Three Reasons Why Your Small Business Should Be Using Instagram

Posted by Bhavesh Joshi On Saturday, August 11, 2012 0 comments
Three Reasons Why Your Small Business Should Be Using Instagram
July of 2012 was the month that helped to mark the second anniversary of the first Instagram photo ever taken. Since that date, well over 80 million people have shared more than 1 billion photos on the Instagram site. In April 2012, Facebook purchased Instagram (as well as acquired its 13 employees) for the cost of $1 billion. As you can see, Instagram is an extremely popular application, to say the very least!

At this point, you may be wondering what Instagram is. Instagram is a free service that is offered to those who would like to share their photos. It allows its users to take photos, apply digital filters to it and share it on various social networking services such as Facebook Timelines, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and Flickr as well as the Instagram network. Photos are usually confined to square shaped which is somewhat of a throwback to Polaroid and Kodak Instamatic images. The filters enable users to be very creative and add personality to the photos. Some find this site to be somewhat addictive. When you start taking your photos with Instagram, it can be difficult to stop!

If you have a small business, you may be thinking, "Why should I use Instagram? What can it do for my business?" Well there are several different advantages to using Instagram. The first advantage is, it is completely free--no cost involved! The Instagram apps are freely downloadable for iPhones as iTunes' Apps Store as well as for Android camera phones which can be found at Google Play. The second advantage is this service is mobile. It has been estimated that nearly a billion people primarily use their cell phones or other mobile devices in order to connect to the net. By 2015 more individuals in the United States will access the net via their mobile devices than through their computers. It is very important that your small business brand be in front of these individuals as often as possible. You should start now; Build your community through--Instagram. Lastly, you should use Instagram because it will dovetail beautifully with all of your social networks. The Instagram images will instantly be tweeted to all of your Twitter followers and posted to Facebook Timelines, providing those who follow you with rich content from wherever you are.

Imagine that you are the owner of a business that specializes in deep-sea fishing charters. If you post all of your images to your Facebook page or to your Tumblr blog and tweet them out to your followers on Twitter when a client lands an amazing fish, as it happens then this could serve as an extremely powerful tool when you are attempting to build your brand and differentiate yourself from the rest of your industry. What if you are an owner of a beachfront hotel and you would like to capture the perfect sunset rising over the Pacific Ocean or you would like to simply capture the feel of a realizing atmosphere at the beach? Well, sending an Instagram and sharing that image with your current and potential clients will help to market your business perfectly. While you are taking pictures, you can also throw in a geotag location on it for bragging purposes!

Boutique hotels, Dive shop owners, tour operators, restaurant owners, souvenir shops, domestic airlines, used car dealers, real estate brokers - no matter what industry your are involved in: every one of these small businesses has the potential to harness the "mobile social" power in order to win over the new customers as well as keep the current customers happy. This list is endless. Whether you are you a small business owner who's business is located in Paradise or somewhere else in the world, you should take advantage of this special app. Put yourself and your business brand out there with the Instagram and begin to reap all of the benefits of the new "mobile social" revolution.

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