Instagram business update: verified blue star badge is finally here

September has been great for Instagram and has brought us a lot of good updates for business who use the platform to build their brands. In this blog I want to talk to you about the famous blue star badge. Why? Because it’s finally out for everyone who owns a business.

In September we saw the arrival of the in app form to apply for the blue star badge and this is great. That’s because the blue badge does 2 major things.

You are trust worthy!

Having the blue star badge let’s users know that you are verified and that you are 100% the person, business or brand that you say you are. This of course builds more trust towards your companies social presence.

We have talked about building trust and rapport with your audience before. It’s not just social proof that matters. In fact, it’s way more about building meaningful engagement with your audience that will eventually drive and boost your sales. Being verified will definitly play a big part in achieving your business goals.

Extended business features!

Being verified on Instagram comes with some great rewards. For example, Instagram will award your account with more business features like product tagging and shoppable posts. This in turn will drive conversion rates up way higher than you’ve ever dared to dream.

It’s the product tagging feature that is so very valuable to businesses because it plays so well into the need for native marketing. We already know that native marketing is taking the realm of social marketing by storm and it doesn’t show signs of slowing down anytime soon. It’s here to stay for a long time.

Instagram is even testing a new feature in which verified business accounts can use product tagging in their Instagram stories and that is just next level marketing. We already know that the story feature is way more popular than the feed itself. On average people will spend more time going trough Insta stories and the engagement is higher. The play of the game is starting to shift more from our feeds and into our Insta stories.
How do I apply?

How do I apply?

Fortunately this is very simple. Log into your account, go to your page, tap the three stripes at the top right and hit settings at the bottom. From here you can scroll down untill you see “apply for verification”. Hit it and you will automatically be transfered to the verification aplication form. Just fill in the details and add the requested documents and you should be good.

Important: just because you apply for the verified badge doesn’t mean you actually get it. Instagram is still being very stricted in it’s screening process and rightfully so. It might also take some time before you get an update on your verification status so be patient on that one.

Conclusion

The conclusion of this blog is that if you’re a business or brand who uses Instagram as a marketing tool and have not applied for the verified BLUE BADGE yet, you should do that ASAP. It will give you a clear edge over you competitors and your marketing options will increase greatly.

So what do you think of the blue star update? Are you going to apply for it? Did you already do it? And if so how do you experience it? Let me know and let’s connect.