For brands that want to increase web traffic and monetize their Instagram accounts in one step, Dash Hudson's LikeShop is the must-have solution. With a single click, followers can go from your Instagram feed to any page on your site. It’s simple, seamless, and helps users easily navigate to exactly what they’re looking for.
If your brand has products for sale, and an Instagram account, it only makes sense to utilize the Instagram shopping feature. Besides being one of the most popular social media apps with a massive user base, it’s also extremely engaging. These high levels of engagement are the perfect opportunity for brands to share, promote and sell their products to consumers and followers who are genuinely interested.
Setting up shop on Instagram also boosts brand exposure, drives product discovery and even eliminates the middle man that can lead to consumers dropping off. Selling on Instagram makes it simple for users to buy directly from your site without ever having to leave the app.
Brands engaging followers through meaningful connections are more likely to entice them into shopping on Instagram. With LikeShop, marketers get the best features of every link-in-bio option, and all of their stats at a glance, in the same place they schedule, measure, and publish their content.
Many brands are selling on Instagram with this feature. However, not only is LikeShop a monetizing solution for brands, but it’s also an opportunity to create major added value for your audience. You don’t have to use it exclusively to sell products on Instagram—you can also send followers to news articles, promotions, collaborations, or anything else you want to share with them
A link-in-bio solution is a URL found in a brand’s Instagram profile that users can tap on to go straight to that brand’s landing pages. Solutions like LikeShop create a customizable feed that turns social media content into a digital storefront or magazine.
Like any marketing tool, measuring KPIs for your link-in-bio tool is essential for streamlining your strategy and getting the results you need. We collected data into the LikeShop performance of brands in the first three quarters of 2022 to help you understand the best practices of this social media marketing staple, as well as seasonal shifts in click-through rates.
There are a couple of things you need to do in order to set up Instagram shopping natively. First, make sure your account is an Instagram business account. On your profile, go to the settings section, tap business, and select the Set Up Instagram Shopping link.
Once you click this option, it’s time for you to set up your product catalog through your Meta Commerce Manager. Within this Facebook Business feature, you’ll have the ability to add a catalog. You can start by selecting your catalog type, and then you can manually upload product information (500 x 500-pixel images, descriptions, price and SKU) or connect a partner platform like Shopify.
Knowing how to set up shop on Instagram is one piece of the puzzle, another is knowing what to do and how to get the most out of your shop. Here are six things you can do to ensure your efforts don’t go to waste.
LikeShop is a great way to assess how your content strategy is functioning. Is your audience clicking on your LikeShop posts? What types of images are more effective at promoting follower action? What caption formulations garner the most movement? And finally, what are the call-to-actions that compel people to head to the link in bio?
When measuring your performance, the click-through rate (CTR) is definitely the best place to start. You want to look at the percentage of followers who are opening your LikeShop page and clicking on content. Your historic CTR is important, but understanding where you stack up against the major players in your industry is also absolutely essential for a true picture of your results.
We calculated the click-through rates of all LikeShop users for the first 3 quarters of 2022 and segmented them by industry and quarter to give you a better idea of where your brand sits in your competitive landscape. A CTR of around 70% seems to be the general percentage marketers should strive to hit, with some fluctuation of 10-20% higher or lower depending on your specific industry and seasonality—in general, Q1 & Q2 performed higher than Q3.
Now that you have the percentage, you need to know how to achieve it. On the visual side, Instagram users across industries are persuaded to click on celebrities and creators. The majority of top-clicked posts have a photo tag, or mention another account. Caption length does not seem to be a factor in performance. There are top performers with lengthy captions as much as there are with short ones. Captions get the most amount of traction when:
Some of the highest click-throughs come from CTAs that directly name the action you want followers to take. For example, using words like "shop" instead of just saying "link in bio." This tactic is even more successful when the CTA is followed by a description of the benefit they get when they take the action, like: "Click the link in bio for/to [fill in the blank]" or "find [fill in the blank] at the link in bio."
On the flip side, a subtle approach is much more successful for brands in the fashion industry. In fact, a lot of the highest-performing posts for fashion brands don't have a call to action at all. This means that the audience has already been educated on the behavior and does not need to be reminded every time items are available to shop (but it’s still effective to add CTAs once in a while to refresh your followers’ memories).
For links, the number of clickable items do not affect post performance. There's an even mix of single-link posts and posts with multiples. The common thread across all topics and industries is to pique people's interest. Think about what your audience is interested in, would be intrigued by, and can't get enough of. Those posts will garner the most traffic.
Integrating LikeShop in your Instagram strategy is a great way to use all the tools at your disposal and consequently optimize all touchpoints on the marketing channel. It can help you sell on Instagram, unlocking a whole new revenue stream, while also enabling brands to turn Instagram into a major growth driver. Now that you know the secret to hit that high bar you've set for yourself, you can meet and surpass it every single time.
Yes. Instagram shopping gives the ability to sell directly through posts, stories, live streams and advertisements.
No. There is no need to obtain a business license to sell products on Instagram. That being said, it’s still important to adhere to Instagram’s Commerce Eligibility Requirements.
No. It is completely free to set up Instagram shopping and sell products. The only thing that comes at a cost is advertising if that is something you explore when choosing how to sell on Instagram.
LikeShop is a link-in-bio solution that sends your audience from your Instagram posts to your website in one tap. With LikeShop, your brand is able to leverage Instagram to send customers directly to your storefront or digital media, and it is fully trackable with the use of UTMs.
LikeShop.me is the URL destination that brands use in their bio to link to their LikeShop.
LikeShop is a part of the Dash Hudson platform, and comes as a part of your package with a number of other powerful features to help you navigate the competitive social media landscape.
LinkTree and LikeShop both offer options for brands to add multiple links to their bios with one single link in bio — so, what's the difference? LinkTree has both free and paid versions, and is a stand-alone feature, meaning social managers still need a separate tool to pull in social analytics, and data from their site clicks. LikeShop is a feature available within Dash Hudson, that's perfect to bring your audience straight to your storefront, or any other page you want to direct your audience to. LikeShop is perfect for marketers looking for a single social tool they can plan and schedule content from, use to help define their strategy, and pull in data and insights from their overall social performance — including site clicks. This offers a meaningful analyzation of your audiences journey from your social pages, to your website.