And to make matters worse, we’re going to start seeing branded content posts from “influencers” who we don’t even follow (like Bridgett from Noom – above).

 

I understand social media can’t (and shouldn’t) be free but force-feeding us as many lousy ads as can be squeezed into our stories and posts is turning Instagram into garbage. The ads shown above are ones I found on my feed yesterday – every second post is an ad! And I don’t have an iota of interest in any of them.

I’m not one of those people who is opposed to all ads on principle. I follow a slew of brands and influencers, e.g., Wildfang, Akimoto Kozue, Morgenstern’s. The difference is that those brands offer something of interest to me, and it’s solely my decision to follow them. They are not being foisted on me by the overlords of Instagram.

For those of you who haven’t heard the latest news, Instagram just introduced a branded content feature to bring sponsored influencer posts to our newsfeeds—whether we follow those influencer accounts or not!

Instagram claims 68% of its users want to interact with creators. While that might be true in theory, I find it hard to believe that people using Instagram would equate finding a sponsored post in their feed as “interacting with a creator.”

Per emarketer

• 69% of US marketers plan to spend most of their influencer budget on Instagram.
• Before the Facebook-owned social network introduced this branded content feature, there was no direct revenue stream for the platform to make money off the 500,000 active influencers on the platform.

From Instagram’s Business Blog:

Brands/Advertisers will work in tandem with their influencers to turn the influencer’s content into ads which the brand will then pay to have posted as an ad – to one and all.

 

Read on below for more on how this horrid branded content strategy will work.

 

One of the biggest requests from brands is the ability to incorporate branded content posts into their advertising strategies.

Using the tools available on the Facebook ads platform, businesses can reach targeted audiences beyond the people who follow the brand and creator accounts.

There are two main steps for creating branded content ads.

• Branded content creators need to enable their business partners to promote their post as an ad.
• Once they do this, the business partner will see the post on Ads Manager and can choose to run it as an ad in feed or stories format.

Branded content ads for feed will be available to all advertisers in the coming weeks and for stories over the coming months.

And this is just the beginning (for the ad masters) but the end of Instagram as we’ve known and loved it.

 

Bottom Line.

As an Instagram user, this is dismal news. From a brand perspective, the jury is out.

A lot depends on how this is executed. As you can tell, I’m not optimistic.

So while Instagram celebrates this as being “just the beginning,” many of us (the platform’s users) see this as a sure sign that its best days are behind it.

Sadly, all good things must come to an end.