Most social media sites start out as being purely user-friendly and slowly shift towards being marketing-friendly, too. Over time, sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter went from focusing all on the user to adding features like ad platforms and analytics information for businesses.

Instagram has officially joined their ranks.

Instagram first made the steps towards being more business friendly a few months back when Instagram Ads rolled out for businesses. Then they announced that you could switch more easily between profiles. And finally, as of last week, they announced some big additions coming to Instagram for business, including business profiles and a few features to accompany them.

The big new features coming soon include business profiles, insights, and promoted posts.

Coming soon: Business Profiles

Right now, there’s only one type of Instagram profile, and that’s a typical user profile. One of the new features coming to us will be the option to convert your current profile into a business profile.

This type of profile will allow businesses to choose how they want customers to contact them, with choices including call, text, or email via a contact button. For brick-and-mortar stores, other users will also be able to get directions to your location.

Having a business profile will unlock other upcoming additional features, like the ability to access Insights and Promoted Posts.

What This Means

The biggest advantage to the business profiles feature (aside from being able to access the two other new features) will be the ability to add more information onto the brief profile page. That contact button could increase communication with your brand. It could also help users know that your account is, in fact, the official brand account based on the contact information.

Right now there’s only one type of profile, making businesses’ and users’ profiles identical

It will be interesting to see how business profiles will automatically rank in Instagram’s new algorithm, both immediately when they’re released and over time. My guess is that eventually, brands will face a more stringent scale of comparison than typical users -as they do on Facebook, and engagement will be more important than ever.

We’ll keep an eye on it here and let you know what’s going on in the next few months.

Coming soon: Insights

This is the feature I’m probably most excited about out of all three. We all already know how valuable Facebook’s Insights (of all kinds) are, and having the same kind of information for Instagram provided by Instagram has the same potential.

While most third party analytics tools offer a lot of great information about your number of followers and engagement rates, none (that I’ve seen) provides information about the demographics of your audience. Instagram’s Insights will.

All of this information will be available through the mobile app.

What This Means

The more information that we have about our marketing efforts, the better, and an on-platform analytics tool will be able to provide more relevant information than most third party services, and it will be free. As Instagram’s algorithm takes effect, it will be more important than ever to know what content is doing well and why, allowing us to continue to create high performing content so we can stay relevant and at the top of our followers’ feeds.

Right now, we can view our followers’ profiles, but we don’t get any other information about them, like actual demographics or interests.

This is where the demographic information comes into play; this addition is a huge deal, allowing us to create more relevant content that’s geared to the audience we have on the platform. Since we haven’t had access to this type of information before for this platform, it’s going to be an invaluable addition.

Coming soon: Promoted Posts

Promoted posts are a feature we’re familiar with on Facebook, and Instagram’s promoted posts will follow the same basic idea; you can turn a regular, high performing post (or just any post, really) into a promoted post, helping you to connect with more customers and build more engagement.

With promoted posts, you can select a target audience or allow Instagram to select one for you. You can end the post’s promotion at any point.

Promoted posts also appear to come with a CTA button to encourage users to take action, though we don’t have any information about what types of CTAs we can use.

What This Means

Promoted posts seem like they’ll be like instant ads- you can promote content that is already doing well, for however long you’d like, to get more eyes and engagement on them, and to potentially connect with a new audience.

You could promote a post with an important announcement, like Ploughshare’s call for submissions, to increase its visibility.

You can create them from the mobile app just by clicking a button and choosing your targeting criteria, without needing to go through the full Create an Ad system on Facebook. This will make promoting content quick and easy.

When are The Changes Coming?

If you, like me, are now crazy excited about the potential of these new features and what they could mean for Instagram marketing, the question on your mind is likely how soon can I get my hands on this?

The best answer that we have is soon. All three of these features will apparently roll out at the same time in the next few months.

The first countries to get access will be the US, Australia, and New Zealand. All other regions across the globe should get access to these features by the end of 2016.

Final Thoughts

For a while now, marketers on Instagram have either had to completely wing it with their marketing efforts or rely heavily on third-party services, that offered features like analytics and the ability to access multiple Instagram accounts easily.

Having access to these features through the Instagram platform will make them more accessible to all businesses, especially those who didn’t want to pay for pricey analytics tools before. It also marks the start of potential additional exciting features designed to increase business’s and marketers’ use of the platform.

Since I know I’m not the only one who is excited for the coming changes, stay tuned and watch our blog (or sign up for the newsletter) for first looks at the new features when we get them.

What do you think? Are you excited for these changes? What are you most excited for? Share your thoughts in the comments below!