By Ruben Betancourt
Guest Blogger
For anyone wishing to catch the attention of millions of people, Instagram, which is easy to use and provides its users a great opportunity to exercise their creativity, is an excellent platform to lead traffic to a particular product or service.
Launched in October 2010, Instagram, the online photo-sharing and social networking service once thought to be little more than an online photo album consisting of so-called “selfies,” has in three short years grown into a powerful advertising tool for marketers, designers and manufacturers, among others.
Following in Twitter’s footsteps with the objective of helping its users navigate the service, Instagram added hashtags in January 2011to help users discover photographs and each other.
Instagram’s growth has been impressive. In February 2013, the service announced it had reached 100 million monthly active users. Eight months later, on September 9, 2013, the company announced that number had grown to more than 150 million monthly active users, a remarkable growth spurt.
In short order, Instagram has become a force to be reckoned with and a powerful marketing tool. It enables users to take and share photographs with their smart phones and tablets (with the ability to apply a number of digital filters for creativity’s sake) and, as of June 2013, to upload and share videos to a variety of social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and others.
Instagram’s rise to becoming a successful social networking service hasn’t been completely without its share of controversy. On December 2012, when the company announced it was changing its terms of service in a manner that was misunderstood by many of its users, including a number of celebrities and established brands concerned that Instagram would start marketing and selling user photos without obtaining their permission.
Instagram’s management listened to its users’ concerns and promptly announced its existing (and non-controversial) terms of service would remain in place even before the new terms were deployed.
For marketing purposes, Instagram is a more personal platform whose users primarily consist of people between the ages of 18 and 34, a critical audience for any business wanting to reach this most desirable audience and its high disposable income. At this time, Instagram also enjoys a more balanced male and female mix when compared with other platforms such as Pinterest. Instagram’s base reflects a user group that grew up wanting share its latest discoveries.
Both Instagram and Pinterest, in their unique ways, offer their users visibility, brand awareness and engagement which ultimately benefit business growth. As part of an overall marketing plan, and depending on the audience, both platforms will make a company’s or organization’s products and services easier to see.
In its short life, Instagram has played a critical role in a movement like the Arab Spring, helped millions share treasured memories and vacations of a lifetime and helped countless businesses and manufacturers expose their products and services to the world.
Whether saving images to remember adventures or showcasing products before an audience always hungry for new products and new information, Instagram is a venue that equally serves both needs.