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Posted on December 1, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton
Home > Featured > How brands can use Instagram and other mobile photo sharing applications today for customer engagement

How brands can use Instagram and other mobile photo sharing applications today for customer engagement

Featured marketing social networks

This is it!

The saying is a photo is worth a thousand words and if that is the case books are being published in popular mobile sharing applications such as Instagram, Path, picplz, Burstn, Treehouse and more. Stories and experiences are being shared by uploading photos and new mobile social networking communities are being formed. Yesterday I posted an overview of Instagram and how Instagram lands its first brand partner the National Geographic. While the popularity of mobile photo sharing apps seems to be growing, I believe we will see more brands use photo sharing applications as another tool to engage with customers or gain new customers or as another marketing channel.

While more open photos sharing apps like Instagram, picplz and Burstn continue to gain users, another sad but inevitable trend we may start seeing is more users trying to increase their followers and treating photo sharing apps like another Twitter or social networking site. Just yesterday someone was searching “how to get more followers on Instagram” and landed on this site. Gaining more followers at this point just means more people will see your photos but soon as more brands partner with photo sharing applications to offer incentives for let’s say, best photo or a caption contest the race to get more followers on photo sharing apps could start.

With the rumors around how many users Instagram has and the news around Path and picplz VC funding, it will be curious to see what is next for photo sharing apps outside of multiple platforms support (Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile 7, iPad and Tablets). Will photo sharing apps create dashboard for users and brands to see analytics on photos? Will photo sharing applications create APIs for other services to pull in photos? Will leaderboards be created from photo sharing applications like Twitter had that lead to its early success?

Regardless, not just iPhone users although Instagram is said to have one million iPhone users alone, but it seems mobile phone users are joining photo sharing apps and uploading thousands of photos. The only thing left now is monetization, brands and agencies start seeing opportunities to use photo sharing apps as a way to increase customer engagement or for marketing and when they do…. please do not call it social media.

Until then, here are few ways brands can use Instagram and other mobile photo sharing applications for marketing or customer engagement.

1. Sell Cat food!

Really… do not laugh, Instagram is full of cat and other animal photos. I’m not a big animal person and not a fan of ads but a brands could have “show us your cat” and pick the winning photo for free cat food for the month. They would have to follow the brand on Instagram to win. Then the brands could reply to announce the winner in the comments.



2. The same could be said for diapers.

There are a lot of baby photos being uploaded.



3. Caption Contest.




4. For Questions and Answers:

What is your favorite artist or What CD should you buy?



5. Product placement




6. Show us your best photo of our location




7. Book Cover feedback




8. At conferences, find the exhibit booth with xzy and take a picture




9. Photographers can show there work.




10. Holiday photo tagging.

Ex: Show us your Christmas Tress

So far I have seen photos being uploaded of brands such as Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, Old Spice, Staples, McDonald’s, and various energy drinks. For brands and agencies, what is one of first tips we said in social media class 101? Participate where customers are talking about your brand online. As for photo sharing applications, it’s participate where people are posting photos about your brand in mobile applications.

Do you think we’ll see more brands partner with photo sharing applications in the future?

Also read:
Will Instagram become the next big mobile social network or just one awesome photo sharing app?
On Thanksgiving Instagram is all about the Turkeys! 9 Thanksgiving Day Turkey photos on Instagram
The 7 most popular photos on Instagram, there’s more than lol cats!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Featured, marketing, social networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • http://www.donald-harris.com Donald Harris

    What is interesting to me is just how many outlets a brand has to stay on top of to get there names out there. It no longer just TV and Radio.

    • http://socialwayne.com Wayne Sutton

      Good point! For the most part it’s the agencies and from what I’m hearing they are like “not another social network” when most art just now getting started with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

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  • http://twitter.com/jmlares Jessica Lares

    Photo applications are NOT the place to advertise. Instagram is a place for photographic creativity and does NOT need branding to ruin the fun for the little user base it does have. If you want to advertise on an iPhone application, use iAds.

    And speaking about Instagram, it is VERY difficult to get in the popular section and STAY there for more than a hour or so. You don’t even get more than 200 likes at a time. It’s not like Twitter either where you can get followers that stick. I personally follow like 4,000 users but only get to like about 50 photos a day because I only open the application when I’m going to shoot a picture.

    And out of those good thousands of people that follow me personally, hardly ANY but 50 ever like my photos.

    I personally would report anyone using Instagram as a marketing tool, I’m sure there are others that would do the same. There are already debates about the camera roll being used to post copyrighted material and stuff out of SLRs.

    Like I said earlier, it’s better to use something like an iAd if you want to constantly advertise.

    • http://socialwayne.com Wayne Sutton

      Jessica, you make valid points. This was some ideas I was floating around in my head but I get the feeling brands will start to use the app to communicate with Instagram existing and growing user base. It won’t seem like advertising or marketing but it will be. For the record I love Instagram and don’t want to see it change from how the community uses it now but I feel in the next few months or it could be years, things will change. It took Twitter four years to do promoted tweets/ads it may take Instagram and other photo sharing apps two.

      It will be also interesting to see how the National Geographic uses Instagram. Per their note, they’re already talking about doing challenges.

    • http://socialwayne.com Wayne Sutton

      Hate to say it but “told you so” Instagram + Grammys and instagram + brisk + sxsw = marketing.

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  • http://twitter.com/artclubcaucasus artclubcaucasus

    Instagram should be used for everything, just let us create different streams, groups, lists or how do you want to call it. Image plus Text is stronger than image, image is stronger than text, video smth in between. Instagram should open soon a usable web interface as well and let the steam roll. Great tool for travel, art, any visual input and including the newest self-styled Facebook Sneakers..

    Great post again, thank you Wayne

    @ grijsz

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