Tuesday Teardown: Instagram Collabs

Bit late for today’s edition but a quick and important one.

Welcome to the Tuesday Teardown where we look at how a platform has launched a new feature.

Today we’re looking at Collabs, a new feature by Instagram that let’s you collab. The feature slow launched a few months ago but is now being widely accessible to a broader audience of users.

What Does It Do?

Collabs lets you invite another account as a collaborator or co-author of Feed Posts and Reels. This means big and small brands can collab and cross-promote thus reaching larger audiences.

How Is It Being Used?

Think about it this way if a brand does a sponsorship with a creator, they can both be tagged front and center or if a larger account partner with a smaller one. There’s already been a few brands that have used this to promote their smaller subsidaries.

The NBA used this to promote its’ smaller ignite league (a developmental league for players looking to make the NBA).

Others have used it in partnership for collaboration between creators, in this case a husband and wife duo used it with both of their accounts.

It allows for both creators to be highlighted and thus helps drive both accounts rather than just one especially since the collaboration is both people.

How It Differs From TikTok

Many are comparing this feature to the Duets feature by TikTok and while they are by name similar, they are different by function. Duets are similar to Remixes by Instagram while Collabs are entirely unique to TikTok, let me explain.

A duet allows the user to dual screen and react to the other person’s content, so they are side by side in the content. It also doesn’t let both people get tagged at the top of the post (thus driving more traffic). I’ll use my own TikTok as an example.

Yes this is the desktop version of TikTok. Couple things to note, the content is split screen when duetting, the caption tags the original creator (meaganhealytv) in the caption but isn’t at the top of the content. Compare this with the collab screenshots above.

Collabs is being rolled out to a small percentage of the global Instagram community but it is an interesting feature that is sure to gain more traction.

If you liked this article, consider subscribing below & share with a friend!