Instagram is used by about 12% of digital buyers in the U.S., which makes it a great place for businesses to connect with their audience, reach potential customers, and ramp up sales and revenue.
In this article, we’ll discuss 12 Instagram social commerce features to help you grow your e-commerce brand and drive stronger connections with your target audience.
1. Instagram Stories Highlights on Your Profile
What’s the point of creating great content if it disappears after 24 hours? Sure, it gives a sense of exclusiveness and is great for time-sensitive promotions, but you don’t always want all that beautiful work to go to waste.
That’s where Stories Highlights comes in. This feature allows you to save and share spur-of-the-moment content with your audience without posting it to your feed. To create a highlight:
- Click on the “+” button at the top right corner of your profile
- Select “story highlight” from the drop-down list.
- Select the stories you want to highlight and click “next.”
- Add a cover image and title to your highlight
- That’s it! Your Instagram story highlight should appear on your profile.
Make sure to label your Story Highlights and categorize them clearly. If one highlight category becomes too big for people to search through realistically, check if you can delete some stories from there or split them into smaller batches.
2. Shoppable Stickers and Instagram Checkout
Shoppable stickers and Instagram checkout enhance Instagram’s e-commerce capabilities, making it a powerful tool for businesses to reach their audiences directly.
Instagram Shoppable Sticker allows businesses to tag products in their stories. When viewers tap these stickers, they can see product details, such as pricing and descriptions. This makes shopping more straightforward and integrated, giving potential customers the information they need without leaving the app.
On the other hand, Instagram Checkout takes this a step further by allowing users to purchase products directly within the Instagram platform without being redirected to an external website. When a product is tagged and the viewer taps for more information, there’s an option to “Checkout on Instagram.”
Users can quickly buy products they discover on Instagram by entering their payment information once and saving it to their account, streamlining the purchasing process.
3. Collaborative Posts
Instagram allows users to publish content together via collaborative posts. The users appear as co-creators, and the post shows up on both of their profiles, sharing the same comments and likes.
This feature is handy for collaborations between influencers and brands or mutual promotions between two profiles, as it helps maximize the post’s reach to both users’ followers simultaneously.
To initiate a collaborative post, one user creates a post or Reel as usual, then taps “Tag People” and chooses the option to invite a collaborator by searching for their username. The collaborator then receives an invitation to join the post, which they must accept before the collaboration can be finalized.
Here’s an example from tl;dv and Semrush.
4. Embedded Instagram Stories
Bring Instagram Stories to your website with Juicer. Juicer lets you embed Instagram Stories on your website as a beautiful social media wall. That way, website visitors can interact with your social content without leaving your site. Juicer-embedded Instagram Stories walls are permanently available, meaning they don’t expire after 24 hours. You can add call-to-action buttons to your Instagram Story wall so people can shop for items directly from your social feed.
5. Posts Archives
Not every post needs to stay around forever. If you have posted content in the past that doesn’t fit your current branding or leads to many questions and confusion from people who encounter the old content, consider archiving it.
Doing this instead of deleting them gives you continuous access to the comments under the content in case you need them while keeping your feed clean, focused, and up to date with your latest branding strategy.
To archive your Instagram posts:
- Open the post and click on the three dots at the top right corner of the page
- Select “archive” from the drop-down menu
6. Instagram Live
Instagram Live is a feature within the Instagram app that allows users to broadcast videos to their followers in real-time.
When someone you follow goes live, their profile picture will appear with a colorful ring around it and the word “Live” under their profile picture in the Stories section at the top of the feed. Viewers can interact with live broadcasts by sending likes and comments, offering a real-time way to engage with the broadcaster.
Instagram Live offers a range of possibilities for your ecommerce brand, from Q&A sessions, tutorials, and behind-the-scenes looks at events to casual conversations. Once the live broadcast ends, you can save it to your Instagram profile for anyone to watch later.
Going live allows your audience to engage with you directly, which boosts their trust and allows you to tap into feedback from real followers.
Learn more: How to go live on Instagram
7. Broadcast Channels
An Instagram broadcast channel is a public, one-way messaging feature that allows businesses to send direct bulk message updates to their audience.
Anyone who joins your channel can react and reply to messages you send or vote in polls you create in the channel, but they cannot send messages. Since your broadcast channels are public, they are discoverable by anyone on Instagram.
How it works:
- Creation: Creators can create a broadcast channel from their Instagram profile.
- Invitation: Followers can join a broadcast channel by tapping on a link or QR code shared by the creator.
- Messaging: Creators can send text messages, photos, videos, voice notes, and polls to their channel members.
Think of it as a private newsletter or exclusive club for your followers. It’s a great way to strengthen your connection with your audience and keep them informed about your latest activities, including product releases, upcoming events, marketing campaigns, etc.
8. Insights Dashboard
There’s more to Instagram metrics than just likes. Regularly check Instagram’s Professional Dashboard to stay on top of your account’s insights.
On your Instagram dashboard, particularly if you have a Business or Creator account, you can access various insights that help you understand your audience and how they interact with your content. Here’s what you can typically see:
Activity Insights
- Interactions: the total number of actions taken on your account, like profile visits and website clicks.
- Discovery: how many people see your content and where they found it, detailing reach and impressions.
Content Insights
- Performance of individual posts, stories, Reels, and IGTV videos: Shows likes, comments, saves, shares, views, and the reach of each content piece.
- Posts insights allow you to see the content that performs the best over a specified time, helping you understand what resonates with your audience.
- Stories insights provide data on viewer interactions, including replies and exits, giving clues on what keeps your audience engaged.
Audience Insights
- Growth: tracks follower increase or decrease over time alongside the sources of your followers (e.g., whether they found you through a hashtag or your profile).
- Demographics: information about your followers, including age ranges, gender, and top locations (cities and countries).
- Follower activity: shows when your followers are most active on Instagram, helping you to pinpoint the best times to post.
To access these insights, you have to switch to a Business or Creator account since these features are unavailable on personal accounts.
9. Instagram Notes
One of Instagram’s latest features is Notes. It allows you to share short, written content, much like Twitter, except it blends in with the Instagram UX. Notes can be 60 characters long, and you can share them with followers who follow you back or with people on your “Close Friends” list. Notes will appear above your direct messages in your inbox and disappear after 24 hours, similar to Instagram Stories.
E-commerce brands can make the most of Instagram Notes by using it to engage with their audience in a more personal and immediate way and create a sense of urgency and exclusivity. They can use Notes to:
- Announce flash sales or limited-time offers.
- Share quick updates or reminders about upcoming product launches.
- Provide exclusive discount codes to their “Close Friends” list.
- Engage followers with short, interactive messages or questions.
- Promote new blog posts, videos, or other content.
10. Pinned Comments
Sometimes, a customer question or comment in the comment section goes more viral than the content itself. If you want others to see this comment instantly, pin it to the top of the comment section.
It could be comments that answer frequently asked questions or customers who share positive reviews or success stories. This helps new visitors quickly find valuable information and builds positive brand perception.
11. Pinned Posts in Your Feed
If there’s a post that gives a lot of important information, something great for branding, or a post relevant to a campaign you’re running, pin it to the top of your page. This means it stays visible at the top of your feed even when you start posting other content.
Use this feature to highlight key products, promotions, or brand messages. This keeps your most influential content front and center but doesn’t stop you from creating new posts.
12. Create Auto Reply Responses to Common Messages
Running a business account on Instagram means you’ll often get the same question repeatedly in your DMs. Simply referring people to the website isn’t ideal — they reached out for a reason.
You also want to engage with customers promptly, but keeping an eye on your inbox takes time. Luckily, Instagram created a feature to help you out: quick replies. They enable you to save and reuse responses to frequently asked questions to save time and ensure consistent, accurate replies. Here’s how:
- Go to Settings and navigate to the Business or Creator section.
- Select Quick Replies.
- Create a shortcut that’s relevant to questions you usually get. For instance ”delivery costs”. Then, you type out the complete response that will appear whenever you type the shortcut.
This Instagram feature saves e-commerce businesses time and ensures that customers are informed quickly to continue their shopping spree.
Bring Instagram to Your Website With Juicer
Your Instagram efforts don’t have to end on the platform. With Juicer, you can display your Instagram feed on your website via a social media wall. That way, website visitors can engage with your content — improving your reach and overall brand visibility.
Learn more about Juicer’s Instagram embed features.
