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Late last year, Instagram started to really bug me.
My feed was quickly losing its consumption value. It would be accurate to say that I felt I had immeasurably spent way too much time staring at (and obligatorily double-tapping) friends’ photos that I: 1. Had already seen on Facebook
2. Don’t need to see because of oversharing
Is that a harsh position to take? Yes. However, considering that Instagram is now part of Facebook, you have to remember that they leverage your social graph in all their product experiences. Not following your friends on a social network can be seen as antisocial behavior in real life—especially if they already follow you, but here’s my take:
Duplicative content is a giant waste of your time....
Are you looking for ways to get your business started on Instagram?
Do you have an Instagram account, but are unsure how to use it?
Instagram is a wonderful platform to use to provide your audience with unique visual content, while encouraging community engagement.
In this article I’ll show you five tips on how to use Instagram for your business....
Instagram user @meandmyboifriend invented a boyfriend via Snapchat doodles.
Social media can be depressing: watching all your perfect friends lead their perfect lives on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
But a large part of social media is keeping up with appearances.
Instagram user @meandmyboifriend redefined the phrase "my boyfriend who lives in Canada" by creating an entire relationship with a Snapchatdoodle. All her selfies, lonely landscapes and general escapades are accompanied by a series of colorful squiggles....
You should definitely begin the journey of learning how to use Instagram to promote your business by subscribing to the official Instagram for Business blog. It’s packed full of real life examples of how big brands are using photos and tiny videos to build their authority, readership and most of all: business.
Learning how big brands advertising on Instagram, and use their photo skills to capture attention and sales can be a great way to learn and observe, and even incorporate similar tactics into your own promotion strategies. It’s certainly not against the law, and it certainly does provide amazing results.
Photography doesn’t require words, itself it speaks thousands...
Find out how you can use your fans' Instagram pictures to show off products in your store, make videos, create ads and recruit employees.
Do you want to use Instagram to add value to your brand?
Are you looking for innovative ways to get your customers (and employees) to post Instagram pictures?
Then keep reading because I’m going to show you four ways to bring your “A game” to Instagram and wow your fans...
A new report on prestige brands says that Instagram is the Superman of social media, especially in terms of engagement.
“Instagram has demonstrated more traction than any other platform in 2013, and it registered the strongest year-on-year growth among mobile apps,” says Scott Galloway, founder of L2, a think tank for digital innovation, in its report. And with its clear strategy for monetization and “continual innovation, it's an obvious choice for consumer brands.”
The survey of 249 luxury brands finds that 93% are currently on Instagram, up from 63% in July of last year. And while it is just one-tenth the size of Facebook (which acquired it back in 2012), it has 15 times the level of user engagement that Facebook does. And Pinterest, about a third of Instagram’s size, has only about a third of the level of engagement that Instagram users do. All that “makes Instagram arguably the best tech acquisition of the past five years.”
Instagram is the hot social network right now. The site, which allows users to upload photos with pithy captions or hashtags, has seen tremendous growth over the past year.
According to a recent study, in 2012 only 13 percent of online adults in the U.S used the site. Last year that increased to 17 percent, a gain of 4 percentage points, growing faster than many other social sites.
Instagram users tend to be young and urban, and they’re a great target audience for many businesses.So how do you increase your Instagram following among these highly desirable potential customers? Here are a few tips that will help your feed grow....
Instagram just released a new feature that many are calling a Snapchat killer. The new feature is Direct Messaging and it allows you to send private images and videos to other Instagram users.
This gives a new opportunity to businesses looking to connect with Influencers and their following in a new private and "secure" manner. And like Snapchat, there are many ways you can utilize this feature to share sales, promote products, and create a dialog with your community. If you haven't read my post, 8 Small Business Marketing Ideas For Snapchat, I give you some great ways to use the mobile app.
Of course you can do the same things with Instagram Direct. Things like flash sales, scavenger hunts, and messages from your company would work on both platforms. There are a few differences however that you should take into consideration when deciding whether Instagram Direct or Snapchat is better for your business goals....
Since the launch of Instagram Video, some media organizations are experimenting with it as a news platform, but are legacy news organizations evolving?
...Traditional media organizations more often use Instagram Video to promote news content, rather than to break actual news. But startup NowThis News is flipping the social media/PR model upside down by using Instagram Video as its main vehicle to deliver breaking news and featured news briefs.
At more than 50,000 followers, NowThis leads the pack in Instagram Video innovation. So why are most old guard news organizations still hesitant to imitate the model? And which are adapting the evolving micro-video strategy to their own success?...
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is a meat eater and Newark Mayor Cory Booker is a vegetarian. That is what we learned last night in the first exclusive Instagram video interview of a political figure. Posted by the up-and-coming mobile video news company NowThisNews, this is the first of five installments to be posted this week.
The series poses one question each day to the Newark Mayor and U.S. Senate candidate. Within the constraints of the Instagram Video format, Booker has about 15 seconds for his answer. In yesterday’s post Democrat Booker illustrated at least one disagreement and difference between himself and Republican Governor Christie. NowThisNews says this is the first interview of a political candidate ever posted exclusively to Instagram. Booker, who is a pretty fast talker, may have been a politician made for Instagram....
Instagram is becoming a core platform for brands to engage with consumers since it registers consumer engagement 18 times that of Facebook and 48 times that of Twitter, according to the latest report from L2 Think Tank.
The "Intelligence Report: Social Platforms" found that the visual component of Instagram has helped the platform grow to 100 million users with the average luxury brand having 100,000 followers. Other visual platforms such as Vine, Pinterest and YouTube have grown significantly and continue to be platforms for brands to deeply engage with consumers.
"For all the mindshare that it occupies, social media ultimately drives very little ecommerce, less than 0.25 percent, and site traffic, less than 3 percent, for prestige brands," said Danielle Bailey, research lead L2 Think Tank, New York....
Instagram is a great tool for capturing fan and customer excitement in the moment, and Brian Zuercher of Venueseen has offered 4 tips for successful Instagram campaigns using the #Indy500orBust event as a case study....
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The future of marketing is visual.
At least that's what about 3,000 marketers told online social media magazine Social Media Examiner in this year's Social Media Marketing Industry Report.
According to the report, marketers value social media marketing--especially visual marketing--more highly than ever before.
With 92% of marketers indicating that social media is an increasingly essential tool, there is also a growing trend towards using (or planning to use) visual content on more traditional platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, there has been an uptake in marketers using visually based platforms such as Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram.
Marketers are now looking to create original visuals and videos to engage audiences, and there’s no question that marketers need to think about shifting their content strategy that way....
...According to Ben Baker (npEngage), “1.1 posts including the hashtag “#selfie” were uploaded to Instagram every single second, that means 4,000 were uploaded per hour, 95,700 were uploaded per day, and a whopping 34,924,648 were uploaded across the entirety of 2013.”
1.1 per second! And of course, that's just the photos that were tagged and uploaded to Instagram, never mind all those shared on Facebook, Snapchat, etc. Understanding how this impacts your communications So why should we care that an entire generation (and many of us older folks too) are taking "selfies"? As Baker suggests in his post, while the “selfie” trend might fade away, it offers some insight into an entire generation of Millennials – their social media habits and more generally, the ways they prefer to connect and be communicated with....
Use Instagram to improve your marketing strategy. Just because you create content or conversations on Instagram, doesn't mean it has to stay on Instagram.
Màny people think of Instagram as a silo – its own platform, unrelated to everything else you do. But there are many Instagram features and tools that you can take advantage of to improve your whole marketing strategy. If you’re only using Instagram to share photos on Instagram, you’re missing out on many more opportunities to market your brand....
Joining Instagram is a must for businesses. As of March 2014, Instagram had over 150 million monthly active users. Additionally, according to numerous sources, the younger generation is shifting away from Facebook and onto platforms like Instagram and SnapChat.
Mastering Instagram for a business is easier said than done. Wittiness, timing and creativity all play an integral part in a business’s Instagam account. Users are taking notice of the brands establishing themselves as the trendsetters of the popular online photo sharing application.
Who are the top 5 brands on Instagram worth following? Here are the Instagram leaders that you will not regret seeing on your Instagram feed....
Instagram has inked its first major ad deal with an agency, and it's big.
The photo- and video-sharing site is rolling out a paid advertising program with a year-long commitment from Omnicom to spend up to $100 million, according to people familiar with the matter....
Omnicom and Facebook, which bought Instagram for $715 millionin 2012, confirmed the partnership but declined to comment on its terms. Instagram said it has a community of 150 million active users, with more than 60% from outside the U.S., and 55 million photos loaded daily....
A newly released report considers the photo app the best media acquisition of the last five years.
Instagram still has no way of embedding external links, but that hasn't stopped brands and retailers from embracing the photo-sharing platform. In fact, it's the social network that has seen the fastest growth, most engagement, and highest conversion from browser to shopper, according a report released Thursday from startup Olapic and research firm L2.
Despite Instagram's billion-dollar price tag, the report considers the photo app the best media acquisition of the last five years. (The worst? Tumblr, which is a sentiment starkly different from Adobe's Digital Index released two weeks ago.) As a case in point, the study touts the following statistics: - Engagement on Instagram is 15 times that of Facebook's, with users spending an average of 257 minutes per month. - Instagram receives 1,000 comments and 8,500 likes per second. That comes to 1.2 billion likes per day. - More than 16 billion photos have been shared to date, with an average of 55 million uploaded each day. - The number of users has increased 66% to 32 million users, the fastest growing of the top 10 mobile apps. - Instagram ads have helped retailers increase ad recall by 32% and brand message lift by 10%....
With 150 million active users around the world, Instagram is not just a great place to upload selfies and pictures of your latest meal. The platform also offers a lot of potential for businesses.
Ready to leverage this potential to increase awareness of your brand? Here are five tips to help you get started on the right track....
What might be the biggest hurdle for the more business-minded individual is the understanding that Instagram is not just about selling. In fact, using your account as a megaphone to promote your product or service is a surefire way to lose followers and leave you feeling like you are shouting into a deserted room.
By having a dynamic Instagram account, new visitors will feel persuaded to start following you in order to get instant updates on their coveted personal feed.The fundamental strategies when regarding customer experience are: - Learning to listen - Creating engaging conversations - Posting ingenious images...
Since you can't link on Instagram, surely it can't be used to sell, right? Think again. In this article, you'll learn about the ways to sell on Instagram.
Did you know that an entire e-commerce ecosystem was building itself in Kuwait thanks to Instagram? From comic books to sheep, these entrepreneurs are banking on Instagram’s popularity in the Middle East to develop their own businesses. Even more interesting is that Kuwaitis aren’t the only ones leveraging Instagram to develop an e-commerce activity. Entrepreneurs, artists and brands alike are using the photo and video sharing platform to get their products out to the World.
But since there’s no possibility to add click-through links on Instagram posts, how are these people selling them? Well, several applications exist to help sellers score almost direct sales via Instagram....
Do photos or video perform better on Instagram? When is the best day and time to post? Do hashtags work? Here are some insights and tips for brands, both big and small, that want to see success on Instagram like the top-performing Fortune 500s.
Is your company on Instagram yet? If so, it joins the 123 Fortune 500s that have added Instagram to their marketing arsenal.Brands like Nike, Starbucks, Ralph Lauren, Whole Foods and more are all top players in the Instagram big brand space. TrackMaven, a competitive analysis firm, has released a study that exposes how these Fortune 500s are using Instagram, and gives tips on how you can use Instagram like a boss, too.
Having an Instagram account is one thing, but actually using it is another. TrackMaven explored the percentage of active accounts versus inactive accounts of Fortune 500s and found that of the 123 using Instagram, about 22 percent had active accounts...
Instagram ads are coming. We don’t know what they’ll look like or when they’ll arrive. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised that Instagram won’t be ad-free forever. The world’s largest brands are already using the photo-sharing app and its new video tool to pimp their products.
Facebook is betting big on mobile ads, which went from being a blip on the social network’s radar to accounting for 41 percent of the company’s ad revenue in just one year. The network reportedly plans to run 15-second, TV-style ads in users’ News Feeds, which could cost advertisers $2.5 million a pop. If that 15-second limitation—as yet unconfirmed by Facebook—sounds familiar, it’s because 15 seconds is also the cap that Instagram put on its new video tool.
Companies are familiarizing themselves with Instagram video as they prepare for the inevitable launch of video ads and seek to avoid angering Instagram devotees in the process....
Could apps like Snapchat lead to more 'temporary' social media use and a different way of thinking about how we curate our online presence?...
Jurgenson envisages that the rise of temporary social media apps like Snapchat could create an anti-nostalgia, which frees us to forget.This could also change the way we look at photos and documents: knowing it will disappear demands we pay more attention. As Jurgenson says: “Permanent social media fixates on the details of a photo, whereas temporary social media fixates on what it meant and what it moved within you.”
A more temporary social media could also change the way we use these networks. Instead of carefully considering how each post could impact us one day, we’re more likely to freely share....
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Jeffrey Kalmikoff shares his fresh approach to Instagram. Unfollow your friends and follow your interests instead.