Instagram has attracted a great deal of attention in the past few years. As the uses of smartphones continually rise, so does the use of mobile sharing apps, such as Instagram.
Many companies have begun using Instagram as a marketing tactic. Users can apply digital filters and effects and then share their photos through several social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. Companies began to take notice of this and started to catch onto this sharing frenzy. For example, Levi Jeans had a casting call to where people would submit their photos with the hashtag #iamlevis. Levi would then go on to select certain user’s photos and display them onto their account in a way to have varied photographs of their clothing in everyday life.
However, Levi Jeans is not the only company catching onto the Instagram craze. Ben and Jerry’s had a contest to where users could submit photos of them enjoying the ice cream, showing the euphoria in which it invokes in the eater. The users would once again place a specific hashtag, this time being #captureeuphoria, onto their photos and automatically be entered into the contest. Winners of the contest would then be displayed in their local advertising campaigns and be seen around their neighborhoods.
Whole Foods on the other hand took another approach to marketing with Instagram. Instead of simply offering the users who submitted photos a chance to be displayed in ads, they went as far as to reward the winner of each week. The weekly winner would receive a $100 gift card to the store. I don’t know about you, but $100 for just simply uploading a photo is pretty awesome.
Enough with the big named companies though. Can small, family owned businesses benefit from the use of Instagram marketing? The answer is, yes. McKay flooring went on to prove just that. Even though a family owned flooring business wouldn’t seem to benefit from a site like Instagram, they went on to heavily use the site and post pictures in great amounts. They also went on to use other users of Instagram with a contest, offering a $100 amazon voucher in return for the winning photo.
So, as sites like Instagram gain more and more followers, marketing teams would be smart to aim their sights on the picture uploading craze. So even in the marketing world, online is taking over. The companies don’t even need to do much in reality with the contest tactic, as users have to supply the pictures, not the company itself. As the cliché goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words”.