Instagram AR Effects. How To Publish Branded AR Effects?

A few months ago, Instagram AR beta was officially opened. What that means is from that very moment, everyone, including brands, could publish their own AR camera effects directly onto the Instagram platform. It’s certainly been enormously popular and has only added to the engagement with the mobile app. In fact, an AR camera effect created using Spark AR can be distributed quite easily to almost anyone, anywhere, making it a truly powerful promotional tactic. What’s more, it is really effortless to publish them and to share them with all of your Instagram or Facebook followers. And if you have any trouble we would be more than happy to help assist you with everything from the creation to the publishing or distribution of a Facebook or Instagram camera effect.

There is a bit of a difference when it comes to branded AR effects made for the purposes of promotional activity versus the all the other kinds of effects. For pretty obvious reasons we will only really address branded AR effects. Firstly, it is important to determine what would be deemed a promotional AR effect. There is ultimately two main things that will determine whether an AR effect is promoting a brand under the judging eyes of the Instagram platform: is the account that the effect is being published to belonging to a brand (business pages are probably a bit of a give-away), or else could the content within the effect itself be construed as promotional. Instagram is with doubt the strictest platform when it comes to branded AR camera effects. It is nearly always seen as a promotional AR effect when it included either a brand name, logo, product name or product image. Of course, sometimes you can get lucky with the approval but more often than not it’s going to be tagged as a promotional AR effect on the Instagram platform.

1. Instagram Profile

Whenever any user visits your profile on the Instagram platform, they should be able to see all of your different AR effect in the Effects tab. You can simply go there when you click the icon below your Story Highlights.

2. In A Story

When flicking through stories, if you come across any using an AR effect it will highlight the creator/publishers name at the top. You can click on them to yourself to try out the effect.

3. The Effect Gallery

This option only relates to those users who are already following your Instagram account. When they open their Instagram camera and scroll right through their effects tray they should be able to come across your effect. Promotional effects will only ever be shown to users who are following your profile.

5. Links To Effects

Lastly every single AR effect will have its very own unique URL. With this link you can essentially post it, publish it or share a link just about anywhere to promote it further, When somebody clicks the link it will go ahead and open the AR effect in the Instagram platform, unless they don’t have the app in which case they will be prompted to download and install the Instagram app. Its one of the simplest ways to share an Instagram effect.

It really couldn’t be simpler to publish your branded AR effects through the Spark AR Hub. That’s the place that allows you to upload and manage any of your FB and Instagram AR effects. You sign in using your Facebook account logins, this means that any effect uploaded through that account will be the publisher of the effect even if you did not actually create it yourself. This means branded AR filters will be shown as belonging to the brand account that uploaded them. When uploading your effect you will need to also upload an icon for the effect, you can then wait to see if it has been approved which usually takes about a day and then finally you can upload a demo video of your effect. It is really important that this demo video is of a decent standard and is in some way appealing as this will show up on your public profile and the Instagram Effect Gallery. You can also see how well your effects have been received using Spark AR Hub.

The data that is ready available to you, we mean the actual information that you can get access to really isn’t that detailed at all but at least it’s something to go by. The insights include Impressions, Captures and Shares. Impressions are pretty much what they say on the tin, this is the number of times that the AR effect has been displayed on a screen. Captures is the number of photos or videos that have been taken using the AR camera effect. Shares show how many of those photos were used in an Instagram story.

So when it comes to creating an icon for your Instagram AR effect there are some specific guidelines that you need to ensure you adhere to if you wish to get your AR effect approved. The most important of all these guidelines is that the icon needs to clearly represent the camera effect. Another important guideline relates to the name of your AR camera effect, which is unable to include any names of businesses or people and, also, cannot be more than 20 characters in length. If you want to see the full list of rules and regulations, along with a template and some general best practices then feel free to click here.

This post should hopefully have covered some of the more important information that you may find yourself needing if you were ever considering beginning the production of an Instagram AR camera effect for your own brand. If you’re interested in finding out some more information, you could check out Spark AR website as there is quite a bit detailed out there or as an alternative you can head on over to our blog, as this a topic which we often cover. Or if there are any specific questions that you may have or if you are looking for someone to create an AR camera effect for you or your brand then please do feel free to get in touch with us!