and stories archive
Whilst this one isn't exactly new in September, the CEO of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, posted a 'Hidden Gems' video earlier this month revealing the archive section. As he explains, it is a place that you can view 'every story you've ever posted on Instagram, even if it's been more than 24 hours'.
For tracking all the sharing of UGC you do as a brand, this is a great tool. And, for us, brands can easily access the content they or we have shared on their Instagram stories during a campaign. You can also add each of these videos to your highlights, to further separate and distinguish all the videos shared throughout the campaign.
As well as viewing the videos, you can easily download them to your camera roll, meaning they can be uploaded straight into a social media campaigns folder for easy access. The same applies for any live videos which have been made, so if anyone has made any live broadcasts about their UGC campaign, they are all accessible here.
Conclusion
Anything which remembers and tracks what we post as brands is beneficial. With lots of things to monitor, the stories archive, the reels section, and the 60-second stories only act as a helping hand to a UGC campaign.
If you want a helping hand with your UGC collection and engagement strategy, request a demo