Facebook Canvas comes to Instagram

September 14, 2017

Since its inception in August 2016, Instagram Stories has been a runaway success. It now boasts over 250 million users a day. Launching ads was always part of the road map for Stories and in March of this year the first ads started to appear.

It fully monetises Instagram’s answer to Snapchat and adds significant weight to the Facebook offering in the process. However, mimicking a successful and popular social platform isn’t Facebook’s style. They like to go one better, or more frequently, 10 times better than the next guy.

This week we see the inevitable integration with Facebook Canvas, offering a seamless extension of the full screen experience of Instagram Stories.

If you aren’t familiar with Facebook Canvas it’s their most unique ad unit, allowing advertisers to create in-feed stories with an instant-loading full-screen experience. As Facebook put it; “Canvas enables you to shorten the distance between your message and the customer. It loads instantly, is mobile-optimised and designed to capture the complete attention of your audience.”

Porting this function over to Instagram and allowing Stories to be run from Ads Manager opens up many new avenues for advertisers and creates a more genuine environment for the end user.

Successful organic Stories can be re-purposed and used on a Facebook page and vice versa. Instagram Stories can now automatically be added to Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network campaigns so that advertisers can deliver a consistent message to their whole audience.

What this means to advertisers is a more seamless experience creating ad content over both Facebook and Instagram, a vastly increased range of ad creative executions and an overall more manageable platform. For users it means consistency, immersive targeted ads, and less cross over between Facebook and Instagram.

Check out this handy how-to guide for more info on creating Canvas for ads in stories on Instagram.

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