Instagram For Content Marketing and Social Media

You know you need to be creating content. Right? It’s been talked about so much, we’ve all become jaded and simply nod, “Yes. I know. Must. Create. Content.” Fact is, it’s not easy, and if you’re like me, the process isn’t particularly fast.

But photo sharing can be one of the most efficient (i.e., fast) ways to get your content out there. And no one does it better than Instagram.

The ubiquity of of smart phones makes creating and sharing high quality photos pretty straight-forward. The resolution of the built-in cameras is surprisingly high (Ex: 5 MP for iPhone 4 and 8 MP for the 4s) and the growing number of photo editing apps allow you to take some interesting photos.

You can take HDR photos, mash-up photos into a mini-collage, and incorporate interesting photo effects and filters. Yes, photography purists snub their nose at the “Instagram” effect, but you can’t deny that it provides you with some interesting ways to create and share (and even print) photos.

Instagram
There are many different opportunities and locations to share photos, but none are currently garnering the attention that Instagram is. After being purchased by Facebook, Instagram has experienced explosive growth, with more than 50 million users, and adding a reported 5 million users per week.

Use Instagram Photos as Blog Content
If you are using WordPress as a blogging platform you need Instagrate, an awesome plugin that will allow you to utilize your Instagram photos as a blog post.

Instagrate is very easy to set up, and allows you to utilize the image caption as the blog post title, and also append hashtags or additional text.

An easy to implement on-site content tool? I’m in!

Statigr.am
As more and more social tools and opportunity for interaction comes available, it has become paramount to make the most your time. The more you know about how and why people are interacting with your content, the better. Statigr.am can help.

With some interesting tools and analytics, you can learn about who is commenting and liking your photos, as well as best time of day to post, and even which filters work best for you. It’s a really sweet set of tools (RSS feed, Feed tab for Fanpage), and includes a browser-based Instagram viewer, for free. They also offer a collection of tools to run an Instagram based contest, which will run you about $550 U.S., depending on the Euro conversion rate.

Share
Through Instagram’s application settings you can also share your photos on Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and Foursquare. You have the option to send the photo to Facebook; however, this will send the photo to your personal profile, not your business Facebook page.

Surprisingly, there is no elegant solution for sharing your Instagram photos to your Facebook page timeline. You can make use of the RSS feed from Statigr.am and tools like Hootsuite to pipe the feed data to your Facebook page. However, it will link to the image instead of actually displaying it, which defeats the purpose.

Despite that glaring weakness, from the business-owner perspective, Instagram and the opportunity to share across many platforms is a great tool to help us all consistently create content. Some of our favorite examples?

• New Belgium does a great job of sharing the story of the people, the places, the beer and the bikes. They have built a strong audience and the interaction with each photo is impressive.
• Dogfish Head is another craft brewery making great use of Instagram. Photos of all the behind the scenes action at the brewery and events.
• Red Bull does it right. Lots of photos, tons of interaction.

What are your Instagram tips and tricks?