For $3.99 each month, Instagram users can now pay for Instagram Plus, a premium subscription that allows users to share their stories for up to 48 hours, measure rewatch insights and customize the font of their profile bio.
Which, for most users, will provide a modicum of fun as they tweak what they post and check their stats. For artists, however, these new features can help them connect to their digital audience and provide further insights on who their fans are. Meta announced the new program on Thursday (June 4), with Facebook and Whatsapp also rolling out paid subscription services.
New features among the rollout include Story spotlight, which allows for a story to be made a priority for friends; multiple story audiences, where users can create an audience list and share a story to a targeted crowd; story extend, which allows for Instagram stories to last for 48 hours, rather than the standard 24; story rewatch insights, to learn how many times someone rewatched a story; search viewer list, to check if a specific person viewed a story; a custom bio font, so the font of a profile matches the user’s aesthetic; and up to six profile pins.
Features such as multiple story audiences could prove helpful for artists, giving them the potential to connect with their biggest fans and provide content to them directly, rather than with the broader public, and allow them to segment audiences more than simply into a close friends list. Story extend could also prove helpful for album and song announcements, allowing fans more time to view them and potentially increasing engagement.
As tour marketing continues to push toward targeted campaigns for fans in each market, the new features could also allow an artist to curate an audience list of fans in each city so they can speak to them directly ahead of a show. Artists like Cardi B have taken to social media while on her recent tour to speak to fans planning to go to her next show, challenging them to be better than the crowd the night before, for example.
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With insights into how many times a specific person has viewed a story, artists could potentially use that information to determine who their biggest fans are. As for the custom bio font, it provides another opportunity for artist branding and lends a creative way for their profile to match a new album era.
Additionally, with six profile pins available, artists who have created a series of posts to support a new album release will be able to allow fans to easily find their biggest highlights.
Social media remains a bit of a handful for artists, with myriad platforms that reward engagement in different ways making it sometimes difficult to keep up with everything at once. Some of these features seem designed to make it easier, then, for artists and creators to help parse that information and make it further available to more fans, in a more targeted way. Instagram will remain a free service with its current offerings, with the subscription allowing for an optional upgrade. Facebook Plus will be available for $3.99 per month, while Whatsapp Plus will run at $2.99 per month.
