How do brands use Instagram to connect with fans?

Instagram is increasingly becoming a favorite platforms for Brands globally to engage with their customers.

It's importance can be gauged by the fact that it is the world's largest mobile ad network. Instagram now has a community of over 500 million users liking over 4.2 billion photos and sharing over 95 million pictures daily. The format of Instagram makes it a great medium for visual story telling.

There are multitude of ways used by Brands to connect with fans, drive awareness and generate sales. Following are three key points

Content

Great content sells on Instagram. Check out the channels of Coca-Cola Argentina, Petco, FedEx & Frooti. They produce great content, share what goes on behind the scenes, employee stories etc. In case you are getting started, you can check out these 7 easy Instagram Marketing tips.

Contests on Instagram

Instagram contests are a great way to keep your followers engaged. Contests can be around your brand (such as some trivia), content you are sharing on Instagram, or even can be user generated content where you can ask consumers to take pictures about your product/brand and share it through a hashtag.

User Generated Content

Brand generated content and contests are a great way to engage with users. However remember that social media is not just about you. It is important to share user generated content and re-share posts by your community. You can learn more about it through this free 2 minute e-learning course How to increase engagement on Instagram?

You can also check out this 2 minute free e-learning course on How to Build a Brand on Instagram in 2 minutes. It is rich with examples.

This is an answer to a question on Quora on How do brands use Instagram to connect with fans?

Giving the finger to a scripted life!

It's crazy to take jobs just because they look good on your resume. That's like saving sex for your old age. ~ Warren Buffet. You have plans for your life, career etc. You've built an entire script but what is this based on? Scott at Ted talks about how almost 80% of the people around the world don't like the job they do. In his career, he found one day that most of the job he did was automated by his competitors. Building the resume was clearly not way forward. It was during that time he he heard the quote by warren buffet, " It's crazy to take jobs just because they look good on your resume. That's like saving sex for your old age ". This was when he left his job. While there are know universities, which talk about finding your passion, Scott talks about a lens that can help in finding the job we love.

Twitter and the world of hate - Delhi Gang Rape

Common wisdom says that venting out reduces frustration. Twitter, Facebook, and blogs help us achieve the same. While what normally starts as a "venting out" experience, I suspect is turning out to be an anguish enhancer. When I look at trending topics on twitter all what I see is a world of "Hate". Small pieces of hate messages turn out to be a big collective bunch of hate. Take the case of Delhi gang rape and some ill-minded comments of politicians and spiritual gurus. What started as scattered bickering remarks against a comment made by "Asaram" has now become a full fledged ball of rage. This rage was "non-directional", had no agenda and was oriented towards sarcasm and wit. While Delhi gang rape highlights poor governance, societal problems and problems of law and order, venting out on a forum that accumulates the frustration by many such people only adds to the low well-being. It is time we use some discretion and post messages that...

Twitter vs. News - Effectiveness in building relations

Social Media has been termed as an effective way to build relationships. Brands are trying to harness this capability by building social presence on this new media. Celebrities today account for the maximum amount of followers on the web with twitter being a fine example for this. But is this new media effective in creating relationships with this vast list of followers, which celebrities often tend to have? In an interesting research by Lee and Jang , they explore the effectiveness of celebrities in building social presence on new media. They compare twitter and a news website to check the relative effectiveness of enhancing social presence. While the traditional PR machinery used by celebrities might give them news coverage, they contend that their tweets can reduce the barrier of relational development as compared to a news website. Their findings are counter-intuitive and very interesting.

Economy of Social - Social Media Tips, Marketing and Business

Search This Blog