Instagram has started testing its version of Facebook Pages
Instagram's business profiles add a "contact" button for people to email businesses or get directions to their location, per screen shots posted by Later.
Facebook owns Instagram. In case you had forgotten that, Instagram is becoming increasingly more like Facebook. It’s started selling ads the same way Facebook does. It’s going to start testing an algorithmic feed just like Facebook’s. And now it’s started testing business profiles that are similar to Facebook’s Pages.
A couple of months after Instagram said it was building profile pages specifically designed for businesses, content marketing firm Later has posted screen shots of them to its blog. An Instagram spokesperson declined to comment on the screen shots specifically but said in an email: “We are testing new business tools coming to Instagram in a few months.”
According to Later’s screen shots, Instagram’s business profiles look almost identical to its normal profiles — except for one thing. The business profiles introduce a button that people can click on to contact a business. The screenshots show that clicking on the button opens up a menu from which someone can opt to get directions to a business’s location or send it an email.
For those paying attention, Instagram’s contact button echoes a change Facebook made to Pages last September, when it rolled out the first major redesign of Pages since 2012. As part of that overhaul, Facebook made the buttons people could use to contact a business more prominent on the page. Facebook made that change because it wanted to be a more useful and more direct connection between businesses and their potential customers. Apparently, now Instagram is saying “me too!”
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