Facebook Prepares Instagram For Global Advertising

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Facebook has finally decided to use Instagram to earn some ad money, keeping in view its huge popularity. Instagram ads, which were open to big brands only, are now also available to small businesses in over 31 countries, the social network said in a blog post.

Facebook Prepares Instagram For Global Advertising

Making full use of Facebook resources

New options such as 30-second video spots and ads with prompts such as “Shop Now” and “Install Now” are now available to advertisers. Instagram ads were available in just eight countries but will be available in more than 200 countries by the end of the month.

Apart from Facebook’s main app, photo-sharing application Instagram is the first property of Facebook to reach a significant level of advertising sophistication. For providing advertisers with more options, the company has integrated Instagram with its resources, indicating how the company’s chat apps, Messenger and WhatsApp can make more money for the company.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously said that he will not be ramping up money-making on these properties until they hit 1 billion users. WhatsApp is close to touching that mark as it currently has 900 million monthly active users, the messaging service revealed last week.

User satisfaction a priority

Making sure that the 300 million Instagram users do not get annoyed with the ads is the next step. “We will continue to improve the feedback mechanisms within Instagram to give people greater control and improve the relevance of the ads they see,” the company said.

Instagram has been testing advertising for the past two years. The platform has used Facebook’s network of marketers and tools for expanding its offerings at a fast pace. Instagram has been testing new advertising capabilities for the past few months and has found big demand in areas like travel, e-commerce and entertainment. Marquee is a new ad format added to Instagram recently, which helps advertisers reach out to mass audiences by making use of a photo app such as a movie premiere.

The Facebook-owned company said that expanding globally is a priority, as around 70% of its users are located outside the U.S. eMarketer, a research firm, projects that 14% of Facebook mobile ad revenue will come from Instagram by 2017.

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