The renowned platform is now the 3rd most popular social media site. Ranking in popularity, Instagram comes just below Facebook and YouTube, according to Dustin Stout, providing a potentially massive reach for your company.
The vitality of Instagram is a result of its active fan base, and what your organisation can get out of it will depend entirely on what you want to achieve and how you connect with your potential customers on the platform but Instagram provides fantastic potential to build your brand and reach new customers when used as part of a strategy.
Founded in 2010, Instagram revolutionised the idea of photography; it made everyone a creative. Earlier mobile phones had cameras, but the photos rarely left the device. Instagram offered something new – anyone with a Touchscreen phone connected to the web was now a “photographer” and could showcase their imagery with a range of filters & effects. It quickly became the place to share photos and videos, with everything from the mundanity of what people were having for lunch to momentous events like a newborn baby or university graduation and, of course, the rise of the selfie. Today, it is a place where businesses can join in, get in touch with their audience, and has helped establish the role of Social Influencers in marketing.
As technology has developed, so have social platforms, each taking the best features from other ones and making it their own. Instagram may have ‘borrowed’ the Snapchat stories but they added some great new features like the polls, questions, rating bar and a countdown feature (the list goes on). These elements allow interaction between users but they can also be used to start a conversation with your customers. Recently they introduced “stories” so here is our guide some of the features of Instagram Stories, what they are and some ways you can make them work for you. Basic Instagram for Businesses: Your starter guide to Instagram stories
What are Insta stories: Stories are a quicker way to publish content with a range of additional, optional features.
These are mostly used by individuals who come to share real-time stories about what’s going on in their life. However, there is a beneficial side to using them for your business. As a basic guide to stories, it’s important to talk about the basic tools that you can use on them. Probably your first experience of Instagram stories will be seeing yourself staring back at you, from a low angle, not knowing what to do next. Don’t be put off! It’s just defaulting to the front camera (although this seems to have changed in later updates). At this point you are able to select a photo from your gallery by clicking the small square in the bottom left-hand corner, or, you could use one of the options shown underneath the ‘shutter’ button. Slide through the options to go live to your followers, take a boomerang, film a video and then have it play in rewind, etc. or you could just keep it simple with a normal photo or video. Once you’ve done this, you then get to edit your image/video by typing some text onto it, drawing over it or adding some stickers. Very quick, very simple and when done correctly, very effective.
Continue reading our blog posts on how Instagram stickers can be beneficial to you.