You will not disagree that 2020 has been a year full of downs and downs and well while we were all stuck in quarantine, we could at least use the internet to our benefit. Tell me you did not connect with an old friend or tried a 5-minute quick recipe? While everything was drop-dead, Instagram had a life of its own and quite obviously then popped up trends that were new, fun, and for all so we all eventually gave in because of boredom to some and enthusiasm to many.
But were these trends just empty and had on the purpose of benefit? From a business point of view, it cannot be true because you can always benefit from an opportunity that has crazy mass. And now that 2020 is ending, we must actually look back and evaluate what was behind the trends and what are these popular trends that benefitted businesses. Come along!
CIRCULATION THROUGH KNOWLEDGE AND INFORMATION:
Instagram is an inspiration for youth and it is a place for communities and large amounts of different opinions. Since the use of Instagram increased considerably and with the changing times even the people are more woke socially with opinions, circulation of knowledge and information had to be a trend soon. The posts where the knowledge of certain terms and opinions were passed had become quite a thing on Instagram and people actually spent time reading and sharing them in their stores. Maybe under influence a lot of times, but it existed and it could have been a really effective strategy for businesses to connect and influence their strategy. And not going to lie, a lot of them did. So, if you are still a business that is looking for an effective way to connect with the audience, start picking up the issues your audience may like, and voila, start interacting!
LIVE-CLASSES:
Be it Vogue or the popular Instagram influencers, everyone started taking out some time and coming live to educate people about their lifestyle and their secret sauces. This made people excited and left them with an urge of wanting more knowledge and insight into their lives. It was a very effective way to utilize time and give what you got. It did not even take up so much effort into recording and editing the video. You just had to click one button and people were able to see you live. They felt like someone was giving them a class for free and that is the best way to connect with people. To keep giving them. And that is why this proved to be one of the effective trends that worked in the favour of our favorites.
AR BRANDED FILTERS:
You might have taken up those challenges where you had to guess a character or guess the typos in the sentence or maybe answer some questions about yourself. These were a fun little thing in quarantine and these are known as AR filters. Brands and influencers created a fun concept and designed it around a filter for people to save and use on their stories. This made them popular because, on the top of the stories, these brands and influencers got credits, and sometimes even in the design part it showed who had designed the filter. This brought brand recognition without trying so hard and that is why it benefited brands as much as it benefitted consumer’s interest.
SHOPPING FEATURE:
The shopping feature was a smart move from Instagram’s side as well as from the side of businesses. As soon as you click the explore page on the app, you see the section “shop” pop up. And when you open the section, you see varieties of brands promoting and selling everything. You can tap and check out the details like prices and a lot more. This was new and hence went viral. The small effort to include shopping on the application benefitted millions of businesses because now they could directly sell products with their audience and hence it created the scope for people using Instagram from everything and anything once again!
SMALL BUSINESSES STICKER:
Instagram launched a small business sticker in and around April or May because it was a tough time for small businesses that had just started out before the quarantine. This feature helped to enable the customers to tag and share the profile of these businesses on their story w=so that their followers can see and refer to the same. This enabled many small businesses to sustain and hence that is why the sticker went viral for absolutely positive reasons and results. Many influencers put up the stories of the businesses they had connected with and it was an overall growth strategy that 2020 desperately needed.
So, these were some viral trends that the year 2020 saw on Instagram. As we open our arms to 2021, we are also open to new possibilities and trends that will help businesses and influencers grow, together and hopefully by helping each other. But only the time and trends of Instagram can tell that!