With Instagram growing and growing, we’re delighted that the company has now produced a best practice guide to help marketers to get the most out of this fantastic social media platform. While Facebook, Google + and Twitter are still fantastic avenues for social media marketing, Instagram could be a great place to have a strong presence – if you utilise it in the right way.
Best Practice Guide
The best practice guide focuses upon 5 different tips for any brands who want to increase engagement between themselves and their customers. Principally, these tips are to remain true to your brand, to share experiences, to find beauty everywhere, to know your audience, and to inspire action. From first glance, we could probably say that these principles should be applied to any social media marketing campaign whatever the platform, and that we’ve seen it all before, but at the same time, it’s great to be able to go into detail on all of these points, specifically for Instagram.
Handbook for Brands
Most of us of course won’t be one of the lucky ones, but Instagram is planning to send out an offline ‘Handbook for Brands’ to specially selected marketers and larger agencies. This is planned to contain existing Instagram brand values along with a top ten hashtags which showcase the ‘collaborative creativity’ which is prevalent in the Instagram community at the moment. These are likely to include #ChasingLight and #ThingsOrganisedNeatly.
New Advertising Platform
Testing Advertising has only been on Instagram for a matter of months, with a very slow roll out with a plan to keep quality levels high during this beta stage. Instagram are obviously concerned about any potential backlash against advertising on the site, and have indicated that they would like any adverts on the site to be enjoyable – to be akin to high quality adverts traditionally found in glossy high end magazines.
Instagram and Facebook
Of course, Facebook acquired Instagram back in 2012, in an effort to improve its mobile presence, and it already looks like it is paying dividends. In the last three months of last year, mobile revenue for the Facebook Empire clocked in at $1.25 Billion, a figure higher than the investment required to purchase Instagram. This takeover of course did herald a backlash from its users, when the company adjusted the terms of service to enable the selling of user’s photos on the site to brands. Thankfully, Instagram did a quick U turn on the policy, but it will be interesting to see how things develop over the next six to twelve months as the popular social media site becomes awash with adverts – albeit very beautiful ones!
From a marketing point of view, we’re delighted to see this avenue opening up – it should be a productive place for businesses given the popularity of the site, but the only cause for concern is the reaction of current users to the change in scenery. Time will tell, but the smart money is on Instagram becoming one of the best social media sites to target with your marketing money in the coming twelve months.