In today’s episode of the Gupshup Conversational Messaging Podcast, Beerud and Srini discuss how the Instagram messenger API can be the game-changer for everyone involved—for the brands, consumers, influencers, etc. Tune in to learn about how to make use of Instagram for your brands marketing, commerce, and support.
The Instagram We Love
Instagram is a powerful social media platform that has hundreds of millions of users. It enables its messenger API to present countless opportunities not only for brands but also for consumers. Automated chats through Instagram direct message (DM) gave way for businesses to increase their interaction with consumers and for influencers with their followers. The converging of social media (public) and conversational messaging (private), according to Beerud, made a lot of impact on how brands operate.
“There are things you want to say publicly, and there are things that have to be done privately. If you can do both in a seamless manner, I think that can have some dramatic impact.” - Beerud Sheth
Making the Experience Personal
Beerud thinks that this automation, if done right, could be a rich experience for consumers, brands, and influencers. For example, through trained AI or smart bot, consumers can DM their favorite influencers/celebrities and get an "authentic" response. Influencers, which are on the other end of the spectrum, can monetize from increased engagement, partnership with brands, or by simply using the feature however they like.
"You can ask what you're interested in, and they will answer. It really changes the whole thing, it gives a very personal, intimate experience.” - Beerud Sheth
Everything in One Go
The Instagram messenger API is an all-encompassing capability that can help with brands’ marketing, selling, and support. The platform can now be used to cater to all concerns, starting from the announcement, deals, launches to the selling itself, up until resolving customer issues such as cancellations, returns, etc.
However, Beerud notes that aside from Instagram, there are other channels (WhatsApp, etc,) that brands can use aside from Instagram, so make sure to check those for consumers to have as many options as possible when connecting to brands.
“It just dramatically transforms a brand, a business or an influencer's ability to engage their fans, followers, and customers.” - Beerud Sheth
Bio:
Beerud is the co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, the world's leading platform for cloud messaging and conversational experiences. It is used by over 100K+ customers and developers and handles over 6 billion messages per month. He previously founded and led Elance (now Upwork, a publicly listed company), the pioneer of online freelancing and the gig economy.
Prior to founding Elance, he worked in the financial services industry – modeling, structuring, and trading fixed income securities and derivatives at Merrill Lynch and Citicorp Securities. His graduate research, at the MIT Media Lab, involved developing autonomous learning agents for personalized news filtering. Beerud earned an M.S. in Computer Science from MIT & a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Institute Silver Medal.
Srinivas has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.
Resources:
Gupshup.io
00:01
Listen to insights on how conversational messaging is changing the way businesses and their customers engage. Join gupshup CEO Varun and VP for marketing srini, and an array of guests for conversations about conversations. This is the gupshup conversational messaging podcast.
00:28
Welcome to another episode of the conversational messaging podcast as a sheeny. And as always, I'm joined by season two of this extremely popular podcast. And we're focusing a lot on the innovations that conversational messaging is bringing about in the transformation that it can bring about to businesses and customer engagement across different sectors and verticals. Today, we're going to talk about a very exciting channel or messaging gap, if you want to call it that all of us use and that is Instagram. And Instagram, as you know, has sort of taken the world by storm. And it has spawned legions or not just of users, but also of creators who are creating interesting content, educative entertaining content that people are consuming. And there are a lot of individuals who have become influencers. And a lot of companies that are also adapting Instagram as a as a key channel for them to connect with their not only connect with their consumers, but also get them into their ex to explore their products and to interact and transact with them. So today, we're going to talk a little bit with bureaus about how Facebook has sort of enabled Instagram to be more than just a channel for engaging, but more of a channel for even commerce, and for influencers and brands to do more with it than just interact with just send one too many interactions. So if I can invite you to talk to us a little bit about how Instagram itself is transforming first.
01:56
Yeah, I think when you know, look, when people think about Instagram, they assume we're talking about posts, right? Then any creator, any publisher, can any influencer can put out a post out there. And that post is available to millions of people, right, or to the 1000s of followers, as the case may be. And you know, people can comment on it, you know, interact with each other, hashtag it, whatever. Right? All of that's possible. And yes, that's, that's sort of the popular use of Instagram. But there's been recent developments where Instagram announced messenger API's, right for direct messaging within Instagram. So as you know, Instagram also allows one on one direct messages,
02:40
right? dm says they can do
02:42
exactly right, you can do DMS, and they've now just enabled API's so that businesses or any Instagram user, could be a business could be influencers, could be others as well, right? Could be, they can use this API to enable sort of automated chat conversation using the DM channel. Okay. And that's incredibly powerful. I think what's really happening is the world of social media, and the world of conversational messaging is, is sort of converging. And I think that's going to have some very dramatic impact, and consequences. Because social media is all about public conversation. conversation, messaging is all about private conversation. And as any of us knows, right, there are situations there are things you want to say publicly, and there are things that have to be done privately. And if you can do both in a seamless manner. I think that can have some dramatic impact. And I think we'll talk about some examples and use cases. But that's really what's going on.
03:47
Great. So let's look at this change from the point of view of somebody who follows a brand or or an influencer and also from the point of view of an influencer, looking at followers. So let's say I follow Dwayne The Rock Johnson is one of the biggest movie stars in the world. And today, my mode of interaction with Dwayne is just to see the posts that he puts out very inspiring posts every day. And I might choose to comment on it. Or I can even choose to send him a DM but I know that he has something like 200 million followers, so he's not going to be responding to my DMS. So how is Instagram API? How will it transform my experience as a follower of a big celebrity?
04:27
So I think, you know, exactly enables fans followers now to engage in one on one interactions with the brand with the influencer as the case may be right. And that's powerful. Now, obviously, you know, somebody who has millions of followers will get a whole lot of incoming DMS, right and we need to automate those interactions. But when cleverly done when intelligently done, right, these these software programs or chatbots can really be the trained and programmed to act as if they are that brand, that person, right and influencer. Right. So it's as if it's really Ben Johnson himself talking to you, and you're having a private chat with them. And by the way, as a friend, as a casual fan, you know, you may have certain queries and certain specific things, and so long as it can answer the queries you have, as well as Ben Johnson would, I mean, you don't know, or care whether it's a chatbot or, or the celeb himself. Right. And I think that's the that's the real power, because, because what happens is in public conversations, you know, there's a certain thread or a certain stream of interactions, but in a private conversation, you have the ability to ask who you want to ask, right? And you may be interested in something very different from what are they interested in. And those things are hard to do in public, right, in a public interaction here to cater to sort of the mass audience. But in practice interactions can be very personalized, to be customized. And in particular, it's the fan that's in control of the conversation, right? You can ask what you're interested in, and they will answer so it really sort of changes, the whole thing makes it gives a very personal, intimate, sort of experience.
06:19
Understood. And if I can flip the question to look at it from the point of view of an influencer, let's take a fashion influencer today, who has a loyal following and endorses a brand's or even reviews reviews, New Seasons, new collections and talks about it. How can Instagram API sort of transform the way they engage with their followers? and engagement is also one part of the question. The larger part of the question is Instagram influencers also monetize their followership because they have interactions with a lot of brands, and today, any any marketers out there who few who've leveraged influencers, know that the commercial model is limited to two or three dimensions of Instagram. So you know, you will get charged for, for a post, you will get charged for a story, only get charged for a video that they post, how can Instagram API help influencers to add more dimensions to their engagement with their followers, that that sort of can also help them to maximize monetization capabilities?
07:23
I think the messaging API's for Instagram are a real game changer for brands for merchants for influencers and so on right? Now, look broadly, when we talk about conversational messaging, it, it can enable all kinds of use cases that broadly fall into three categories, right, it's either sort of marketing related, commerce related, or support related, right. On the on the marketing side, it could be, you know, if a if a brand or a merchant is introducing something new, or some, you know, sending out some maybe deals and offers, or has some special, you know, new launches, new product announcements and so on. Basically, they can answer customer queries about you know, what's available, when is it available, how much is it, what it can be used for? And, you know, do you have it in a different color, different size, things like that, right? Similarly, if an influencer is announcing something new, they can, you know, they can use it for, you know, to, to basically begin a conversation about whatever it is they are announcing, then when you get to the second part, the commerce part, I mean, that's where it's really interesting, you can actually enable transactions, right, you can enable purchases. So let's say if, if a merchant is selling, you know, dresses, for example, which are inherently very visual, people like to see these dresses, ask questions about it, and then when they're ready to buy, like literally, you know, with the with a few clicks, they can add it to the shopping cart, purchase it right away and so on. Similarly, for an influencer, which today might just be putting advertising oriented posts, right sponsored posts, could also now introduce a commerce element to what they do, right, and maybe they could sell, you know, virtual content, digital content, my photos and autographed, you know, memorabilia and exclusive material voice messages, personalized voice messages, it could be any, any of that stuff, right? So it opens up many more business models and possibilities. And lastly is sort of, you know, support, right, if some customer has a complaint has an issue. They want to do troubleshooting, cancellations, returns, refunds, things like that. If they post, you know, a complaint out there or an issue, the brand could instantly take that into a private conversation, right, which is mean these individual issues are best resolved in a in a private chat. And the point is you can instantly and proactively respond to any any complaint raised by a customer and instantly take action right and convert a negative post into a positive post very, very quickly. So I think the the possibilities are endless. I mean, it just dramatically transforms a brand, a business or an influence influencers ability to engage their fans, followers and customers.
10:27
Great, thanks for that, because I think really exciting that such a such an important channel is getting this capability and and gupshup is sort of adding the capture of magic, if you will, to that to make it more effective.
10:38
Yeah, I think just to add a little bit to it, right, I think the way... Look, there are newer channels emerging, of course, businesses are doing stuff on WhatsApp. Now you can do it on Instagram. Gupshup also has a channel called gaped. You can do it on multiple different channels, but but the right way to do it is you sort of write once run anywhere, right? You you write a chatbot, you create a chatbot once, and you make it available on multiple different channels. So you can build the sort of rich capabilities and extended or expanded, you know, from WhatsApp to Instagram, to others. And, you know, of course, you can still specialize to a specific channel if it has different features and different capabilities. But still, the idea is, you know, you want to be able to reach all your users in you know, no matter what channel they're approaching, approaching you from.
11:28
And amongst those that you follow on Instagram period, who is that one person or a brand that you would want to want adopting Instagram API so that you can have a personalized conversation with them?
11:39
Oh, I think you know, I love you know, looking at some artwork, paintings, things like that. I think it'd be interesting to see some of that be available and accessible OBS digital RT I can very quickly and easily get it could be interesting.
11:54
That's great. And I think for any brands out there, influencers out there listening to this, I think Instagram messenger API for Instagram, along with the you know, the value adds that the cup ships, conversational messaging platform ads, can can really transform engagement with followers and it will also transform followers engagement with the brands that they form. So thank you so much, once again, and we will be with you pretty soon with another episode with another innovation from a conversational messaging. Thanks for your time.
Sounds great. Thanks.