by Camila Porto | Oct 2, 2022 | Instagram |
Have you ever thought about having a private list of followers in Stories? This is the feature promise Instagram Best Friends. A special channel, where only followers you select can consume your content.
What is Instagram Best Friends?
Fever among Influencers, the Instagram best friends it can be one more channel to communicate with your most engaged followers. The feature was released last year, but it has only recently become popular with many users, particularly entrepreneurs and content creators.
In Best Friends, Instagram allows you to create a special list within Stories. When sharing some content, you can choose between: sharing with all your followers or only with those who are part of your Best Friends list.
How does Instagram Best Friends work?
Generally speaking, it works like a private list of followers. You may have some criteria for adding people there. For example, you can ask anyone interested in receiving exclusive content to tag your @.
An example is the billionaire entrepreneur Flávio Augusto. Very engaged in Social Media, he created a Best Friends list on Instagram. To be part, you need to follow his profile on Instagram and tag @geracaodevalor.
However, what not everyone knows is that many influencers are monetizing Instagram Best Friends. There are influencers who charge subscriptions, which can reach 3 thousand reais per year, to be part of their Best Friends on Instagram.
There are those who find it absurd to pay to "see someone's stories". But, we cannot forget that Social Media has created new formats of content consumption. So if the content is quality and subscribers see value, it's simply another way to monetize Instagram.
Of course, you don't have to charge to share content with your Best Friends, but it's important to offer something different so that people see sense in wanting to be part of this list.
How to create your Best Friends list on Instagram?
Creating your Best Friends (or Close Friends) list is easy. The biggest job is adding people. This is a very manual job and, depending on people's interest in taking part, it can take a long time.
There is already a solution that helps in the management of Best Friends. Lastlink is a platform that helps you manage and monetize your Instagram Best Friends. Below I give more details about it. Now, learn below how to create your Best Friends list on Instagram:
1. Access your Instagram profile and click on the side menu:
2. Click Best Friends:
3. In search, type the user you want to add:
This is the manual and most boring process. You need to write down the Instagram @ of the person you want to add, then type in the search field.
4. When locating the user, click on “Add”:
Ready! You've created your Best Friends list and you can edit it whenever you want. To remove a user, simply click on “Remove” next to the name”:
How to post to Best Friends?
Once you've created your Best Friends list on Instagram, posting content for them is pretty easy. Just make your Stories normally and, when posting, choose the Best Friends option, marked with a little green star.
Instagram does not send any notifications to the user when they are added or removed from the list. The follower will know they are on a list when they see Stories identified as sent to “Best Friends”. A green circle appears around the image of those who posted a Stories to their best friends.
Manage your Best Friends list like a pro
As you'll see, managing your Instagram Best Friends list is pretty manual if you opt for Instagram's own features. Recently, we met Lastlink, a tool that promises to help in this work and the best: allowing you to charge for access to your Close Friends. We don't use it, as we don't have this Best Friends list active today. But, you can check out Lastlink, try it out and let us know what you think.
With it you can automate the entry of followers into your Best Friends list and charge a monthly subscription, charged to your follower's credit card or Pix. And there's more: as soon as you register on the platform – completely free of charge, a private feed is automatically created (Lastlink Feed), allowing only your subscribers to have access to them.
As if all this were not enough, you can still count on Lastlink Bio, which is a totally free aggregator of links, for you to use in your Instagram bio and further enhance the dissemination of your work.
Why is Best Friends so popular?
But why is this resource being explored only now? The first hypothesis is because many content creators and influencers saw this list as an opportunity to publicize their work. In some cases, even making money with the feature: charging a monthly fee for users to have access to exclusive content.
Of course, there are those who turn up their noses at the idea of ​​paying to see someone's Stories. But, as previously mentioned, they are new content formats and value generation for those who use Instagram. Whatever your opinion on it, the important thing is that the Best Friends list can help your business.
On this issue of paying monthly fees, there is nothing clear in Instagram's terms of use that prohibits this practice. Thus, until now, the charge is “released”.
We just don't know for how long or if Instagram will create any obstacles to this. Remembering that until recently, it was forbidden to charge for participation in Facebook groups. However, Facebook even natively launched tools to charge subscriptions to join groups. Maybe with Best Friends it will be another place for Facebook and Instagram to earn some money?
