Rumors arise every once in a while that say some people may be cutting back on social media usage. Overall, just the opposite is true – most social networks continue to make audience gains!

Business use of social media sites for marketing continues to evolve:

  • 80% of small and medium sized businesses use social media to drive growth
  • 99% of the top brands have a presence on Facebook
  • 83% of luxury brands have a Pinterest business account
  • 4 in 10 brands share 1 or more photos per week on Instagram

I recently attended a regional Green Conference where there were some people using Instagram and more inquiring about it. It became clear that Instagram needed to be the subject an Everbearing blog.

Ample Harvest Instagram post.

 

What is Instagram and why should you care?

Instagram is a social media photo-sharing tool. It was designed on a mobile-friendly platform, making it ideal for smartphone and tablet usage. Once you download the FREE Instagram software to your device, you simply take a picture or video, choose a filter to transform its look and feel, and then post it!

Instagram enables users to take pictures and videos, and share them on a variety of social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr. A unique feature is that it restricts photos to a square shape, different from the typical rectangle used by mobile device cameras. It also uses a lot of #hashtags to organize similarly tagged messages, enabling searches to return all messages that contain a particular #hashtag.

Instagram too continues to grow in popularity. In December 2010, Instagram had 1 million registered users. Then just last December, they announced that they have 300 million users, with the total number of photographs uploaded exceeding 1 billion.

A fun Instagram fact – back 2012, musician Ellie Goulding issued a new music video for her song “Anything Could Happen”. It contained only fan submitted Instagram images that used various their filters to represent words or lyrics from the song, and over 1200 different photographs were submitted.

How Instagram pertains to business usage

First and foremost, it is another tool to extend your Internet reach to attract a larger audience to grow your business – by sharing your business’ product or project images. By using Instagram your business can:

  • Identify trends so you can leverage them
  • Promote your business
  • Spread your story further
  • Engage and gain followers and potential customers

Instagram has been proven to attract a younger audience (your next wave of potential customers!) with 90% of the users under the age of 35. The demographics also report that 68% of Instagram users are female while 32% are male. With a 23% usage share, the most active on Instagram are users with a college education. Then, 24% of Instagram users say they use it several times a day.

Instagram’s influence, growth, and demographic statistics are too good to discount or disregard. The benefits of using Instagram will outweigh any fears you may have about engaging another social tool.

Let us know how we can support your social marketing efforts.

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