Fill Every Spot! 6 Instagram Features Every Business Should Know

Instagram is a powerful social media platform, and businesses can effectively use its features to market themselves. About 36% of people use it as their search tool, and it has over 2 billion active monthly users - Quite impressive, right?

When it comes to social media marketing, we’ve always bent with the winds. Instagram decided to become one such wind, but filled with opportunities to build your brand advocacy. With this in mind, let’s have a look at the new features Instagram has to offer, and how businesses can use it right to make it their growth engine.

6 Instagram Features That Help Build Your Business to A Brand

Need I say how essential it is to stay updated on all the new features when it comes to social media marketing?. Let’s look at the latest features that help to leverage Instagram marketing for your business.

1. Broadcast Channels
2. Enable Reminders for Posts and Lives
3. AI Images for Stories.
4. Instagram Story Templates
5. Scheduling Posts Within Instagram
6. Lead Forms on Instagram Profiles

Let’s try and understand each one of these in greater detail so you can apply them to help your business grow.

1. Broadcast Channels

What are Instagram Broadcast Channels?

Broadcast channels are one-way communication groups where you can share messages, and your followers can react to them. This serves as a direct line to your most engaged customers, allowing you to connect with them without fighting the noise of the main feed posts. You can even consider this as a community where your most interested followers can participate.

Let’s say you offer “Martial arts classes for kids”, you can offer

• Sneak peeks at your upcoming classes.
• Exciting content like “move of the day” demonstrating a specific technique.
• Conduct polls
• Share student spotlights or answer specific questions
• Share early bird offers.  
• Behind-the-scenes posts

And so much more. By using this feature creatively, you can boost client engagement and create a more loyal customer base.

2. Enable Reminders for Posts and Lives

What are Instagram Reminders?

Instagram reminders as a feature that enables businesses to notify their followers about their upcoming events and releases. They can help to increase signups for your events. While you create a post on an upcoming event, you can simply “Add Reminder”. If your clients are interested in it, they can click “Remind Me” and receive reminders.

For example, you can opt for this option when you conduct special workshops and events. Let's say you’re giving a one-day online session on “cooking for children”. You can add reminders for that post so that your clients can set up those reminders, get post notifications, and attend those sessions without missing. You can also schedule posts in your business account.

3. AI Images For Stories

What are the AI story creation features on Instagram?

People are using AI-generated images everywhere, so why not on Instagram too? You might’ve spent a lot of time brainstorming for a perfect Instagram story, well, it won’t take much time anymore. Instagram is now offering AI-generated images for stories. How many posts do you need? It'll create it all in seconds.

If you click the profile picture displayed in the top left corner of the app. The story creation page opens up. Choose “AI images” and start describing the background picture you need for your story.

As an added feature to stories, you can now keep your followers in the loop about upcoming events, products, and offers with “Notify” stickers.

4. Instagram Story Templates

What Are Instagram Story Templates?

Brands get a 70% retention rate if the users generally watch the stories they post. With this in mind, you can make your Instagram stories more interesting with trending story templates. These story templates are predesigned layouts or frameworks for your stories. You can even create Instagram reels using trending templates.

You can even create a new trend by making your own template and letting people join you. For example, if you’re a yoga instructor, you can create a template saying, “If you’re seeing this, post your favourite asana for this week”. Interested people may join you, too. This way, you can create more customer engagement with your stories.

5. Scheduling Posts Within Instagram

What is Scheduling on Instagram?

You can now prepare content for your regular post in advance and set up a specific date and time when it should go live. You don’t need third-party software for this anymore.

Start posting your content as usual. Click on the “More Options” button and choose “Schedule this Post,” and choose the time slot you want.

This new feature now avoids the need to use third-party software to help post your Instagram posts. This feature helps you to save time and execute your strategic Instagram marketing plan with ease.

6. Lead forms on Instagram Profiles

What are Instagram Lead forms?

Instagram lead forms are used primarily to collect information about potential customers directly on the platform without leaving. These are pre-filled mini forms, which you can customize according to the information you need. For example, if you’re running a kids gym, you might need to know the age of the child; you can add “what age group your child is in?”.

These are primarily placed on Instagram ads, but you can place these forms on your Instagram bio too. These forms can bring in more leads since your new followers can fill them up directly from your Instagram profile without leaving the app. After you've used all these features, you can analyze which one suits better for your business using Instagram Insights.

For more insights on Instagram marketing, read: Growing a Business on Instagram: Most Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

In addition to being a fun place to post pictures and interact with people, Instagram has become a place to grow businesses, too!

While you can effectively market your business here with all these tools in your Instagram account. You always need the right platform to run your business seamlessly. The one that helps you seamlessly manage your booking schedule and automate your front desk tasks. This way you run your business and it’ll not run you!

Omnify can help you with this by effectively managing your service bookings and product purchases. Get started with us and let us take care of all the time-consuming tasks for you, freeing you up to focus on building your brand.