What Business Owners Need to Know about Instagram
A few months ago, when social media giant Facebook acquired Instagram for one billion dollars, it may have been the first time you had heard of the startup company. To many experts, it seemed like a risky proposition (despite Instagram’s popularity), due to uncertainty over how Instagram could possibly generate the revenues necessary to justify Facebook’s billion-dollar purchase. Yet, that question is ultimately for Mark Zuckerberg to entertain. What you may want to consider is: how relevant is Instagram and what is it able to do for your business?
Instagram is a social media mobile app for photography. Whereas a social media platform like Facebook attempts to do everything, Instagram does one thing well – you take digital photographs with your smart phone, add interesting filters, and share them with your followers. Interestingly, Instagram’s success is actually predicated upon its very limitations:
- It only works with cell phones cameras.
- The easiest way to see other photos is on a phone.
- You can only use one of the pre-made filters at a time, so even if you aren’t artistically inclined, your photos will look great.
Initially, Instagram may not seem like a practical fit for business purposes, since it can’t be thoroughly optimized similar to blogs, websites, videos, and web-based social media sites. Also, beyond tagging keywords and writing a relevant comment, there isn’t much you can do for SEO. But what Instagram can do for a business is increase brand recognition as we shall explain.
Instagram Strategies for Your Business
Location: Instagram allows users to add the location of a photo, so it’s crucial to make sure your business can be found on Instagram (you can do this using Foursquare). This is essentially free advertising any time someone browses pictures in or near your business.
Behind The Scenes: People like buying from businesses they know personally, and Instagram is a great way to let customers know who you really are. You can show them behind the scenes pictures, previews of new products to get people excited, as well as pictures of your staff. While this may not bring direct conversions, it will forge a direct personal connection to your brand and company.
Contests and Events: Through contest apps, you can stage Instagram photo contests, asking your fans and customers to take pictures with your product to compete for a prize. You may even ask attendees to take photos and tag the name of the event and the location, ultimately rewarding the Instagrammer with the most liked photo.
Social Media: Instagram easily integrates with existing social media. You may set Instagram to automatically connect to Facebook, twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Foursquare for ready updates.
Though Instagram is not revolutionary as the internet and social media were for business, it is wildly popular and easy to use, so it’s possibilities are worth considering for your business.
Contact MediaMark Spotlight to find out more about how Instagram can help your business.
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