More than pictures
What do you think of when you think of Instagram? Filters? Elaborate braids? Food too beautiful to eat? What about reservations?
That’s right – Instagram will soon allow users to book appointments and make reservations directly through a business’s Insta account.
Double tap booking
Instagram envy could now be a thing of the past.
If you’ve been stalking a hair salon that does a flawless cut and color, you can impulse-book yourself an appointment right in the middle of ooh-ing and ahh-ing at a rose gold ombre.
Come across a perfectly plated dish of your dreams?
Make your reservation right now before your phone is covered in drool, instead of forgetting the name of the restaurant.
Then you won’t spend the next week digging desperately through pictures of food for your star-crossed supper soul mate. A brisk tap-tap will earn you an appointment at that fierce nail salon, on point brow bar, or any other reservation-ready Insta-business.
Is there such thing as the perfect demographic?
We previously outlined the demographic profiles of all the major social media platforms, and Instagram users were mostly female.
That means the user base is perfectly suited to a beauty service booking app.
And a full 90 percent of ‘grammers are under the age of 35, which means they’re eager for anything that streamlines a process or softens that constant FOMO.
A drop in the “cool updates” bucket
The cool thing for businesses looking to participate in this feature is that it will give them a solid metric to measure their success on Instagram with.
This isn’t a like, or a follow – this is a real action that, for the most part, will result in more sales for their business.
This upgrade comes on the heels of a number of other Instagram additions. We can now zoom in on pictures (why did that take so long?), upload more than one picture at a time (because, shocker, grammable things don’t happen in isolation, but often come one after another in a long stream of social media gold), and even buy beautiful things directly from businesses’ Instagram accounts.
Who run the world
With this latest feature, Instagram directly challenges platforms like OpenTable and Yelp, and could even pose a threat to fitness class booking apps like MindBody.
Instagram is determined to get users to do as much as possible on their platform, and they’re well on their way to taking over our lives, in the best way.
