Despite facing plenty of controversy over its proposed Terms of Service changes, Instagram remains a hot site for both users and the marketers who want to capitalize on its popularity. If you've never used it before, Instagram is one part Flickr and one part Twitter: essentially a community in which users take and share photos with one another.

From a marketing perspective, the community's enthusiastic fan base and built-in social aspects make it an ideal place to connect with potential customers and build brand recognition. Here's how your business can take advantage of Instagram's potential:


Plan your content strategy.

Before you post your first image to Instagram, plan out a content strategy for the types of images you'll share and how these graphics communicate your brand's message. Although plenty of people use Instagram for personal purposes -- posting everything from pictures of their lunches to their pets -- businesses must be more strategic.

To start, identify potential followers by seeing who's following your competitors on the site. Then, take a look at the images they're liking and sharing and consider their preferences when defining your own content strategy. That way, you should ensure that any image you post to the site will appeal to your new followers.

As you go through this process, continually ask yourself the following questions to help guide the content curation process:

• What types of content do my potential followers seem to prefer?
• What types of content will most likely encourage these Instagram users to engage with my brand?
• How can I share content that will get people talking about my brand?

"Follow Me"

Image courtesy of Murad Osmann


Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Image courtesy of Murad Osmann



Murad Osmann and his girlfriend like to travel. And, when they do, they document their journeys in incredible style.

Rather than upload traditional touristy shots, Osmann uses his Instagram account to post photos of his girlfriend leading him, by the hand, through gorgeous landmarks across the world. Some notable spots include London, Singapore, Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Bali. Even the inside of an IKEA store gets a shout-out.

The overall theme of the pics: "Follow Me."

"The first photo happened in Barcelona while we were on vacation. My girlfriend was a bit annoyed that I was always taking pictures of everything, so she grabbed my hand and tried to pull me forward. But it didn't stop me from doing photos," Osmann, an executive producer at Moscow-based Hype Production, told Mashable. "That's how it all started."

Osmann said he snaps the photos with his iPhone and uses the Camera+ app to add some corrections.

"It might seem that I have a lot of free time, but we [Hype] have a lot of shoots away from Moscow — I'm usually always busy at work abroad," he said. "But after we finish shooting, I often ask my girlfriend to come for two or three days and we continue our project."

Regardless, it's an undoubtedly romantic concept — and one that's sure to unleash the travel bug in everyone.

We've compiled 20 of our favorite photos in the gallery above. You can stay up to date with the rest of the stunning shots on Osmann's Instagram page. He'll be traveling to New York in April, where he says he'll take more photos for the project.

Do you have any unique traveling photos? Share them with us below!

[H/T Reddit]
Images courtesy of Murad Osmann














































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Many people enjoy the capturing of life with photos and videos. For some it is the reminder of people met and experiences that shouldn’t be forgotten.



Some are moments of fun and ecstasy, others are sad and tragic.

Modern photo technology now embedded in smart phones allows us to take photos and view them instantly without waiting for the local Kodak corner store to develop the film.

This evolution has been fatal for this global brand.

Now you can not only click and view, you can also tweet, Facebook and email that photo to friends and family all around the world in seconds.

A trigger happy friend of mine uses Instagram to take those snapshots of a moment in time.  When her smart phone battery died the other you could see the loss of her time freezing machine was not good for her health.

Life in One Second Videos

A movie director Cesar Kurimaya has decided that he didn’t want to forget special moments. Instead of Instagram photos or still images, he is capturing his life by taking one second videos every day and turning them into a montage of a life lived.

It makes him evaluate each day with clarity. It helps him answer the questions of, have I loved, have I lived, have I made a difference?

He uses it as an inspiration to view his journey not from the limits of an imperfect memory but a video archive of his life.

Never again will he forget what he did on that day that was memorable.

Instagram Breaks 100 Million Monthly Users Milestone

Instagram is barely 2 and a half years old after being launched in October 2010. In April 2012, Facebook thought its technology and potential were worth $1 billion and bought the startup which had only 13 employees and was still losing money.

The founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom see it as a tool to inspire and connect.

It has just broken through the 100 million users per month and is now a major player in the social media ecosystem.

This puts it at number 5 behind Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.

I think we only just seen the start of the Instagram journey.












































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Social media marketing is the beckoning and shiny new toy.

It started as clever but simple to use online technology where you could share multi-media content with friends, family and school colleagues. It was fun, engaging and it has touched the social human global psyche.

It happened because the intersection of technologies such as cheap high speed internet, low cost hard disk storage and software that made using social network platforms as easy as writing a Microsoft “Word”  document became aligned at the same time.
Even the older generation found they could use Facebook!

CEO’s, business owners and management initially saw it as a distraction from serious business and traditional marketing. How could you take Facebook seriously when it it was the social network that the son or daughter used it to share their party photos from Saturday night.

What was the point of a a 140 character tweet?

Then the penny dropped.

Large brands realized that the marketing leverage and amplification that the “many to many” crowd sourced global conversations could bring to their marketing strategy was sizable and significant.

Coca Cola changed its marketing strategy from creative excellence to content excellence. They had realized that social media was able to spread their content and ideas with velocity and the crowd could create and share more stories on social networks than they could ever hope to buy.

Small to medium business were provided free marketing tools that they could use themselves to promote their business.

The democratization of marketing was now evident.

Along with this realization many myths abvout social media marketing have been spread that have caused confusion and disillusionment when the return on investment didn’t materialize or wasn’t apparent.

Myth #1. It’s Simple

There are many myths about social media marketing but the biggest one by far is that it is easy and can be done by an intern at lunch time.

For small, medium to large enterprises is it is far from simple because social media marketing does not scale very easily and it requires many resources, skills and processes that until recently were at an adolescent stage of development.

With social media marketing you need to:

• Write, film and snap the images and capture the content
• Edit the content into a creative format that entertains, educates and inspires
• Create it for the different types of media such as video, text (for blog posts), Twitter tweets, Facebook updates, Pinterest images and other major social media networks
• Establish processes that control the publishing and monitoring of the content that is spread globally by many individuals within one organisation that keeps the brand police happy
• Publish it on multiple networks,
• Optimise it for a variety of multimedia formats
• Develop and optimize it for many types of screens including laptops, iPad, iPhone, Android smart phones and tablets so that it renders properly and is easily viewed and consumed
• Optimise the content and platforms for search engines
• Monitor and measure the data you receive to see what works and what doesn’t

It is becoming a deluge of data on many social networks.

So far organisations in the main are using disparate and multiple tools such as Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and Klout that add a layer of complexity and are silos of data and processes that do not lend themselves to the era of big social data.

Help is at hand.

Tools and processes are emerging to make it possible to do social at scale.

Vendors such as Sprinklr, Exact Target, Adobe, Brightcove and Viral Heat are amongst many companies that are developing enterprise class tools that are offering the promise of one stop social solutions platforms that will enable organisations to provide “social at scale”

The Altimeter Group and Jeremiah Owyang have surveyed over 3 dozen vendors that offer the promise of providing the holy grail of “social at scale”. These are revealed in this presentation on Slideshare.

To properly create , publish and manage this social data explosion we are seeing the emerging need in marketing agencies (and major brand marketing teams) for not just “creative” talents but people who understand technology intimately.

It could be that the “Geeks will inherit the earth” in a knowledge and technology driven economy and culture.

Maybe we are seeing the rise of the “Ninja Nerd” who understands technology and the creative process on an increasingly social web.

I look forward to seeing this emerging evolution of social media marketing as it moves from adolescent promise to mature and robust business class platforms and processes.

Myth #2.  It’s Free

Planning , creating content, optimizing for search, publishing to multiple platforms takes time. Time is money.
The professionals with the skills and experience to make social media marketing successful are increasingly in demand and they need to be paid. In a lot of cases the free tools to manage and monitor the data explosion are not adequate to provide the insights needed to manage, sift and sort the data.

Enterprise class tools are not free. Participating on Facebook may cost nothing and tweeting is free but the content and eco-sytem to support a sustained social media marketing effort requires budget and commitment. Professional videos still cost money to produce and edit.

Free tools doesn’t mean that social media marketing is free.

Myth #3. It’s Just Facebook

Many organisations think that because Facebook dominates the social media numbers game with nearly one billion users, that it is the only social media network to consider in a social media marketing strategy.

Facebook only allows less than 15% of your updates to appear in your Facebook followers timelines through its “Edge Rank” algorithms.

If you are a B2B organisation then LinkedIn could be a social network you want to embrace firmly. LinkedIn is also one of the fastest growing social networks.

Twitter can be used to create a targeted group of followers that is expensive and slow to build on Facebook.
The rise of an increasingly visual web has made social media such as Instagram and Pinterest networks increasingly attractive as part of your social media marketing strategy. Some case studies are revealing that Pinterest is more effective than Facebook in driving social commerce. The online boutique store Boticca’s data is evidence of that.

The basics of marketing must not be forgotten in the frenzy of social media mayhem.

Myth #4. Social Media is the “Silver Bullet”

Social media is not your marketing saviour.

You need to have contagious content on your websites and blog that people will want to share on social networks. You need to  relentlessly build followers, tribes and subscribers. This takes commitment and persistence. Don’t forget the role of traditional media such as email marketing.

Remember to continue to optimize  your online properties for search engines. Being found on Google is still a “must do”. If you aren’t doing this then you need to reconsider some of your marketing budget priorities.

Social media marketing advertising is still only $5 billion and search engine marketing spend is 10 times larger at $50 billion plus. Why?…because it works.

Facebook maybe sexy and funky but Google is still king of online and its Google+ network is close to reaching a tipping point in social media consciousness.

What About You?

What has been your experience with social media? Has it been effective? Are you struggling to perform “social at scale”.

What has been your return on investment? Have you been able to measure it?

What other marketing works for you? Has email marketing been important to your tactics?

Are you paying enough attention to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so people looking for you online can find your in search engines results pages?

Look forward to hearing your stories and successes.



































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