Instagram is taking a page out of the Facebook advertising model in now allowing advertisers to promote other user's organic posts as a sponsored content ad.
For example, if an influencer posted a video about a brand on his/her own feed, the brand now has the ability to boost that post to a wider audience.
This is just another step in allowing businesses and content creators to collaborate more closely in content distribution to a targeted audience.
Using the Facebook ads platform, companies can now target an audience beyond just the followers of the brand and creator accounts.
“We’ve long seen that customers want to discover fashion through trusted sources who have credibility, but organic reach on that content has become increasingly limited. So we’re consistently looking for more sophisticated ways like Branded Content ads to serve partner content to the right shoppers, instead of just throwing it into the social ether. Promoting content directly from an influencer’s handle inherently gives the post more authenticity than coming from a brand handle, and we’re seeing significantly higher engagement rates using this strategy.” Liat Weingarten, Old Navy
Each post sponsored via this method will be tagged with a “Paid partnership with” message for complete transparency.
The content creators must grant their business partners promotion rights within their Advanced Settings tab. Business partners will then see a list of posts available for promotion within their Existing Posts section of Ads Manager.
Instructions are available here.
Sponsored branded posts will be rolling out shortly with branded stories available later sometime this year.
