Facebook’s Instagram Introduces Business Booking Feature

Facebook’s Instagram is expanding its scope beyond just a photo-sharing app by allowing people to book appointments with businesses.

Users will be able to book appointments for things like haircuts by visiting a company’s profile and tapping a button to schedule such appointments.

Having such a feature expands the means by which Instagram can generate revenue as a promotional tool for businesses, and improve its functionality for its end-users.

Instagram business bookings

The booking feature is expected to rollout in the next few months, though no hard and fast deadline has been provided. But with more than a million accounts on Instagram, Facebook has another means to generate revenue from the app and fill its mighty coffers.

While the move many not be a revolutionary addition to Instagram, it signals that the app, under Facebook’s banner, will look to diversify from the world of consumer networking and business promotion, to more meaningful transactions between businesses and consumers.

Given Instagram has some eight million companies with business profiles on its app, it was arguably only a matter of time before Facebook cranked its subsidiary into action to find new ways to monetise its user base, beyond advertising which has grown five-fold over the past year.

Facebook already enables conversations between customers and businesses via its Messenger app and web service. 

Social networking sites, such as Facebook, are increasingly pushing beyond being simple sites for sharing views and pictures of brunch to true online platforms for supporting e-commerce, games, apps and other services plugged into them through industrious input from third-party developers.

However, these platforms still make the majority of their revenue from advertising, meaning the additional services are essentially icing on the cake to already lucrative strategies.

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