LAS VEGAS — Meta is bringing product tagging to Instagram Reels. Creators will be able to drop products from a business catalog or a unique affiliate links into their videos, bypassing a common solution of pointing their audience to go elsewhere to find a mentioned item. Creators can link up to 30 products in a Reel.
“For creators, when it comes to highlighting products, this means that the era of link in bio is finally over,” Nicola Mendelsohn, head of global business group at Meta, told an audience at Shoptalk Spring.
“We’re basically shrinking the distance between discovering and purchase and putting creators right to the center of the journey,” she said.
For “add products” on Instagram, creators are defined as persons with accounts who are 18 years old and above, have a public account with over 1,000 followers and are in good standing with the platform’s Partner Monetization Policies. Meta is testing the service in five markets and will continue to roll it out this spring, a spokesperson said. It is not currently available to all creators who meet the criteria.
“We’ve all had the friction of loving something that a creator posted and having to go to the ‘link in bio,’ having to put some words in the comments and maybe they DM you back, right?” Karin Tracy, group lead of retail and e-commerce at Meta, said to a Shoptalk audience. “All of that is now gone and the friction has been removed.”
Select creators can now also promote products and earn commissions from Facebook affiliate partnerships with Amazon, eBay and Temu in the U.S. The service will come to Instagram this spring.
The tool was developed “for seamless integration and the ability for creators to monetize more easily,” Tracy said. “Because when creators can monetize, performance is better for everyone. Everyone wins.”
At this time, Meta is not taking a commission of sales from these experiences, per the spokesperson.
Instagram Reels were introduced in August 2020 as a way users could create videos with audio, effects and creative tools.
