Instagram is today the social media platform of choice worldwide, especially for the younger generation. Naturally, brands and companies across the globe are making full use of the platform to reach wide audiences more easily.

Despite becoming this popular and being used by almost every major brand in the world as their go-to social network, Instagram, until now, had a fairly limited reporting system — one that only told you how many likes and views your posts had received. Compared with the "analytics" systems that older platforms like Facebook and Twitter have, this was a significant gap for Instagram, and brands had been closing it themselves using third-party programs and apps.

Of course, nobody seriously believed that Instagram — owned by Facebook — would ignore this forever, or that the company's management and product teams had no plan for it.

In the end, a few days ago, the expected finally happened: Instagram introduced new "Business Tools," giving companies the critical information they need to use the platform more effectively and plan their future social media activity more accurately.

Let's take a look at these new features together.

Business Profiles

Thanks to this free feature from Instagram, brands will be able to choose how they want customers to get in touch with them. This lets brands add and display information like their address, phone number and email on their Instagram account.

However, to preserve the validity and credibility of these profiles, the feature will only be available to brands that already have a Facebook account.

Insights

This is perhaps the most useful of the lot for brands and businesses. With Instagram Insights, brands will be able to get demographic information — who their followers are and where they're from — letting them post with much more planning and precise targeting.

Insights will also give brands key data such as which posts get the most likes, how many people — and who — they reached, and overall engagement figures for their posts. Getting hold of data that plays such a key role in a brand's marketing looks set to make Instagram more trustworthy than ever for large businesses.

Oh, and did we mention you can do all of this from an app on your phone, with no need for any computer setup at all?

Promote

Another new feature that will have brands and businesses licking their lips is Promote.

With this feature, you'll be able to turn an existing post into an ad with a single tap, straight from your mobile device. From mobile? With one tap? Turning it into an ad? That's exactly it!

These new business tools are a huge step forward for Instagram's standing in the business and brand world.

Bearing in mind that all these features will run through an extremely simple interface on a mobile app, it's worth remembering they won't be as comprehensive or flexible as Facebook's Ads Manager or Power Editor. Still, we're confident Instagram won't stop here, and will deliver more comprehensive solutions over time as brands' needs and demands keep growing.

Here at ReputeUs, we can't wait to try out these new features and see what they bring to the brands we represent.

Rolling out first in the US, Australia and New Zealand in the coming months, the tools will be available worldwide by the end of the year.