Lunchtime hack #1: Instagram

What is Instagram?

- The world’s second largest social media medium

- Instagram is a fun and quirky way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures

- Snap a photo with your mobile phone, then choose a filter to transform the image and share

- Instagram is built to allow users to experience moments with friends' lives through pictures as what happen.

- Instagram is built to be fully integrated with Facebook and Twitter. Photos can be shared across all platforms

Key facts

- 300 million monthly active users

- 37% of 18-29 year olds use Instagram

- 18% of 30-49 year olds use Instagram

- 6% of 50-64 year olds use Instagram

- Average Instagram users spend 257 minutes a month on the site

- 64% of Instagramers are women, 36% men

- On Instagram 53% of posts have at least one hashtag. 20% have more than 6 hashtags

- 70% of Instagramers have already looked for a brand on Instagram. 41% follow or would follow a brand to benefit from special offers

- 48% of Instagramers are professionals. 46% of Instagramers have higher education degrees

How to use Instagram

1. Download the app

2. Register/Set up

3. Connect to Social

4. Take a photo

5. Add a filter/border

6. Publish

7. There’s video too!

8. Follow other users

Hashtags

- If your posts are set to public, you can add hashtags to your photos and videos

- Take a photo/video and choose a filter.

- On the screen you see after choosing a filter, type your hashtag in the Caption field (ex: #flower).

- If you want to tag a post you've already uploaded, edit the caption or include your #hashtag in a comment on your photo.

- After you tag your post with a hashtag, you'll be able to tap the hashtag to see a page that shows all photos and videos people have uploaded with that hashtag.

Brands & Instagram

(Figures from Feb 2015)

The picturesque five-star resort the Hillside Beach Club on the coast of Turkey turned to Instagram this year to source six new “Chief Instagram Officers.” The campaign had applicants tag their most impressive beach photos with #JobAtHeavenOnEarthfor a chance to take over the resorts official Instagram - paired with free accommodations – for a week.

Outdoor enthusiast brand, CLIF Bar powers many athletes and adventures with their products. To help share and inspire new adventures and protect the environments in which their customers are playing, CLIF created their #MeetTheMoment campaign. The photo sharing campaign choses a new environmentally centered nonprofit each month in which for each post shared with #MeetTheMoment, $1 would be donated to that nonprofit. The posts, all with beautiful outdoor and adventure themed imagery, are collected and shared on a styled website social hub.

In more millennial generation dream job news, Netflix ran a competition to find three ‘Grammasters’. Each Grammaster went on the road for two weeks across the United States, photographing film and television locations and going on set. In return, Netflix paid $2,000 per week and covered all travel arrangements. Applying for the job was as simple as following the @Netflix account on Instagram, selecting your three best Instagram shots and adding the hashtag #Grammaster. They’d had 18,000 shots a month or so into the campaign. 10 finalists were selected and whittled down to three Grammaster winners following interview. Their shots used #filmedhere and were plotted on this map across America.

For Dan Rosenbaum, Manager, Digital & Social Media at San Francisco Travel, “Instagram is a great channel to inspire. We see it at a window into a brand, a destination.” The destination was an early adopter of Instagram, back in 2011, which also explains how they achieved to reach close to 40,000 followers on this platform. Along with its ubiquitous #onlyinsf, which has been tagged on nearly 20,000 pictures, the destination also uses hashtags along with specific campaigns. For example #dineabouttown is used in conjunction with the Restaurant Week, held twice yearly, collecting more than 1,440 mentions so far, or #sfoutdoors inviting locals and visitors alike to share their best pics of San Francisco’s hidden gems or known landmarks. Either way, every Tuesday a photo gets highlighted on the official SFO accounts, such as their Facebook page, which is followed by more than a half-million fans!

Luxury brand Barbour is making the move into the world of Instagram to promote its flagship International range. The brand asked 11 Instagram followers to team up with some of the hottest up and coming directors to create 15-second films using only iPhones. These films were posted using the tag #inspiringplaces and collated on a microsite, where they will be judged in categories including best cinematography, best stop motion and best comic film by a panel of Barbour judges. The videos spanned many cities including New York, Berlin, Barcelona, Copenhagen and Istanbul, helping to bring the international image of the brand to life.

Appealing to people’s vanity could be one of the easiest ways to encourage brand engagement. Take the example of Benefit Cosmetics, who turned to Instagram to find images of real people using its "they’re real!" mascara.

Fans submitted more than 11,900 selfies via Instagram using the #realsieshashtag, and Benefit Cosmetics created a mosaic view of these submissions on a responsive design microsite linking to the "they’re real!" product page. http://realsies.benefitcosmetics.com/

Benefit: #Realsies

Igers Wales (and Igers Cymru) are Wales-based Instagram communities which showcase some of the best images taken around the country. Tag your pictures with #igerswales and #igerscymru and @_luella_ and @thedimmick and they pick the best of the pics to share with this ready-made audience.

Park Plaza Cardiff

Tourism Fiji

Deliciously Ella