Is there any real benefit of Instagram for Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is the buzz word for getting more website visitors, getting more clicks on your website and basically getting more customers but sometimes it seems that you just participate because the experts tell you to!

In some cases it is important to stake your place or get your own URL at websites like YouTube or Facebook but the purpose for many sites has most small business owners baffled.

Instagram serves one very obvious purpose to me – it helps you get images from your smartphone onto your website. This means that your staff or contractors can do some of the work that you’d normally pay a digital marketer for.

File Management and transferring files is complicated for most users

I remember back to the late 1990’s and around the dotcom boom when everyone started to use the internet and email as well as digital cameras. I was operating a computer software training centre in Dee Why (Sydney) and one of the hardest concepts for most students to grasp was file management in Windows. Files, folders, drives are the words we use and I recall trying to compare it to a filing cabinet.

Most of the people who did our courses really just wanted to get photograph image files from their digital cameras and onto their computers and this is one problem that Instagram solves. By installing the Instagram app on your smartphone and then sharing selected photos to your Instagram account you can not only share it with your friends but you can use a plugin in WordPress to then show these images on your website (see the example were I helped Tristan from ABS Asbestos demonstrate the type of work they do).

Image storing and sharing services

Instagram isn’t the first image sharing service but it’s owned by Facebook, which has massive opportunity to promote it to their users. Other image sharing services include:

• Pinterest
• Flikr
• Google Photos
• TinyPic, and more

The goal with these image sharing services is not just to be a place you can store and share images but most importantly that your profile gets discovered by potential customers and that is why it’s important to use keywords and keyphrases that describe what your business does with each image.

The old way is via uploads

The alternative ways are not too complicated but involve more work. If you use something like Dropbox you can automatically have pictures you take with your phone backed up into the cloud. If you have Dropbox installed on your computer then you can easily just follow these steps:

1. Sign into WordPress
2. Find the page or blog post where you want the image(s) to go
3. Go into edit mode
4. Click the insert image button
5. Find the image on your computer
6. Upload it

If you’re a bit nerdy like me you’ll find this logical and easy but if you’re focused on your work then this can seen downright confusing and complex.

If you need help with your digital marketing and just want some help and advice register for the free digital marketing consultation.