Facebook has done an excellent job making Instagram a more business-friendly platform over the past year or so. The ability to manage multiple accounts and in-app analytics have been real game-changers in my opinion (cliché, we know, but true in this case). Yet, there is still one feature, already available on Facebook, that we would LOVE to see brought to Instagram.
The ability to invite accounts that interact with your posts to follow you.
We wrote about how this works on Facebook here. We highly recommend checking that entry out if you’re not sure what we’re talking about. You’re definitely missing out on “free” Facebook likes if you’re not taking advantage of this built-in feature.
How would they implement it?
Clearly, the user experience would suffer if anyone could simply type a username in and send an invitation. Something like that would be abused insta-ntly. See what we did there? The key to rolling out such a feature would be for Facebook to govern our ability to invite others. Here’s our thinking:
Your ability to invite a new follower would be based on an interaction threshold between the two of you.
Perhaps something like 10 post likes and/ or comments within a one-week window of time, for example. Since so many people like images without regard to who posted them, some threshold of interaction with one account would show interest, and warrant an invitation to follow in our opinion.
Currently, you can invite anyone who likes a single page post to like your page on Facebook. So this isn’t too far off of something they've implemented in the past.
Instagram already collects data on liked images, so doing this would simply require coding around the threshold we mentioned above and a new “Invite” tab on our profiles. We think it's the next step in making Instagram even more business-friendly.
Thoughts?
What do you think? If you’ve got any feelings one way or another we would love to hear them. Would invitations ruin Instagram for you or would it enhance the experience? Send us an email at nick@watchsm.com or contact us here.
Personally, I know that I’ve probably liked dozens of suggested posts from certain users without following them. I would welcome their invitation.