Ads From Influencers You Don’t Follow Are About To Hit Your Instagram Feed And Stories

You may soon spot influencers you don’t follow in your Instagram feed—recently, the Facebook-owned photo sharing platform announced it is rolling out what it calls “branded content ads.” This will allow brands to make influencers’ sponsored content posts appear as ads so a bigger audience sees them.

How it works

Now, posts uploaded by creators using Instagram’s ‘paid partnership’ tool (which signposts when content has been paid for) will also feature a toggle that says ‘allow my business partner to boost’—Brands who paid influencers to post sponsored videos or images on their Instagram profiles have had their reach limited to that particular influencer’s following on the platform—Before brands can use influencer posts as ads, the content creator must grant their business partners (the brands they have relationships with) access to promote their posts. Once the creator — or influencer — has done this via their Advanced Settings page, brands will see the influencer’s posts in the Ads Manager under “Existing Posts” and can run the content as an ad within the Instagram news feed or Stories format.

As more creators deliver branded content and more users flock to see what their favorite influencers are sharing, it’s only natural for brands to get in on the buzz. Making it easy for advertisers to create ads from influencer posts saves the time and creative efforts on the advertiser’s part — and, obviously, helps Instagram’s bottom line as brands will have more ad options available with influencers doing the heavy lifting of pulling together creative for an ad

“Paid Partnership” text will appear on those ads when they run in Instagram’s feed, along with the brand name being part of each post, which Instagram called “an important piece for our continued investment in ads transparency.” “Branded content is an evolving ecosystem,” Instagram wrote in a blog post. “As we’ve worked to build the right tools for both business and creators involved in branded content deals, one of the biggest requests from brands to date is the ability to incorporate branded content posts into their advertising strategies.”

All advertisers will gain access to these new branded content ads in the coming weeks—Branded content ads will be available to 50% of businesses from today and 100% from 17 June.