Instagram: A Guide for Business Users

Instagram, what is it? It's a photo sharing service for iOS, Android, and now, web. You can take photos in Instagram or import them easily from about any camera app or your camera roll (and whatever Android calls it). You can apply filters that enhance the look or theme of your photo – caution here, this can easily be overdone. Photos you post to Instagram can be shared to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and FourSquare. That’s what is on the surface.

What is it really? Instagram is a massive community of pros, amateurs, micro-communities, groupies, wannabes, spammers, scammers, selfie takers, attention seekers, and snap happy tweens - that's just the start of it. Instagram has a world-wide user base too. What’s more, millions and millions of those Instagrammers are addicted. TechCrunch recently reported that Instagram has 90m monthly active users. They check their feed multiple times per hour, peruse galleries, scour dozens of popular hashtags, link from profile to profile seeking, finding, ogling, and scrutinizing thousands of images every week. 

Instagram, the company, sponsors weekly projects that engage 20,000+ of their own followers on a regular basis. Let’s ask again, what is it really? It’s hundreds of thousands of impressions just waiting to happen. It is armies of loyal followers waiting to engage with your brand and get what for it? Social capital – that’s the currency on Instagram. Let me clarify, Instagrammers aren’t in it for the money. All it takes is a little ‘instafame’, a ‘feature’ or a request to use his or her image in your ad and give them credit. Why? So they can shine in front of the community, even if just for a moment. It’s all for the glory of a good ‘gram’. 

I’m also implying that you can get people to create great content for you, for cheap or even for free. Ya, it’s possible. Very possible. Here’s an example - Pilgramers: http://www.hamiltonisland.com.au/about-us/media-centre/Pages/article-40.aspx

Instagram isn’t for every business...yet. I won’t name names, but can you imagine a crotchety old tech company, like those with two or three letter acronyms for names, creating a presence on Instagram and involving their followers in ad and branding campaigns? Not likely. But – here I will name names – Pepsi, Coca Cola, Apple, Ford, Chevy, Volkswagon, Toyota, Gap, North Face, Burton, Smith Optics, even small companies like ski resorts, hotels, magazines…ok I’m done listing…you get the point. They can use Instagram. And, if they do it right, they engage their customers like no other medium.

Instagram has a set of unwritten rules just like any community. Here are a few:

• Take your own photos or in other words, create your own content. 
• Never use someone else’s photo without permission and without giving credit – common sense copyright stuff right?
• For the most part, take and edit your images on a mobile phone – there are tons of great apps that do this. 
• Use the square format – unless you’re really good at another format THEN USE A WHITE BACKGROUND not the black default!
• It’s a photo app, take good pictures…actually take GREAT PICTURES – hire mobile photography talent if you have to.
• GIVE BACK TO THE COMMUNITY – find a way to do this!
• Oh, and this one is important, don’t feed bomb your followers, it’s the fastest way to get ‘unfollowed’ – for business this means a few times per week, unless your content is phenomenal. 
• Don’t cheat by using bots i.e. genuinely engage with your following – this can get unruly and unmanageable and I honestly don’t see many good solutions for the engagement part of this process yet (see more on this below)

Oh, you want an example? Ok, REDBULL. I don't even need to say anything else. I’m just going to show you some of their 'grams':

These images are sourced from Instagram and belong to RedBull. 

These images are sourced from Instagram and belong to RedBull. 

Ok, I will say something. These are not only creative, they’re engaging. Notice a few key things are happening here: 

• Creative and appropriate use of ‘branded’ hashtags
• [decent] Metrics are built-in, e.g. likes and comments
• Brand building is happening
• Engagement is happening
• Campaigns are coordinated, e.g. #FlyingFriday #Allnighter #Summeriscoming

Redbull is phenomenal at creating and reinforcing their brand loyalty here. There are other examples listed as links below. 

If you’re a recognizable brand, it won’t be that hard to build a following. You have other challenges like engaging them, giving back somehow, etc. If you’re a startup or trying to build a brand, follow the guidebook; know who you are and what you do best, ‘impute’ your mission on your customers (Steve Jobs would have said that), keep it simple, be consistent, create impressions, back it up with your product or service, etc. To build a following, you’ll have to do a few key things really well:

• Create great content, i.e. great photographic mini-ads
• Be consistent
• Give your customers and potential customers some incentive to follow you 

A note about that last point: what’s the incentive here? Let me repeat, social credibility is currency on Instagram. Chew on that for a while. It’s a really interesting thing to think about in terms of social/engagement marketing and advertising.

There are other ways to engage your following, once you have one, and all of these have a caveat – ‘if appropriate’:

• Follow them back
• Like their stuff
• Comment on their content and feed
• Run campaigns, discounts, special deals, etc.
• Make them feel like they are a part of something unique, a movement, a revolution, a club, etc. 

When you create content, and put it out there on Instagram, you now have something to interact with your ‘followers’ over. If you have a few thousand followers, it’s no sweat. You can expect, if you have great content, about 15-20% ‘like’ rate. You can expect 50-100 comments per post. All of this doesn’t require reciprocity, but especially if you’re leveraging ‘key influencers’ in your following, it will require some. If you have 500k followers, like RedBull, there’s no way you can manage interaction with regularity, consistency, etc. For example, there’s Hootsuite for the creation phase and Adobe SocialAnalytics for the analysis phase, but nothing that I can find in the ‘engagement management’ phase. 

To sum it all up, Instagram represents a tremendous opportunity for genuine engagement with your current and potential customers. You can drive sales and brand loyalty, and there's potential to do it without putting the smallest dent in your marketing budget. Happy shooting!

Check these out:

http://instagram.com/redbull

http://instagram.com/burtonsnowboards

http://instagram.com/hamiltonisland

http://instagram.com/cocacola

For number crunchers: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/17/instagram-reports-90m-monthly-active-users-40m-photos-per-day-and-8500-likes-per-second/

If you must know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital

Hello world: http://instagram.com/jordan_is  

P.S. Private Accounts = #FAIL 

Are You Impacting the World or Just “Liking” it.

Your friends have more friends than you do.

It’s true. Don’t be hurt. Research it. Or rather don’t, and read on.

On average most people’s friends tend to have more friends than they do. This paradigm is known as the “Friendship Paradox,” and it is fairly recent to the social sciences. It isn’t a paradox at all, it is very real and there are mathematics to back it up. So what, who cares? We all should, and here is why.

In 2009, Harvard researcher Dr. Nicholas Christakis tested an experiment to research how the flu virus would spread through the university. He chose several hundred students at random and asked them to each nominate a friend. He monitored both of these groups separately and then compared them. What he found out, on the surface, was surprising. The friends who were nominated exhibited flu symptoms on average 16-47 days sooner than the students chosen at random. Because the nominated friends are more central to this social network, they were able get and in turn, pass on, the flu more rapidly. This is one of the most specific cases in the friendship paradox and its power. Here is a video of Christakis discussing his experiment.

Social networks are made up of people and their dyadic relationships. It isn’t the number of people nor the number of relationships that matter, but rather the interaction. The individuals on the periphery have the fewest direct connections within the network, while the people toward the middle exhibit greater centrality. Centrality is the notion of influence within the social network. The more centrality a person exhibits, the more relationships they share within in the network; therefore, the greater influence they have on diffusion within the network. Malcolm Gladwell expounded on this phenomena in his book, “Tipping Point,” and described these people as the social “mavens.” These are the people that really make the difference. The social mavens exhibit the greatest influence on social capital. Christakis notes that if he were to have immunized the random group of students for the flu, very little, if any impact would have been made; conversely, had they immunized the friends who were nominated, they could have protected nearly the entire university at one-third the cost. This is astonishing stuff. While Christakis is mainly interested in using this phenomena to determine how to more easily predict epidemics, this same idea can be used to determine the influence of just about anything.

If one were to take a straw poll of her peer group, I could almost guarantee that all of them belong to at least 3 separate digital social networks: Facebook, Twitter, and at least one other (Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, etc.) But for all the “likes,” followers, comments, “plus ones,” what do we really have to show for it? What does it mean? Does the amount of followers, likes, plus ones, really determine how influential we are in our real lives, or have come to a point where our digital and physical lives are on ever diverging paths? We can watch the twitter-sphere explode with #whatever and Facebook posts blow up with likes and comments on the same topic. What if we could aggregate all these metrics into a measurement of social capital? What does 20 thousand twitter followers really equate to? Sure these metrics are easily quantifiable, but how do we qualify them as credible or as having clout? Speaking of c(k)lout...

Digital analytics are currently being used to summarize and determine who these people are and how they can be used to everyone’s advantage. Klout.com is one such company who is attempting to determine a person’s digital social worth or influence within their realm of the social networks. Klout algorithmically aggregates all the different social networks you belong to. It consumes your followers, posts, comments. tweets, blogs, likes, pluses, hi-fives, shouts, whistles, and even Yahoo! accounts, then summarizes the data to determine your Klout score. The higher your score the more social influence you have in social media. On the Klout dashboard, it shows all your different social networks and what percentage of your score is determined from each social network, so you know on which networks you need to focus your efforts to increase your score. Here is a screenshot from my dashboard.



The scale goes from 1 - 100, with the average person scoring a 40. As an example, President Barack Obama scores a 99. Mine is a 12. Yup, i suck. Apparently I am only 10 percent as influential as the president of the free world. BFD. Omid Djalili scores 82 and he is a comic writer, producer, and self-proclaimed “dog handler.” I wonder how Ceasar Milan would score in that network? The basis of Klout is to determine your influence on driving social media and its trends. Does a tweet you make have a ripple effect-effect in the network, or did it fall on deaf ears?

While it is easy to quantify who is being “retweeted” and followed (#creepy), it is nearly impossible to determine if those people are actually influential in the same way the nominated friends were influential in the flu study. Sure my twitter feed blows up during sports games and elections, but i don’t consider the majority of these people influential. Being influential takes more than being a social network sounding board. To be influential you must have the ability to change the outcome of certain trends, norms or behaviors. While much of these theories remain constant across our physical and digital networks, one of the largest difference is the ability of the digital networks to actually pin-point, in real time who the mavens are. The influencers in a physical social network may have no idea how powerful their words and actions actually are; whereas, their digital clout can be viewed like scoreboard.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_influence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network#History
http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_how_social_networks_predict_epidemics.html
Gladwell, M. (2000). The tipping point, how little things can make a big difference. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
http://socialcapital.wordpress.com/tag/friendship-paradox/