Instagram for Business

Does your business have an Instagram account? You may want to consider using Instagram for business. Latest research into the topic found that 54% of the top 100 brands have now implemented Instagram as a part of their social media strategy. Since August, Instagram has been growing at a faster pace than both Pinterest and Google+.

Instagram Web Profiles

This week Instagram announced web profiles, which are eerily similar to Facebook profile pages. Facebook will be rolling out web profiles over the next week. Back in April, Facebook purchased Instagram for a reported $1 billion in cash and stock and Instagram has gained millions more users since the purchase.

Instagram for Business

So how can your go about using Instagram for business? The key is to use images to tell a story—about your products, your brand, your employees. Think like your consumer. What can a photograph visually tell them about your company?

• Show Your Products
• Show How They’re Made
• Behind the Scenes Photos –Give viewers a backstage pass
• Sneak Peek—of new stores, offices, designs, products, content
• Show consumers ‘before’ and ‘after’ or show product comparison photos
• “A Day in the Life”—follow office staff members for a day, office photos and meetings
• Travel? Share photos from the start of the trip to the end—take fans with you while you do business!
• Get customers involved—hold a photo contest, have fans submit photos of themselves in your product
• Find out how you are pictured as a company.  You can do this by typing in your company name on Statigram. This can also help you understand how people use your brand name in hashtags
• Use relevant, specific hashtags—this will help you connect with others on Instagram, which can help boost photo likes, attract new followers and increase overall brand awareness
• Make sure the photos you post have meaning, to you and your customers. Not only will this entice shares, but if you aren’t excited about the picture, your fans won’t be either.

Instagram is easy and user-friendly—anyone with iPhone or Android smart phone can participate right now and a Windows Phone app for Instagram should be out before the end of 2012. With more than 110 million smart phone users in the U.S., the upside is a lot of additional awareness for your brand.

History

Instagram struck gold with the idea of putting photo sharing and social media together when it launched back in October 2010. Using a smart phone device, the app connects to the camera already on the smart phone and allows the user to change the photo by applying filters to give different looks, borders and color tints, similar to old school Polaroid images or a Kodak Instamatic.