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It has been awaited for several months, Instagram finally launches Business Pages with real local information about points of sale (address, geolocation, hours, phone, website, etc). In this article, we explain how they work, what they are for, how to create them, and then how to update them.
Business pages and Instagram accounts, what is the difference?
You have long known Instagram Accounts like the Burger King account with 1.6 million followers, the Fnac account, Promod, or even LCL! Each brand has its Instagram account with its share of posts, followers, and followings. However, it is rare that each point of sale in a national network has its own Instagram account with good management, regular and quality posts. For example, Franck Provost’s central account has 53,000 followers and very high-quality posts mostly from professional photographers. Yet, if you are a Franck Provost customer, you actually go to a local hairdresser of the network, which often does not have an Instagram Account in its name. In this case, you might share photos of your new haircut when leaving or look for inspiration before going there!
Instagram has therefore created a new type of Business pages, automatically generated, which are “Places” where people can tag themselves. So, if you go to the Franck Provost in Orléans, you can access photos from users who tagged themselves in this local Business on Instagram – often other customers! Yet this Business does not have Instagram Accounts and is often unaware of being referenced there.
Above, you can clearly see the difference between an Instagram Account on the left and a Business Page on the right with user photos. Thus, having Business Pages in addition to the National Account allows users to:
Know where a photo was taken (and possibly visit the Business in question) or share a good address with their followers.
Access local information of a point of sale to possibly contact or visit it.
In the context of a search on Instagram, it is finally possible to search either Accounts, Hashtags, or Places. Above, for the example of Fnac, we observe that while the National Account appears first, Business Pages are starting to take an important place in Instagram’s structure.
How are photos added to your local pages?
As shown above, photos for which Instagram users have tagged themselves in your Business automatically appear on your Business Page without any monitoring possible on your part. Here, the Instagram account of the client company Cemex posted a photo of the point of sale that received over 1500 likes and many comments: the popularity of the Cemex Instagram account thus benefited the Ducasse Sur Seine restaurant, as the photo was tagged there!
When posting a photo, Instagram users are geolocated. Just before going live, Instagram asks the user to add a place to tag themselves, even with a list of suggestions based on geolocation: in the example above, it is the second mobile screenshot where the suggestion is “Paris La Tour Eiffel.” The user can also search for a specific place to tag themselves as shown in the last screenshot.
How to create and update your Instagram pages?
Whether to highlight your products, concept stores, events, employees, or promotions, Instagram Business Pages are today a great opportunity to attract customers to points of sale and make your organisation known locally (not to mention the SEO aspect).
Yet many networks have Instagram Business Pages that are partially created, poorly managed, or present incorrect local information, whether phone number, hours, or website (see example below of data found on Instagram - up to date).
Since 2012, Instagram has belonged to Facebook, which today leads to a deeper integration between the two companies. While Waze’s points of sale database is not linked to Google’s despite its acquisition in 2008, the relationship between Facebook and Instagram is different.
Thus, it is currently IMPOSSIBLE to create, claim, delete, monitor, or modify the information of a Business page on Instagram! Instagram’s local data system is directly linked to Facebook’s and Facebook Business Pages. An Instagram page therefore shows the same information as its Facebook equivalent, as shown in the example below.
To manage your Instagram pages, it is therefore important to properly manage your visibility on Facebook via local Business Pages.
For networks with several dozen or even hundreds of points of sale, the subject can become very complex, especially when you want to update your data on other platforms like Waze, Foursquare, Google My Business, or Apple Maps. At Partoo, we automatically manage local pages for over 50,000 points of sale on about twenty platforms including Facebook and Instagram.