On May 2 Instagram debuted Photos of You, a feature that allows users to tag people and brands in photos. The announcement on Instagram’s business blog describes the feature as “a new way to curate and share the photos that best showcase your brand as documented by your biggest fans.”
To add people to a new photo, tap Add People from the Share screen. Then tap on a person within the photo, start typing their username and select them from the dropdown menu. To add people to an old photo, go to the photo, tap “…” under the photo and then tap Add People. You cannot currently add people to someone else’s photo.
When it comes to photos your brand is tagged in, you can use the screen above to opt to allow photos to be added automatically when others tag you, or to manually review all Photos of You before adding them to your profile.
The Photos of You section officially goes live May 16, but if you’re ready you can go ahead and make it visible now. In the meantime, here’s how to optimize your Photos of You section.
1. Encourage employees to tag your brand. Having your employees tag your brand in office pictures will provide a fun peek at your office culture. The visual nature of Instagram can be a great tool for employment branding, and the tagging feature makes it even easier.
2. Tag events. If you have images from events, you might as well tag the event’s handle in your photo. If the event team OKs your image for their profile, you’ll end up on their Photos of You section, which — if it’s a big event — is bound to attract a lot of eyeballs. In the example below, we tagged a picture of our impala friend in last year’s Techweek VIP room.
3. Connect with your favorite businesses. Tag the businesses you frequent, from the coffeeshop around the corner to your favorite co-working space.
4. Encourage patrons to tag you. For B2C brands (and even B2B in some cases) this is a great opportunity to collect user-generated content, so go ahead and build up your Photos of You section by reminding customers to tag you. This reminder could be as simple as a text-based Instagram image, or as elaborate as a contest that incentivizes people to tag.
