• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, August 27, 2015

The big push to monetize the second generation of social media sites continues.

Adaptly, a social advertising platform, announced today that it has been selected as a Facebook Marketing Partner with early Instagram Ads application program interface (API) access. The company also released software products for purchasing and managing paid-media campaigns on Instagram  today.

Adaptly’s platform allows marketers to reach users on social media with video and images, and can also perform sequential messaging on Facebook and Instagram. More importantly, advertisers can access all that juicy Facebook data about Instagram’s users.

Instagram Ads API is an invite-only program that allows marketing developers to integrate with Instagram. Instagram Ads API Partners are able to share access to Instagram accounts across teams, schedule and publish content to the social video and image site, and monitor audiences.

Before the new API offering, if a business wanted to advertise on Instagram, orders had to be negotiated with a special sales rep a la Mad Men.

The introduction of API access basically allows anyone to advertise on Instagram’s platform on a self-service basis. Instagram’s 2015 ad revenue is expected reach nearly $600 million, growing to $2.81 billion in 2017 according to eMarketer.

Instagram as a platform hasn’t been fully embraced by brands, though it is often included as almost an afterthought by many marketing strategy professionals, according to a recent Yesmail study

Sears Holdings and full-service advertising agency Assembly are among the first of Adaptly’s clients to take advantage of the New York-based company’s new partnership.

Adaptly was also chosen for Pinterest’s marketing developers program in June, which is a similar program to this one.