As you may have already noticed, it had barely been a week since it was announced. Direct instagram; New Instagram feature to send direct messages with photos and videos.
So far, we haven't decided to post anything about this new feature, simply because we wanted to try it out first and find out information about how brands and other social media experts use it. And in summary, we have drawn some conclusions from which for us are the main advantages and disadvantages of Instagram Direct.
To give you an idea of what the new Instagram Direct function is based on, we could say that it is very equivalent to the Twitter direct messages, except for a few differences that we mention below.
Possible uses of Instagram Direct for your profile and some things to avoid doing
Obviously, at the same time as sending messages to your friends and acquaintances on Instagram, the Instagram Direct function has many more purposes, mainly when we talk about Instagram profiles for companies and brands. It is exactly these types of profiles where we want to focus, since they are the most interested in obtaining potential clients for their business through this platform, which makes them susceptible to abusing this new functionality.
Advantages of Instagram Direct
- Exclusive content. The opportunity for power send direct messages on Instagram has given many commercial and brand profiles the ability to reach their followers on a more personal level. As an example, this makes it much easier to notify the winner of a contest on Instagram or also offer a series of special offers and exclusive content to the followers most committed to the brand.
Creating a group of followers Vip To those who send exclusive content with Instagram Direct that only they can later see, it makes these followers feel special in some way. This could undoubtedly lead to higher sales conversions for any business profile or any brand.
And now you can also send animated gifs 😉 - Send messages to anyone. Unlike direct messages on Twitter, with Instagram Direct you can send messages to any user, even those who do not follow you. When you send a direct message to a person you do not follow, that message goes to the request list and it is that person who decides if they want to receive the message or ignore it. It is clear that if they ignore the message in the request list, the message will not reach them, but at least you have the opportunity to send them and in several cases we assure you that the messages are accepted. This is so because if not, all Instagram users would be receiving direct messages from anyone (be it someone you follow or not) and at the same time indiscriminately, without even having the opportunity to approve or reject them, undoubtedly it would become a perfect tool for SPAM. .
- Shared comments and likes. Anyone who receives a direct message will be able to see the comments and Pleasures of others. This is really interesting because in this way you can generate feedback among all the people who have received the message.
- Personalized service. If you promote your business or brand on social media, you know that a large part of the job is listening to your customers or followers and giving them answers to their questions. Instagram Direct gives you the opportunity to approach and communicate directly with your followers and ask them, by way of example, how you can help them make their online purchases simpler and faster, or also what aspects you can improve in your products to improve them .
- Delete sent messages. You can delete any direct messages you have sent so that no one to whom you have sent them can see it again. This, which a priori does not seem like an advantage, can be very interesting when generating a call to action to your followers. In other words, if by way of example you send a direct message with a special promotion only for your best followers, you can indicate that the message will be deleted the day after it is received, from this dynamic you encourage them to act quickly and take advantage of the offer before the message disappears.
Disadvantages of Instagram Direct
- Special promotions and coupons. This is rather a disadvantage for normal user profiles. It is very good to be up to date with the promotions of your favorite brand through Instagram and by the way get a discount coupon, the problem comes when you follow many brands. Why? Very simple, because Instagram Direct is ideal for brands to carry out promotional campaigns among their most loyal followers And if you are a follower of many of them, it is likely that in a short time your list of direct messages will be saturated with publications of this type. If left unchecked, your direct message list would be the closest thing to a mailbox full of online store subscriptions and coupon websites.
- Send limit. If you use Instagram Direct to promote your products, you should know that you can only send each message to a maximum of 15 people at the same time. If you have a profile with hundreds of followers, and you want to send the same message to your 100 most loyal followers, you will have no choice but to forward the same message several times. This is undoubtedly a rather cumbersome thing to manage for brand profiles with a large audience.
- UNWANTED MAIL. Returning to what seems to be the big problem of Instagram, the new function to send direct messages can become a great claim for the bots from Instagram and spammers. The users spammers They will soon take advantage of Instagram Direct to indiscriminately send SPAM messages requesting followers, Pleasures, comments or anything else you can think of. At this time, there is no access to the functions to manage direct messages from the Instagram API, Indicating that bots they still can't use it. But we assume that Instagram will soon include them in its API.
- It does not make it possible to send messages from the computer. Even though Instagram can already be used from the computer, it still has many of its restricted functions, and to at the moment, this function does not allow send direct messages on Instagram from your computer.
These are for us the main advantages and disadvantages of Instagram Direct, a very powerful tool if you know how to make good use of it, but also a viable gateway to SPAM if we don't control it.
