What’s new for Instagram Autumn 2022

At Agility we are always tracking what is new across the platforms.  Below is the ‘hot off the press’ news from Instagram.

With over 1.4 billion monthly active users across Instagram, it’s important for social media marketers to stay up-to-date with new features to keep their audience engaged with new content.

We have put together an overview of the upcoming features Instagram are set to introduce or have recently begun rolling out. Read on to find out how you can get ahead of your Instagram game when posting and creating content for your visitor attraction, albeit a zoo, theme park, farm park or heritage attraction.

Adding multiple links to your Instagram bio

This feature is excellent news for attractions that allow Company Pages to have multiple URL links in their bio.  

Currently, Individual accounts can  link just one singular URL in their profile bio’s, with many pages using third-party tools such as Link Tree and Metricool to provide links to other external platforms associated with them.

Instagram have introduced this feature to ultimately expand business building potential, giving us the option to link through their various social platforms as well as external webpages.  This will remove the need for third-party apps, and also keep the webpages embedded into Instagram itself.

This tool will be extremely beneficial to visitor attractions, allowing them to link through their website, and other social platforms. It also allows businesses to promote upcoming events by linking specific landing pages.

It is not currently clear exactly how many links you will be able to link to your profile, but this feature should shortly be rolled out, having been in beta since early October 2022.

Introducing longer Instagram stories

Instagram stories were first introduced in August 2016 to encourage further interactions between profiles. Instagram have since made multiple changes to benefit the user’s experience, with the latest being the introduction of longer Instagram stories.

Instagram stories can now featured as a 60-second long video clip. This means that video stories will now play in one, long continuous clip, removing the breaks in between clips that would appear glitchy between segments.

Video content posted to stories must be exactly a minute or under a minute long, otherwise the remaining footage will be cropped and removed from the video.

So, what does this mean for visitor attractions?

There are some concerns about this update, with its practicality in question. As the length of the videos are now much longer, it means users can’t skip through segments to find a particular piece of information within the content, and instead must watch the full story duration. This will make it harder to get your key points across, whilst keeping audiences interested long enough to watch the entire length of the video.

How can you make longer video content work for you? 

For longer video content, the main focus needs to be timing and communication!  To make sure you keep your content interesting for the full 60 second duration, here are our tips.

• Use the added text features on stories to highlight the key points from the video in your 60 second story.   
• Consider using an incentive or special announcement to keep your audience waiting till the second half of the video?
• Communicate key points at the beginning of the video, as this makes the ‘stand-out’ information more easily accessible for the audience and less likely to be skipped when the viewer moves on.

Creator Portfolio

Influencer are becoming a vital part of visitor attraction marketing and this new feature will help both the influencer and the visitor attraction engage.

This feature is currently is known as ‘Creator Portfolio’ and  allows Influencers to create a portfolio that pitches themselves to a brand.

The aim of the Creator Portfolio is to help influencers in securing marketing deals with brands, and to help companies easily identify who they wish to work with from reading through a creator’s portfolio.

The Creator Portfolio is set to be split into the following components:

• Show off your content. Share insights of what you love to create and what works best.
• Express your individuality. Videos, photos, and text that express who you are and what makes you unique.
• Let brands view in creator marketplace. Make your portfolio public in creator marketplace so brands can discover your best work.
• Start the conversation. Share your portfolio to start talking to brands about partnerships.

This feature allows creators to share their profile directly with potential partners whilst remaining within the Instagram app.  Previously this would have to be done outside of Instagram or on email.  Instagram obviously like this feature as it keeps all the traffic and interest inside Instagram itself, although it has been heard that you’re also able to share a link to your portfolio outside of Instagram.

This feature, once rolled out to all accounts, will be great for brands looking to work with influencers as it provides an overview of the creator themselves. Visitor attractions will be able to easily identify which creators they want to start the conversation about a future partnership.  

Always looking ahead

Social media is forever changing, with new features and tools constantly being introduced to improve consumer and business experience. Make sure that you and your brand are keeping on track with the latest updates to keep your profile on-trend and relatable to you audience.

This blog was written by Drew Batten, Marketing Coordinator of Agility Marketing, a boutique marketing agency specialising in Digital Marketing for Visitor Attractions.