No doubt Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are grinding their teeth as they read about this one.
Yesterday, Social Media Today Influencer and digital marketing advisor Dhariana Lozano posted this image to her Twitter feed.
Could it be? Could Instagram be rolling out the capacity to post a single update across several profiles at once?
As confirmed by TechCrunch, this is now, in fact, being rolled out, starting with iOS.
The feature - which was actually first spotted in testing back in December - will be welcomed by social media managers who are working to maintain several accounts - but then again, it kind of goes against the original content ethos that Instagram was founded upon. While it may make things easier, and it may add more content to Instagram's ecosystem, it will be repeated content, duplicated across multiple accounts.
Is that a good experience for your audience, or the audience of the profiles you manage? That call will come down to your individual assessment, and likely, the crossover potential between the different groups who follow each respective entity.
But then again, it could be great for promoting major sales events across various different accounts for a single brand (Nike, for example, has 'Nike Football', 'Nike Sportswear', 'Nike Basketball' etc.), or for raising awareness of an issue or cause across multiple profiles. There could be ways to utilize the functionality well, but it does seem like the most common usage will be to cut down time spent in posting, which will result in a lot of the same content being shared out from multiple accounts.
Remember when Systrom and Krieger left Facebook last year due to conflicting opinions about the way forward for the platform? I'm guessing this type of activity was among their concerns.
TechCrunch also notes that Instagram's working on a new way to make it easier to share images from Google Photos to Instagram, making it easier to re-purpose your saved images. So there's that - but the big news is obviously multi-profile posting.
Will you be using this in your social management process?
