Instagram change API to focus on brands

On this day and age, we cannot ignore that social media is a great bridge that connects brands with users and vice versa. Just as users look at the options brands have to offer, brands can take a look at the consumers and their behavior. However, there’s a big problem with this, users don’t want to be studied or investigated, and then we have all the transparency issues that are sometimes solved voluntarily by the platform and sometimes they have to be obliged by the government. And finally, we arrive at today’s Instagram changes on their data API (an api is a programming and analysis interface for our posts)

Privacy changes

“Do as I teach, not as I do”. On these few months we’ve seen many data filtering scandals, for this reason Instagram has decided to change their own rules to make sure to not only protect confidential user information but also to maintain its own relevance and attractiveness for advertisers and brands that use it. The first thing they did was to shut down their public API, which took down many third party social media managing apps that depended on it, secondly, every bot for businesses in Instagram was shut down, so that if we depended on automation to move traffic to our site, it will not work anymore, however it does mean that any like or comment on our page will be 100% real. Also, likes will be now completely private for you, no other user will be able to see what users have liked, this is a problem for e-stores that looked at what you had liked to know which products are attractive to you. Finally, as a brand, searching for user generated content won’t be so easy anymore, we won’t be able to look for users directly or likes, only hashtags.

Continues growth brings heavy limits.

As we know, Instagram has been pushing growth on its audience exceptionally in the last few years, which means that more users have their eyes on the photography social network and at the same time these users are on hackers’ crosshairs. So, what Instagram is trying to do is simply to avoid, the sort of frauds that have been occurring on the platform lately. Leaving platforms like Twitter and Reddit, which have become contenders for everyone’s attention, to start making their own limitations to protect users from data filtering and potential frauds.

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