Instagram and online shopping, an increasingly established partnership

More and more web agencies are advising their clients to take their business to social networks, specifically Instagram, thanks to the enormous visibility these new media offer. According to recent research, Instagram has become the main source of inspiration for shopping, especially for buying Christmas gifts.

The same research showed that it is luxury goods that attract attention, mainly among young users, those born from the 1980s onwards, who are more inclined to buy exclusive or limited-edition products online. A trend of recent years is in fact buying valuable items online, such as watches and jewellery, increasingly present on e-commerce platforms.

With the aim of becoming a shopping platform, Instagram has introduced (and is continuing to develop) interesting new features, such as the already tested and launched ability to tag products inside a post and redirect the user straight to the purchase page.

Just these days the social network is testing other new features, starting with the look of each user's profile interface, with the aim of improving its usability. A second update would concern shopping on Instagram: the addition of a button dedicated to the shopping function on business profiles, so as to show several products for sale in a single section with name and price. For private users, they are adding the possibility of creating a sort of “wishlist” to save the products they want to buy and find them again later in a dedicated section.

Finally, some technical improvements have been introduced, such as the addition of alternative text in photo descriptions. Alternative text is a written description of the content of an image, a feature already present in all search engines, to make online browsing easier for visually impaired people through “screen readers”, tools that translate images into text and play it back through speech synthesis.

All these new features serve to make Instagram more accessible to everyone, with the aim of further increasing the number of registered users, which today stands at 16 million in Italy and 813 million worldwide.

With these staggering numbers, the presence on the social network of a company that sells at retail becomes essential to its marketing strategy. Contact NewVisibility, our web agency in Como, for a consultation to improve your online and social media visibility!