Introduction to Instagram
Instagram is a free photography app designed
for smartphones.
It combines artistic photographic
filters with social networking features so you can enhance your pictures to
your preference and share them with friends instantaneously. These filters can
also be applied to short videos comprising no longer than 15 seconds which can
be taken on the app.
Using the app, you can scale, crop and
readjust the image before applying 1 of the 17 filters that can create different
effects or colour tones which can dramatically transform the look and feel of
the image.
Once you have finished editing your image,
you can share it over various other social networking and photography platforms
such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous, and Foursquare or even
email it.
The image is contemporaneously
added to your feed, where your friends and other users can comment on it or
‘like’ it.
You can follow other Instagram users
to view their photos and interact by “liking” their photos or commenting on
them.
So essentially Instagram combines
the feel and function of both a photography and a social networking app.
Popularity of Instagram
Instagram currently has more than 150 million monthly active users. In June 2013, the service already gathered a total of 16 billion photos with over 1 billion ‘likes’ per day, and essentially making it the biggest photo sharing service in the world.
This highly engaging platform is an exciting opportunity for marketers to influence the way people feel about the world.
With its huge user base built over the span of 4 years, since Instagram first launched in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, it offers tremendous monetizing potential for Facebook, which acquired Instagram in April 2012 for for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock.
Instagram is popular in Singapore, it is suggested that there are 12 Types of Singaporeans on Instagram. ;)
Instagram, like other social media sites such as twitter and facebook, has also adopted the use of the #hashtag function which allows users to categorise and add context to their images and make them searchable on the network
This no doubt has contributed to the popularity of Hashtags among social media users, especially the younger group.
The video below shows how some people use Hashtags in conversations!
