Three Instagram Features You Ought to Be Using

Your ecommerce social media arsenal simply isn’t complete without a strong presence on Instagram. Drawing a diverse audience that stretches from Boomers to those not quite ready for a driver’s license, Instagram is a powerful tool in your social media portfolio.

But you know this. And you’re there. You’re already making the most of your Instagram, right?

Maybe.
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But there’s a good chance there are features you’re missing. Features that could boost your scope and help you reach more of your target audience. 

Location Stories and Hashtag Stories in Explore

Help your audience find you when you utilize hashtag and location stories. A fun way for viewers to experience stories and events as they unfold, making use of this features is simple and easy.

While creating your story, you can add a location sticker, or a hashtag sticker, and your story may be included in a larger collection connected to where you are or whatever your hashtag relates to.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Begin your story – make it amazing!
2. Click on the “stickers” icon at the top right.
3. Choose the proper sticker and type in your location or hashtag.
4. Complete your story and click “Next” to post.
5. Voila! You’re done.

Location stories are a fantastic way to draw customers to your business, get out the word about a special event, and even to run contests.

Add Live Videos to Stories

Live video is great, but up until recently, when you share a live video on Instagram, it’s gone as soon as it’s complete. Not anymore. Now, you can choose to share your live video to stories, and when you do, it’s viewable for 24-hours, allowing you to reach a much broader audience.
It’s actually quite simple to do—just create your live video and when your broadcast is done, click “share” at the bottom of the screen. That’s really all there is to it.

Filter Comments
Comments are great. We want comments on our social media content, right? But not all comments are created equally, and some are hurtful or inappropriate. Instagram’s now got a way to address that, and we absolutely think it’s worth taking advantage of to help maintain your professional profile.

Instagram’s offering two filters right now— automatic and manual. The automatic filter will flag/hide comments based on an internal Instagram algorithm designed to catch all those things that are obviously inappropriate. This looks to be the new default setting, and for most businesses, this probably suffices—especially if you’re good about monitoring and moderating your social media.

The manual filter is another great tool, especially if there are specific inappropriate comments that keep popping up. Using the manual filter, you choose the words and phrases to filter, and Instagram blocks them before they ever appear.

Bonus: you can take advantage of both and use the automatic filter and the manual filter to really protect your brand.

To filter comments:

1. Go to “Settings” and scroll down to “comments”
2. Click on it and set the toggles to your specifications.
3. To enable the automatic filter, choose to “Hide Offensive Comments”
4. To enable the manual filter, choose “Enable Keyword Filters” and then enter the keywords and phrases that you’d like filtered out.

By no means are these all the latest and greatest features of Instagram, but they're a good start. And once you really dive in, we think you’ll do just fine discovering all that this particular social media platform has to offer your ecommerce business. 

Got a favorite Instagram feature? Tell us about it in the comments.