Taking and sharing photos on Instagram for Video Marketing

Instagram is a free photo sharing program launched late in October 2010 which enables users to take photos, apply a digital filter to it, then share it a la the way we share on Twitter or Tumblr.

Instagram came out of the gates with such force that Apple named Instagram as app of the year 2011 saying that the app makes it “near impossible to take a bad shot.”

Nice quote.

More importantly, how do you tap into this monster of a site and get the traffic and the interest and eventually the sales you need?

7 Ways to Market on Instagram

Here is a list of seven ways that you can get traffic to your business’s website through Instagram:

1: Instagram Cannot Be Your Only Tool In Your Toolbox

Clearly, Instagram is a great mobile marketing tool, but it is not the only tool. By design Instagram works best with visual friendly content sites like Pinterest, Tumblr, and Facebook. Why? Because these are the places where people talk about great photographs.

2: Start Involving Your Community

Start thinking about creating scavenger hunts and contests and many other ways to have visuals drive action. Use visuals for all the power they really have and let people “play” with your shots as much as possible.

3: Let Your Employees be Involved

Encourage everyone in your business to take the most realistic pictures they can as often as they can. Unlike Pinterest, photos on Instagram can be more gritty and real and you need to play that out.

4: Use HashTags That Get You Noticed

If you think you can follow #kanyewest in a meaningful way on Instagram, you are sadly mistaken. The speed of the hashtags is almost blinding.

Use photo specific tags where possible as opposed to brand attributes as a better way to engage the hashtag craze.

Individuals looking to promote themselves should and still use these tags as I do, but they should also focus on Instagram group hashtags and contest tags to gain greater recognition.

5: Create Your Own Hashtag and Engage People that Use it.

Creating, Using, Promoting, and Monitoring your own hashtags makes some cool things happen in that your own hashtags let you monitor the dialogue about your products and your brand from the outside and be able to jump into the fray when you want to.

The use of original hashtags (now a cottage industry on Twitter) should be a priority for you.

We can see here MTV’s new hit show Catfish has a successful trending hashtag, which looks like it is getting about 20 Tweets a minute!

6: Geo-Tag Instagram Photos

When in doubt, go geo! In the latest Instagram update, users now have the ability to transfer that location information to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Foursquare all at the same time. They can even convey where the photos were physically taken.

With geo-tagging, restaurants, retailers, and any other brand can promote their location and their products in use using and promoting geo-tagged Instagram photos. How cool is that?