A new year brings new social media goals and predictions! Instagram, the beloved social darling of the millennials and fashionistas alike, continues to be an important part of children’s brands’ marketing strategy. Here are three things to keep in mind for 2018:

#1. Stories are basically the new Instagram

Not only does it conveniently live at the top of the feed, but Instagram Stories embodies the ‘insta’ factor that made Instagram the most powerful visual platform in the world. The last few rounds of algorithmic change have basically killed organic growth, as well as the much-loved chronologically ordered Instagram feed.

Stories bring this feeling back and allow brands to connect in a very personal way to their audience. There’s just something about raw, spontaneous content that when done well, and authentically, did what old Insta used to—build a community (in this case, customers!).
The recent rolling out of Instagram stories highlights—Stories content that can be featured permanently right at the tippy top of your profile, cements the importance of this emerging tool.

#2. Bye, bye organic growth, hello pay to pay
This is no surprise to anyone at this point, but in 2018, managing paid Instagram campaigns will be an important piece of your digital advertising pie. Not quite ready to fork it over to Instagram? Forming an Instagram Pod is a handy, though time-consuming, workaround to beat those algorithm blues.

How does it work? You and some friends get together and commit to immediately responding to each other’s Instagram posts in order to ‘trick’ the platform into lifting the post for greater visibility (speed and level of interaction is a key metric for which posts get buried and which see the light of day).

#3. Instagram will start looking more and more like a bonafide sales funnel as shopping features are rolled out and refined.
Mercifully, 2017 saw the introduction of links in Stories as well as the integration of Shopify which creates clickable links in the Instagram feed for individual products. Instagram has always been a critical social media platform for fashion brands, and this shows no signs of changing anytime soon!

This is a welcome development, after all, conversion is the whole point of social media, but it will also contribute to the overall fatigue that plagues a social network as it ages from organic community to legit media channel.

That will make authenticity and creativity more important than ever!

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