• Meta has announced that the Instagram Creator Marketplace is expanding to eight new territories.
• The Meta-owned platform began testing out the Marketplace for the US only in 2022, and is now making it more widely available.
• The Marketplace is specifically designed to help brands and creators connect and collaborate around partnership opportunities.

In July 2022, Meta-owned platform Instagram announced the test of a Creator Marketplace in the United States. More than 18 months later that test has seemingly proved successful, as Instagram is expanding access to the Marketplace to eight new territories.

Before you go checking your own app, access has not been earmarked for South Africa at this stage, so local content creators will need to wait a bit longer to try out this new offering.

The countries that are gaining access alongside the US, however, are:

• Canada,
• Australia,
• New Zealand,
• United Kingdom,
• Japan,
• India,
• Brazil.

If you’re only counting seven above, Chinese export brands will also be invited to connect with onboarded creators in countries outside of China, Instagram confirmed.

For those unfamiliar with the Creator Marketplace it is designed to help brands more easily find relevant creators for any kind of collaboration. One of the more important means of collaboration is partnership ads, which Instagram describes as a way for, “advertisers to amplify content with a creator or other partner’s handle to scale their collaborations.”

“Partnership ads are the most performant and transparent way for advertisers and creators to run ads together and Instagram’s creator marketplace helps brands discover creators to partner with,” the social media platform added in a blog post.

If you’re a brand or creator in the above-listed countries, the former can join Instagram’s Creator Marketplace in Meta Business Suite, while creators can join from their professional dashboard in the Instagram app. “Creators can indicate brands and interests relevant to them. Creators can also create a portfolio to highlight what makes them unique,” the platform noted.

“To help match the right creators and brands for campaigns, we’re testing new custom, machine learning-powered creator recommendations for each brand. Brands can also search for creators, filtering for creator and audience attributes. They can also see a list of creators who have expressed interest and check out creator portfolios,” it continued.

To find out more about this new offering, head here.