How to become instagram partner

What You Need to Know About Instagram Paid Partnerships

It’s easy to waste a lot of money on social media partnerships that don’t do anything for your business. If your business is centered around a product or service that photographs well, you’ll probably be looking at Instagram as a potential marketing option. What do you need to know about Instagram paid partnerships before you start investing?

What is an Instagram paid partnership?

First, what are Instagram paid partnerships? If the average user sees a

post tagged with “Paid Partnership With…

” and a brand name, that means that the person who shared it has some sort of commercial relationship with the brand. It also means that they received compensation for their post, though depending on the relationship this could be money, product, discounts or other forms of payment.

Initially, these partnerships were limited to the audience that the poster had on their account, or what they could manage with hashtags but Instagram’s new paid partnerships tool gives creators and brands the option to allow brand accounts to

promote an individual creator’s posts

on an account with a larger following.

Not only does this make it easier for brands to showcase product-forward content created by their brand ambassadors, but it also helps to support the platform’s dedication to transparency and clarity when it comes to sponsored posts. This is due to the change in FTC guidelines when it comes to sponsored advertisements. Before the change, more than

90% of influencer and celebrity endorsements

were in violation of those guidelines.

Why are these partnerships important?

If you’re setting up a partnership program, this gives your brand more exposure — both through your brand’s page and your partners — than you would normally receive through regular traffic and hashtag navigation. These posts can also be added to your brand’s stories, for more exposure.

For the average user, these partnership programs help them tell the difference between authentic posts and paid advertisements. It’s useful for people who don’t want their feed peppered with ads — users can just unfollow the influencer that’s making the posts if necessary.

As an added incentive, using the partnership program gives both the brand and the influencer the tools to see exactly how well their content is performing. Both parties have the option to analyse those metrics, so they can work together to see what’s working and what’s not. Influencer marketing is expensive, costing anywhere

from $1,000 to $1 million per post

, so it’s important to keep track of those metrics so you’re not wasting money on things that don’t work.

Setting up your Instagram paid partnerships

Setting up an Instagram paid partnership is fairly simple and straightforward for business owners. First, you need to be approved by Instagram as a partner. Once you’ve been given that feature, start by accessing Business Settings and scroll down to Branded Content Approvals.

Toggle

on the “Require Approvals” switch

, and from there you’ll be able to approve influencers as business partners. Once they’ve been approved, you’ll receive a notification any time they create a post or a story and tag you in it. From there, you can either decide to remove yourself from the tag or approve it as a sponsored post.

Mistakes to avoid with IPP

Setting up an influencer marketing campaign is easy, but it’s also easy to waste a lot of money on posts that don’t bring you any traffic. What

mistakes should you avoid

when you set up an Instagram paid partnership?

Firstly, don’t go into any sort of influencer program without a plan, objective and goal in mind. Ask yourself what you want from and what you expect to achieve with this marketing investment. Setting up a plan and having an objective in mind will keep you from making simple but costly mistakes.

Be smart about who you choose to partner with. Using random influencers that don’t align with your brand will just end up costing you money. Working with micro-influencers that hang out in your niche rather than macro-influencers and celebrities that might not really know or like your brand will help you create more effective advertisements and more authentic engagement.

Instagram is a great platform to use if you can find great influencers to partner with. Getting started with the Instagram paid partnership program can help you whether you’re trying to build a media empire or just bring some new organic trafficto your website.

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Instagram Partners: Helping Businesses Grow

Late last year, we introduced the Instagram Partner Program. With the addition of Instagram Partners, advertisers can tap into a set of vetted experts to get help driving business on Instagram. From setting up ads, to managing a business’ Instagram community, and creating and sourcing content, Instagram Partners help businesses in three key areas: Ad Tech, Community Management and Content Marketing. And today, we’re excited to announce a new specialty for the Instagram Partner Program—Media Buying.

Partners in Action

There are now more than 50 Instagram Partners helping clients around the world. In the six months since we launched, we’re seeing success stories from various businesses with varying goals. Movie subscription viewing service, Fandor, wanted to run video ads on Instagram to reinvigorate its brand among a specific demographic. Working with Instagram Partner, CitizenNet, they decided to widen the video reach by running ads across Instagram and Facebook. Fandor created several videos, and CitizenNet set up the campaign, targeting and placement. At the end of the campaign, Fandor saw great results—getting nearly 60% more video views than they initially expected.

CitizenNet helped us drive the engagement and awareness we were hoping for. Instagram and CitizenNet will continue to play an important part for Fandor.

Albert Reinhardt, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Fandor

And jewelry company, Brilliant Earth, worked with Instagram Partner, Kenshoo, to retarget visitors to its website with personalized product ads. Kenshoo helped set up new dynamic ads on Instagram—uploading Brilliant Earth’s entire product catalogue into Business Manager. That way, Brilliant Earth could automatically deliver ads featuring multiple, related products from ones people were browsing on their site. As the campaign ran, Brilliant Earth saw people visiting 24% more pages at a 42% lower bounce rate compared to traditional retargeting channels.

Kenshoo helped us reconnect with our audience on a new platform and to serve more personalized ad content based on user preferences. These ads are resonating with our Instagram community, and they’re engaging at stronger rates compared to our traditional retargeting channels.

Kristina Simonsen, Brilliant Earth

Media Buying Partners

With the new media buying specialty, our expert partners SocialCode and Resolution Media can help you with Instagram advertising operations.

Being the first agency to earn the Instagram Media Buying badge will provide us with access to advanced education and support as we continue to innovate our specialized capability. We are especially excited about the additional benefits we can deliver for our clients with deeper access to Instagram product development teams, data specialists, and innovation resources. These are critical assets as we continue to help our clients win in this increasingly important ecosystem.

George Manas, President Resolution Media

Our media buying partners are dedicated to helping businesses—large and small—with market-leading media buying services to reach specific marketing objectives.

We’re delighted to be designated by Facebook as both a technology and media partner for Instagram. The Instagram platform is driving massive sales and awareness for our brand partners. We’re also excited about growing adoption of clients running campaigns across Instagram and Facebook with the same objective. Our brand partners are proving that combining the power of both networks drives consumer awareness, action and reach.

Laura O’Shaughnessy, Co-Founder and CEO, SocialCode

Right now the new media buying specialty is available in the US only, but will expand to new countries in the future.

If you need help advertising on Instagram or managing your account, find an Instagram partner today. Or, if you’re a developer interested in building Instagram tools or learning more about the Partner Program and its criteria, review our requirements and developer documentation to learn more.

How to Use Instagram Branded Content Tools for Your Business

Instagram Branded Content Tools may seem like a feature only big brands use, but trust me, it can be a real asset to your strategy, no matter what your capabilities!

You can have full control over which posts influencers have tagged you as a paying affiliate and get real-time insight into how tagged posts are performing - making your partnerships with influencers and bloggers more efficient, transparent and traceable.

What are Instagram branded content tools?

Let's clarify what "branded content" is:

According to Instagram's rules, branded content is author or publisher content that mentions a business partner on a commercial basis (for example, when the partner paid the author or publisher).
Any content created by a blogger, influencer or ambassador as part of your brand development strategy.
Any message that was commissioned, sponsored or paid for by a brand.

Instagram has created tagging and analytics features for businesses and creators, branded content tools that help make paid brand partnerships more understandable to people scrolling through the feed.

They are designed to help businesses and bloggers work together in a more transparent way. Which will be very helpful as businesses and brands increasingly need to be crystal clear in their disclosure of paid partnerships.

For content creators, being able to mark a post as an official paid partnership adds an extra layer of authenticity to their content - presenting them as a recognized brand partner.

This can be a huge advantage for authors looking to build their reputation and get more partnerships. Especially if they are micro-influencers trying to expand their business portfolio.

So whether you're a brand or an Instagram content creator, using branded content features is a win-win situation!

Who is eligible to use Instagram's branded content tools

To get started with the branded content tools, you'll first need to comply with Instagram's policies.

Here is an overview of who the function is available to:

Content creators/publishers must have a business profile or Creator account. Business partners must have a business account to be marked as a paid partner.
Content creators/publishers must comply with the Instagram Community Guidelines.
Content creators/publishers cannot be government officials subject to government regulations or ethics.

Once you meet these requirements, setting up and using Instagram's branded content tools is very easy.

How to set up branded content on Instagram

There are different steps for businesses and content creators to start using Instagram's branded content feature.

Brands & Companies: Approving Requests, Viewing Affiliate List

All you need is a business account to start tagging in branded content posts from your partners, influencers or brand ambassadors.

By default, you will have to manually approve all branded content posts in which you have been tagged. If you want automatic approval, just go to your settings, select "company" and open the "branded content approval" tab.

Here you can turn on or off the "manually approve labels" switch.

If you want to control all marks, it's better to leave manual approval.

In this tab, you can also view all incoming Tag Requests and see a list of all approved Business Partners that you work with on a regular basis.

Adding a content creator as an approved business partner will speed up the entire process because they never have to wait for you to approve their request before they can click the Publish button.

Influencers and Content Creators: Setting up branded content tools and requesting a partnership tag

As a content creator, you will need to set up the branded content feature in your account before you can start tagging companies in your posts.

To do this, follow these 5 simple steps:

Click on the menu icon in the top right corner of your profile.
Open Settings.
Select "Account"
Select "Branded Content Tools"
Click "Access Tools"

Once you have enabled the feature in your account, you can start tagging business partners in your posts.

To do this, select "Advanced Settings" on the photo or video while recording.

Select tag business partner and then search for their account.

If you want to tag a story, then when creating it, click on the link icon at the top of the screen, select "Tag business partner".

Note: Business Partners must have a Business Profile to appear in search results.

If the profile appears in the search results but does not allow you to tag it, you will need to contact the business partner and ask for their approval.

Once your post has been tagged, the Business Partner will be notified and will be able to see your post's information and statistics.

How to use branded content posts on Instagram for your advertising strategy

One of the main features of branded content tools is that you can easily promote a brand with a business partner's tag in the feed and stories.

This is a huge benefit for brands looking to get more out of their advertising spend, as tagging a product or service from a well-known blogger or influencer can carry much more weight in the eyes of a potential customer.

To do this, content creators must enable the "Allow business partner to promote" option in the advanced settings of the Instagram post.

After the content creator does this, affiliates will see the post in their Ads Manager and can start promotion in feed or stories.

Instagram branded content tools are a great way to make your blogging partnerships more effective and trackable, and be super transparent with your audience.

And you can easily promote posts tagged with branded content, attracting a new audience.

Quality profile and content - how to start your business on Instagram?

Anna Kuznetsova

Updated by July 28, 2022

Content:

Creating an Instagram business account: name, avatar, biography
How to take beautiful photos for Instagram using a smartphone
Best apps for photo editing and delayed posts

Instagram is a popular social network where the main content is photography and video.
Cafes, restaurants, boutiques, flower shops and all kinds of activities that can be “beautifully photographed” have long been cutting money from a single Instagram account.

This is not only an opportunity to share photos and videos with friends, but also a powerful tool to support brand loyalty, the ability to be closer to customers, know their interests and attitudes towards your product.

It is not necessary to rent an office, equip a store or have an Internet site to start a business, sell goods or provide services. A systematic approach, a little creativity and you can earn money with just one page on Instagram.

Before you start promotion, you need to do the preparatory work. Competent filling determines whether your buyer will find the product or service of interest on your page.

Let's start with the creation of a "skeleton" for the Instagram online store.

1. Creating an Instagram account: avatar, name, biography

Getting to know your account begins with a description of the page and a photo in a small circle: a catchy avatar, page title, a description of what you do and how to contact you.

How to come up with a name for an Instagram business account

Most likely, you have already come up with names for your business. Remember that on Instagram, the profile name is always written in Latin.

The name is the brand name, semantic power in one or two words; it is what describes your activity; what the user will score in the search to buy your product.

Need ideas for a company name? Read the article How to choose the right company name.

It is best if the nickname matches the names of the company and does not contain unnecessary words and commercial messages (official, the best, shop, etc.). It is also good if you have one nickname for all social networks. It will be easier for subscribers to remember or find you:

All social networks are consonant with the name of the Lamoda online store itself.

Avatar

Do not neglect the principle of “dress by clothes”.
Avatar is the main recognition attribute of your profile. The person by which you will be met, remembered and fall in love. The picture should be clear and not contain unnecessary details:

In the example above, the manicure studio adheres to the principle of simplicity and minimalism: picture and text on a white background.

You can't fit a lot of elements in a small size photo, it will look out of place and incomprehensible to the subscriber:

The flower shop uses an iconic logo, but the picture is cluttered and the font is chosen so that it is difficult to read the name. A photo as an avatar for a business account is also not the best option: the small size does not allow recognizing details or faces.

What then? How to look aesthetically pleasing for a subscriber at the first meeting, not to be full of your already established subscribers in the list, while perfectly conveying the essence of the activity?

The company logo is fine, but with a slight modification. The thing is, for the logo to look great on the profile page, it needs to fit nicely into the circle. How to do it?

Can be made by hand using graphic programs. Or create with Logaster and download a ready-made logo for Instagram. The required logo size is 110px x 110px.

How to create a logo online? The Logaster service will help you choose a logo from a dozen options for the name of your business:

You can change the font, color, arrangement of elements to create a unique and adaptive logo for Instagram:

After editing, save the created logo.

An avatar that is pretty in every sense should contain information that the subscriber needs. After all, it is by the description that a person will determine whether he is interested in your activity.

How to fill in your Instagram profile information:

Add or edit this information by clicking the "Edit Profile" button at the top of the page. You need to clearly understand what exactly is important for a person to see on the page he is interested in: and provide this information in the description (products or services of the company, address, slogan, etc.).

1. Profile picture;
2. Biography;
3. Phone number;
4. Email;
5. Geodata.

Instagram page descriptions

Research shows that we remember 20% of what we read and 80% of what we see. But as information develops, people stop perceiving everything superfluous. Even if you have placed important information between the lines, a person can simply scroll through it. You have 5 seconds to grab the attention of a potential customer who has landed on your page for the first time.

Make sure that the required information is filled in the profile:

company name;
a brief description of what you are doing;
contacts;
coordinates;
link to the site.

If even before creating a profile you figure out how to correctly fill in the necessary information, then upon completion, you can safely forget about the need to update your biography or contacts. What certainly can not be said about the content itself. Here you need to always be in trend and be creative. Since photography is something that must be liked by potential customers of your business.

2. How to take good photos for Instagram using smartphone

All previous work will be appreciated and effective with good content on your page. In order to create it, it is not necessary to be a photographer, have expensive photographic equipment or contact professionals.

Here it is enough to know 3 basic rules of photo content:
1. Use a smartphone with a good camera;
2. Take pictures in daylight;
3. Always use the same photo editing filters to create a unified account style (we'll also talk about mobile photo editing apps).

Decide what mood the profile conveys to your reader: calmness - pastel colors, minimalism (suitable for textile stores, children's clothing, etc.) or rich colors - energy, expression. To make the photos in the profiles harmonize with each other, place light, dark or photos with color accents in a checkerboard pattern:

Of course, this is not necessary and creating your own unique profile will be better than generally accepted templates. But if you are just starting out and there are no ideas yet, you can use this one.

Remember that a new user always pays attention to the profile as a whole, and not to individual pictures. And your subscriber is in the photo in the feed. Make sure to keep both of you interested.

3. The best applications for photo editing and delayed publications:

VSCO is a good set of ready-made filters. Choose the one that best suits your product. Experiment with multiple photos and filters. Do they harmonize with each other?

Download VSCO on iOS

Download VSCO on Android

Lightroom . Helps create a unified white balance on your Instagram profile.

Download Lightroom for iOS

Download Lightroom for Android

Of course, the program has much more potential, we advise you to study it to create your stylized account.

Snapseed . The program will help create an exposure or highlight the accents in the photo.

Download Snapseed for iOS

Download Snapseed for Android

UNUM . Create profile photo arrangements before they are published:

Download UNUM for Android

Download UNUM for iOS

Photos taken and processed. But this is half the work on the post. The next step is a description or text.

Text in posts

Decide on the purpose of your presence on Instagram: is this a platform from which you want to sell, or a customer connection tool (suitable for existing stores. Here Instagram is not the main source of sales, but in the future it can increase them significantly).

There is an option to hire a copywriter or SMM specialist. But the owner may well manage the business account. After all, no one knows your product, its properties and capabilities as well as you.

In fact, there is nothing difficult in writing texts for product posts. But still, always “try on” the text for yourself: what a person should think after reading and, most importantly, what to do.

In the text, give real benefits to the person, not characteristics that may not always be clear. For example: you sell portable batteries for phones. In the description you write 1000 mAh. But not always people know how much it is. And if you write: “1000 mAh - up to 5 phone recharges” - a potential client will evaluate whether the product suits him and save him from unnecessary thoughts. Here he sees the value of the battery and its application to his needs.

A post should always contain a call to action: order, buy, call.

Avoid template words and applications in the text: “best quality”, “lowest price”, “unique production”, “reliable service”.
Replace them with the actual properties of the product:

“best quality” for “80% of the composition is steel”;
“low price” - always write the real price, comparing yourself with competitors;
“unique production” – we make orders based on your preferences;
“reliable service” - 5 year warranty.

Without water, with real use cases.
In posts, try to balance between commodity posts and useful content. So you will look like an expert in the eyes of the reader, become an authority, build a trusting relationship.

Hashtags

Hashtags for the page are necessary for easy search of the necessary posts.

Alternatively, place a post with your categories in the profile header with an active link (instead of the company's website):

Create your own unique hashtags:

These work well for a range of products. For example, the tag #cupcake_Instabakery: the subscriber will be able to quickly find all the cupcakes you offer.

Geolocation

Decide where you want to sell your goods: if it is outside the city and you have an offline store, geolocation is definitely needed.

But if you go to an audience outside your region, it's better not to set the location. This can scare away potential consumers. They will think that it is far away and will not pay attention to the product.