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TECHNOLOGY
Wednesday 3rd November 2021

Instagram link stickers are available to everyone – it's a game changer

By Aaron Brooks, co-founder of Vamp.

Instagram fulfilled one of its most frequent user requests when they announced they’d be giving everyone the ability to add links to Stories. CEO Adam Mosseri said: "We’ve received a lot of feedback over the years on limiting links to accounts with >10k followers, and we heard you."

This will be game-changing for the millions of Instagram users with less than 10k followers. What was once a major milestone in Instagrammer’s growth journey will no longer hold the same weight, and new users will have the same ability to drive traffic and app downloads as more established accounts.

Here’s three ways this update will impact the social media marketing landscape.

1 Micro influencers will become even more powerful:

Micro influencers have steadily gained popularity as the influencer marketing industry has matured. Brands understand that they have higher engagement rates and are often more trusted than influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers.

This update makes them even more powerful as collaborators. In partnering with them, brands not only benefit from sky high engagement and potential to reach niche audiences, but they can also drive website traffic via Stories. I’d expect to see demand for micro and nano influencers increase and more Stories being briefed as a deliverable as a result of this update. It’ll be interesting to measure the increase in conversions from organic influencer content over the coming months.

2 Instagram becomes more valuable to SMBs:

Small businesses can now start driving website traffic, right from the beginning of their growth journey. They’ll be able to drive their followers (however few) to websites, ecommerce platforms and booking forms.

This will streamline the usual ‘link in bio’ method and is likely to drive far more clicks. Vamp’s social teams tells me that as soon as they reached 10k and gained access to links in Stories, they saw a significant increase in the traffic they could drive, vs using links in bios. This should place starting an Instagram account and creating Stories high on the priority list of small businesses going forward.

3 A renewed focus on engagement over reach:

10k followers might become a less coveted Instagram achievement, but a high engagement rate will not. In fact, a high engagement rate and strong Story completion rate will become even more sought after metrics. Because if your goal is to drive action and link clicks from your Stories, you need to make sure your followers are watching and interacting with them.

Brands and creators can start training their followers to use link stickers by posting valuable Story content more frequently and using Instagram’s other interactive stickers. Polls, emoji sliders and quizzes are all great ways to engage your audience and encourage them to interact with your content, pushing your Stories to the front of their Story queue.