The day begins with you stalking your high school crush, selecting the perfect picture to post from half a dozen variants, trolling your friends, checking for comments every 7 minutes, pushing your start up to people you think are the potential buyers and scrolling endlessly through people’s vacation photos till you dose off.
Where are you?
If your guess is Facebook, you are right.
If you say it’s Instagram, you are right again.
The social media generation virtually lives in one or both of these platforms.
If Coke could buy Pepsi and combine all their beverages into one, then the next time you’d be thirsty you’d either end up with the ultimate thirst quencher or an ultimate betrayal of your taste buds. There’s a high chance for the latter.
But with Facebook taking over the fast growing image sharing platform- Instagram, the world was in for a pleasant surprise. Facebook kept the beauty of Instagram intact and let it continue blending into our lives as seamlessly as it was before the take-over. It did not merge and transform Instagrams interface and utilities to suit itself. The result: Instagram is only getting better with each passing day under the name and guidance of a brilliant foster parent.
But a lot of us, if not everyone, have noticed that Instagram may soon become the go-to platform for marketers who really wish to carve a niche identity for themselves, separate from the brands that think Facebook is the only way to go.
For those who haven’t yet noticed the slow and surprising rise of Instagram, here’s a list of some obvious benefits of taking your brand on Instagram.
- In your face - The first thing you see on your feed is an image. The last thing you see on your feed is an image. The other things you see when you click on other tabs are previews of images. It’s consistent. It’s attractive. It’s consistently attractive.
It’s that friend of yours who knows exactly what it wants in life.
So if you are keen to connect with your customers through some striking images, clear texts, intelligent graphics, humorous gifs, crisp videos, then Instagram is where you should be.
- Multi-lane highway - Instagram gives you the need not be in someone’s friend list, or be someone’s uncle and force yourself into someone’s friend list to be able to see the images and content that they’re sharing.
Art, humour, business, scenery, poetry, selfies, group selfies, mirror selfies, selfie stick selfies; eliminating the last four, it’s just great to have access to all forms of imagery from all over the world.
- All you can eat buffet - We’re not complaining that Facebook sometimes requires you to crop your display picture into a square before uploading it therefore making you crop either yourself or your good-looking pal.
We’re just naming the plethora of possibilities that Instagram offers to showcase your images and content. Portrait, landscape, videos, ‘boomerang’, ‘layout’, tiles, picture squares and reposts. We’re not even going to mention the filters and settings here. An article on Shakespearean literature cannot have the mention of the English alphabet.
Again, we’re not complaining how Facebook sometimes requires you to crop your display picture.
- A Supermarket for start-ups - One simple hashtag. That tiny symbol that uselessly lay atop the number 3 on our keyboards can now make your brand or service visible and accessible to millions across the globe. Get your hashtags right, find the desirable audience, follow suitable and relevant people and accounts, and be consistent and classy with your posts.
With the right combination of tagging bloggers, potential tie-up brands, marketers and circulating the hash tags that trend and transform, your start-up could have the audience that you desire and you wouldn’t even have to message your friend list asking them to like your page. Just saying.
So, what’s on your mind?
