X

Instagram gives brands shortcut badges to drive traffic

Businesses and brands can now drop an Instagram icon onto their sites to send customers to their online photo-sharing profiles.

Donna Tam Staff Writer / News
Donna Tam covers Amazon and other fun stuff for CNET News. She is a San Francisco native who enjoys feasting, merrymaking, checking her Gmail and reading her Kindle.
Donna Tam
Instagram

Shortly after launching its online profile pages, Instagram is giving brands a way to get more customers to look at the profiles.

The company today introduced shortcut badges, icons that link to a brand's Instagram profile. Businesses can place the icons on a brand's Web site or blog, encouraging one-click access to profiles, which gives businesses a different way to show off their goods and promotions.

According to Facebook, which owns Instagram, merchants frequently request this feature. It's a reflection of Facebook's agenda to focus more on revenue by catering to brands. Badges are designed to help brands bring customers to profile pages and drive up traffic to the Instagram site. This, in turn, introduces more consumers to Instagram, which may then mean more Instagram users.