Bookmarks for June 12-18

This week I was looking at articles and posts about Instagram, since that is the platform that I will be writing about for the group project.

4 tips to use Instagram to promote your business
There's nothing earth-shattering in this post about marketing via Instagram, but it provides a basic introduction for people who are either new to Instagram or new to advertising on Instagram. Some of this advice could be applied to other platforms as well, like the reminder to engage with your followers and provide them with benefits that people who don't follow the page don't get.

5 ways to use Instagram to promote ecommerce
This article moves past the obvious observations of the first one to look at the types of images that are most effective for business accounts on Instagram. Besides the unsurprising advice that marketers should make sure they are posting good photographs, the author points out that users aren't looking for the highly edited and airbrushed images that they see in magazines - they like seeing real people, rather than polished models. The author also emphasizes the importance of hashtags, which are the primary method through which people find new accounts.

Getting started
This advice is coming straight from the horse's mouth - Instagram knows that people are using their site to promote their businesses and has provided advice based on what they have seen in successful accounts and campaigns. Perhaps the most important take-away from this page is how beneficial it is to have a clear vision and deliberate plan when launching on Instagram. My account is not for a business, but I confess that I had little direction when I joined, and probably could have benefited from a more thorough evaluation of my goals and intentions. Fortunately my livelihood is not dependent on maintaining a successful account (only my pride).

Instant algorithm: How marketers should alter their strategies
The biggest kerfuffle in the Instagram community recently was a change in the way that peoples' feeds are organized. Previously, the default view was chronological, so the user knew they would see every post if they just scrolled back far enough. In Spring of this year, Instagram rolled out an algorithm which organizes posts using a calculation of how interested the user will be in them, based on previous actions. The author seems to be advocating a stay-calm attitude (there was a lot of panic at the time, and calls for people to turn on post-notifications), but some of the advice seems cheesy. That may be because I'm coming from a non-business point of view, though.

The 5 biggest misconceptions about using Instagram for business
Finally, this post provides a good response to all the haters out there who think that their business isn't big enough, or visually interesting enough, to benefit from Instagram accounts. The author does a good job of demonstrating the benefits that even small, service-based businesses can gain from promotion on Instagram. The article is undated, but it seems to be from 2012 or 2013, so it may unfortunately not super up-to-date. I know that I have struggled to track statistics, as is mentioned in the final section, so I will be looking into some of the stat-tracking apps that are mentioned.