Get visual with Instagram

The times of beautiful photos only being taken by professional photographers with super expensive cameras are over. Instagram is a mobile app which gives users the possibility to transform their photos into real pieces of art by using filters. What’s great about it is the fact that it’s much more than just a tool; it’s a real community. People can share their photos with the world, follow other users, like photos and comment on them. With people really getting into photography these days, the popularity of this app is immense. Instagram has 90 million monthly, active users and together they share 40 million photos per day. As you can imagine, this is a great platform to reach your customers. How? We will tell you.

How YOU can use Instagram

It’s quite simple; create a profile and start sharing photos! What kind of photos? Well, that depends on the kind of company you are. The difficult part is to keep things interesting for your customers. They will get tired of looking at photos of the products in your store and they won’t follow you if you only show them photos they could find anywhere. That’s why you need to be creative. Here are some examples of how to keep things exciting:

A peek behind the scenes:

People like to see things they wouldn’t normally get the chance to see. So take them behind the scenes and show them how your product is made. General Electric, for example, shows photos taken in their factory while they are building their impressive pieces of technology. This kind of strategy is great because people love the feeling of inclusiveness and ‘access all areas’ and at over 130.000 followers, we can see that this strategy is paying off for GE.

Let your customers do the work for you!

Another way to keep things interesting for your customers is to get them involved. Let them take the photos and then share them on your page. You can do this by giving your customers a hash tag(#) to use, which are very similar to the hash tags on Twitter. For example, Starbucks ask customers to take photos of their coffee and use #Starbucks in the description which has resulted in some very creative instagram submissions from fans and over a million followers.

The photos don’t need to be about your actual product; they just need to have a connection to your company. NH Hotels, a big, international hotel chain used this in a very successful way. They know that the location of a hotel is just as important as the hotel itself. A gorgeous view from a room can inspire people to actually book that room. That’s why they asked people to share their wake up moments and use #wakeuppics. Thousands of people have gotten involved in this movement.

Get followers!

Sharing interesting photos is one thing; getting people to see them is another. This is what you could do to increase your own followers:

• The first step to take is to let your customers know you are on Instagram. Tell them on your other social media platforms and show it on your website.
• To get people who aren’t following you to see your photos, you need to use hash tags. If you are a hotel in London, use #London, #UK, #England, #”subject of the photo”, etc. If people search for these words, your photo will pop up. Think of them as keywords to help people find you.
• Sometimes you will need to incentivise people before they start getting involved, just to get the ball rolling. What you could do is start up a competition. Let people follow you, share photos of your products and give the person with the best photo a prize. Create a win-win situation.