Another popular branch of the social media aspect is known as Instagram. You’ve probably heard about this now! (unless you’ve been living under a rock!) Instagram in a nutshell is photo-sharing app used by over 300 million people including some of the largest corporations in the world (Instagram, 2014).
The basic principle of Instagram is to communicate using primarily photos or videos along with hashtags and mentions… (Hunt et al, 2014) at anytime which can be seen by other Instagram users (Jadhav et al, 2013).
Instagram like the other social sites, has become a very popular marketing channel for companies (Tekulve & Kelly, 2013) who want to promote themselves (Hassan, 2014) without spending as much on ads (Zarella, 2009). However, what makes Instagram different from the other social sites is that companies are able to present themselves in a visual perspective (Hird, 2013) instead of writing a post that may be ignored or be similar to the other 150 posts from before! Like Facebook and Twitter, there is no right answer as to how to become a popular brand on Instagram, but here’s a small list of some dos and don’ts to help…
Instagrammer Do’s
1 – Always include your followers/fans in the product/service you are promoting
Benefit Cosmetics used this strategy to promote a product by using #realsies to get people to post pictures of them wearing the mascara. This will get people more involved (that is what you are aiming for) and will allow you to collect real customer opinions for your company.
2 – Constantly reply to your followers and encourage them to engage with each other! (Dennis, 2014)
3 – Run contests/competitions through initiating a hashtag!
Ben & Jerry started #CaptureEuphoria to get people to send pictures of them portraying the joy of eating Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream. This was a good way for the company to put themselves back in the spotlight to try and engage with customers.
4 – Come up with new ways to show you and your product in a different light
For example Sharpie is popular on Instagram for always coming up with new ways to how a sharpie can be used etc. Through this Sharpie is demonstrating to their followers their creative and fun personality side.
Instagrammer Don’ts
1 – Don’t steal other people’s ideas to mimic as your own (the Internet always finds out)
Don’t attempt to reuse a hashtag/caption (you want your followers to be able to find you through hashtags)
2 – Don’t neglect to maintain your gram!
By neglecting your Instagram people may misuse/steal your hashtag to inappropriately use it and may even forget about you!
3 – Don’t be boring
The point of Instagram is to release your inner creativity for others to see, thus, it would be a bad decision to not take advantage of the filter options etc. Don’t be like Aldo the shoe company who created a clever campaign on Instagram, however, the problem about the campaign is that the pictures were basic and they were rumours the company didn’t even use their own products!
Overall, many researchers have branded Instagram to be more effective than Facebook when it comes to engaging with customers (Truong, 2014). The reasoning behind this is the fact that customers are able to rely on an image rather than words alone from companies (Silva et al, 2013) which is especially beneficially for companies in the fashion/footwear industry (Huey & Yazdanifard, n.d.) Therefore. taking advantage of the use of Instagram can be highly beneficial to businesses as it is a cost-efficient strategy that allows firms to easily communicate and build relationships with customers (Dennis, 2014) in a fun and creative way (Herman, 2014) to increase brand awareness and managing (Geurin-Eagleman & Burch, 2015).
References:
INSTAGRAM. (2014) Stats [Online] https://instagram.com/press/
Huey, L. S., & Yazdanifard, R. How Instagram Can Be Used as a Tool in Social Network Marketing.
Dennis, D. D. (2014). Successfully Social: A Non-Profit’s Guide to Modern Social Media Marketing.
Hunt, D. S., Lin, C. A., & Atkin, D. J. (2014). Photo-messaging: Adopter attributes, technology factors and use motives. Computers in Human Behavior,40, 171-179.
Jadhav, N. P., Kamble, R. S., & Patil, M. B. (2013). Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Trends. Journal of Computer Engineering, 45-49.
Tekulve, N., & Kelly, K. (2013). Worth 1,000 words: Using Instagram to engage library users.
Zarrella, D. (2009). The social media marketing book. ” O’Reilly Media, Inc.”. [Online] http://books.google.com.my/books?id=chd3yfExXMEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summa ry_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Hird, C. (2013). Social Media Marketing: A Best Practices Analysis of Selected Destination Magazines (Doctoral dissertation, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo).
FASTCOMPANY, TRUONG, A. (2014) This Report Shows Why Brands Should Embrace Instagram (If They Haven’t Already) [Online] http://www.fastcompany.com/3026419/fast-feed/this-report-shows-why-brands-should-embrace-instagram-if-the-havent-already
Silva, T. H., de Melo, P. O. V., Almeida, J. M., Salles, J., & Loureiro, A. A. (2013, May). A picture of Instagram is worth more than a thousand words: Workload characterization and application. In Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS), 2013 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 123-132). IEEE.
Geurin-Eagleman, A. N., & Burch, L. M. (2015). Communicating via photographs: A gendered analysis of Olympic athletes’ visual self-presentation on Instagram. Sport Management Review.