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How Your Brand Can Make The Most Of Instagram’s New Slider Feature

Recently Instagram introduced a brand new feature, one that allows users to add up to 10 photos or videos to a post, in the form of an album or slider. This new feature lets users swipe through theirs, or other peoples content, similar to that of Snapchats storytelling feature, without the time limit.  

While this new feature doesn’t really open new doors for individual users and has even seen many viewing this as the death of Instagram’s unique storytelling style, this new addition offers plenty of new opportunities for brands and businesses.  

Effective Ways Your Business Can Benefit From Instagram Albums 

With this new album feature working as an easy solution for creating free interactive and creative posts, they act as a great way for brands to share rich, narrative driven imagery, likely to encourage more engagement, let’s look at just how your business can benefit from this new carousel feature. 

 

Show Off Your Products 

If you’re looking to show off your products or even give your followers a glimpse of your new range, creating a specific album to show off these products, can be a fun way to show off what you have to offer. A series of images in a carousel style, works very similarly to a carousel ad, letting you show off any variations in colour, close ups of the product and even lets you show the product in a look book or in the context it’s used. 

If possible you could even include a video of your product within the carousel post, letting you give a 360 degree look at how your products look, along with images that back this up, something you would never get the opportunity to do without this album feature.  

Tutorials

If you sell products that can be used within a tutorial such as cooking appliances or jewellery crafting material, then through using a sequence of images or even videos, you can walk your followers through the steps they will need to take in order to use your products or create something special, inspiring them to look further into your products and encourage them to buy your products. 

A tutorial is often all it takes to get people to take the plunge into exploring a product or service, with many not wanting to use a product if they are unsure how, or unsure what to do with it, so why not consider using Instagram albums to inspire your followers? 

Tell Your Story 

Working in a similar way to Snapchat and Instagram stories, with Instagram albums you can show off your stories, splitting the story of your brand down into multiple parts, making them even more digestible and more engaging for your followers. This feature also allows you to repurpose your stories, making sure the great content you’ve created for Snapchat and Instagram Stories, doesn’t get lost after 24 hours and being shared with less die hard fans of your brand. 

Use Instagram albums to share your stories as an addition to your regular profile so they can live on forever, showing new audience that your brand is creating content all the time, instead of your content being left hidden behind Stories features.  

Before & Afters 

Working particularly well for businesses such as builders, beauticians and hair salons, the carousel style of the albums feature can allow your brand to show off before and afters of your work, from decorating to hair styles or even makeovers. This can be an effective way to show how your services have improved your customers lives and benefited them, as well as demonstrating the services you provide. 

This can work for a variety or different services, such as cosmetic services, hair stylists, make up artists, personal trainers and even building services. So why not show off what you can do with before and after images on Instagram albums? 

Best Of Albums 

If your business is celebrating a special event or anniversary then you can easily use the albums feature to put together an album that showcases the top moments of the month, year or of the event. Doing this can be an effective way to show off the behind the scenes of your brand, as well as demonstrating how positive your business is and all the great things it’s achieved.

A best of can work for a number of different occasions, from an end of the year roundup to a summary of all the best parts of the month within your business, with careful planning you can utilise albums to showcase everything.  

How To Use Instagram Albums 

Unsure how to use utilising Instagram’s newest feature? Here’s how: 

  • Tap the + icon in the middle of your screen as you usually would to upload a photo or video 
  • Tap the stacked rectangle icon in the corner which allows you to upload multiple items
  • Choose up to 10 photos from your album
  • Crop or move your images around the frame, tap next
  • From here you can adjust the order your images appear in
  • Apply your filters 
  • Add your caption and location if needed, finish tagging anyone that may need tagging
  • Share your album! 

 

Instagram albums are still relatively new, so it’s important you utilise them when possible, jumping ahead of the competition and leveraging the carousel features to increase your visibility before everyone jumps on the bandwagon. 

Don’t worry about your changes, instead focus on how you want social media to work for you and take the steps needed to focus on engaging with your audience and ultimately on telling the story of your brand. 

 

Article By
Sarah Seymour,
Published: 3rd March, 2017
Categories: Marketing

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