You could easily argue that social media is oversaturated, and no one would disagree. There is an overwhelming amount of content, along with numerous platforms and apps that keep users engaged online for the foreseeable future. Yet, social media continues to discover ways to enhance certain features. Recently, Instagram revealed it will test a new feature aimed at making it even more beneficial for brands.
We strongly believe that Instagram is currently one of the most vibrant and helpful platforms for brands. It keeps performing well and provides value to brands every quarter. The new feature it plans to introduce isn’t really new, at least not in the world of social media. It’s just a way for users to choose which geographical area they want their content to focus on. For instance, if they want football content about a Manchester team to be available only in Manchester, they will be able to do that.
The benefit to brands
This is not hard to see. Brands have always found it a little tricky (and perhaps even expensive) to create multiple accounts so that geographical regions can receive content that is specific to them.
If you think about it, it is arguably one of the biggest headaches for a brand that has global reach. If you want to create content, but you have audiences in numerous countries differentiated by culture and language, you have to work extra hard to manage multiple accounts.
This could be neatly managed by simply allocating content to certain countries. This way content can be created in a more measured way, and deftly displayed in areas that will receive the full benefit from it. People in Mexico can have unique content tailored for them for example, which also has the added benefit of making them feel catered to, rather than ‘translated to’.
Instagram Stories are also part of the new geo-restricted approach. And that means that the full functionality of Instagram can be carefully tailored to areas that are important to a brand.
Problems?
Well, yes. The one good thing about not geo-restricting content is that it is easier to measure engagement. You can simply pull up some data that shows you how engagement is for a country or region. It may, arguably, be at least a little more difficult if you have hundreds of pieces of perfectly tailored content going out every week.
That could truly be unmanageable. You would have to (as long as you were super international as a brand) think about setting up content departments that, sure, do the noble and lucrative work of creating stuff for regions, but work damn hard doing so. And then at the end of it, your social media monitoring would have to be super-specific too.
However, as long as that is accepted by brands on Instagram, there is a real sense of potential here. If brands take it on, this new geographical approach should afford them a chance to build up even more engagement.
Engagement
Having truly localised content boosts engagement for a few reasons, but seeing content that is literally made just for your area will more likely push you towards commenting. It feels nice that a brand is talking about your world (as in your daily life), and it will make you feel more like commenting.
The best example of this came about a little while ago, at a Cannes Film Festival event where Kendall Jenner promoted a Magnum Ice Cream product. Magnum made the whole thing super local by making sure that the Thailand audience were shown images of a Thai celebrity, rather than Kendall Jenner, promoting the same product. Both celebrities were there, and Magnum respected both audiences.
Taking that idea a little further, brands can use geo-restriction to make sure that their content literally doesn’t offend. Certain religious festivals would not be tainted by insensitive content blasted out by a brand to al four corners of the Earth, for example. Food and beverage brands could avoid sending out content during Ramadan.
So this kind of hyper-local content will work. And we think that it is just another example of a platform really adding value for brands.
Instagram has won a lot of the social media war. You’d be surprised how many people don’t actually know that Facebook owns Instagram, but it makes sense that the biggest social network of all is adding features (like geo-restrictions) to Instagram after successfully launching them on Mr Zuckerberg’s beast.
Instagram has a semi-bad reputation for creating update after update, on a monthly basis, but every now and then they get it right. This is one of those times.