James Spillane
Since its launch in late 2010, Instagram has been a powerhouse. The iPhone and Android app allows users to take photos, apply a vintage filter and post them to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, and Foursquare.
Vintage photo apps on mobile devices have always been popular, but none have matched Instgram’s numbers.
The most powerful aspect of Instagram is its social community of users. In fact, the Instagram community was so strong that Facebook dropped a cool billion dollars to snatch up Instagram earlier this year.
As with any social network, businesses want to know how they can use Instagram to market and generate exposure for their company or brand.
If you have a physical location, whether it’s a store, restaurant, or park, incorporate Instagram into your social tool belt. A favorite Houston spot for LyntonWeb employees is Discovery Green. Discovery Green has its own Instagram account and shares photos on their Twitter and Facebook streams. You use hashtags to aggregrate photos of your business in one place. For example, you can see everything tagged #DiscoveryGreen. You may even consider setting up a slideshow of Instragram user generated content specific to your business.
Midtown Comics in New York City uses Instagram paired with Twitter to show of what’s going on in their stores, such as events, new product arrivals, and customers that come into their stores.
What if you don’t have a physical location? Fear not, you can still use Instagram! Maybe you are an online retailer that sells clothing. Create a hashtag for your brand and tell customers to take a photo of themselves while wearing your gear. Get that customer to share that photo on Twitter and mention you and the hashtag. Focus on encouraging user generated content that will benefit your brand.
You can also use Instagram for contests like scavenger hunts. Create a list of things that a user has to take photos of, and make them mention you in a tweet with a specific hashtag.
Browse Instagram photos in your browser on sites like Webstagram and Gramfeed, as well as sites that help you analyze your photos and interactions from others like Statigram. Using the IFTTT service that we’ve talked about in past blogs will allow you to collect images with specific hashtags (just make sure you let your submitters know that you may use their images).
Instagram is a fun app, and having well past 80 millions users they show no signs of slowing down. Integrate Instagram into your inbound mix and have some fun while you’re at it!
This article was written for Business 2 Community by James Spillane.
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Hi Mike, great article! I’ve just set up an IFTTT trigger to try it out, I had been wanting to try it out but it slipped my mind so thanks for that!
It’s very true that using personlized hashtags is a powerful way to use Instagram for a small business, regardless if there’s a store or not. Would you find it useful to track the evolution of certain hashtags and see what they do? That’s one of the features of Nitrogram, a new web-based solution for Instagram Marketing that I’m working on. Here’s an example with #DiscoveryGreen hashtag:
http://bit.ly/DiscoveryGreen_ng
http://nitrogr.am also lets users embed a photo stream on a facebook tab, web page or blogpost, and interact with instagram users directly from the web browser. Mike I’d really like to know what you think about it! Cheers.
Thibaut