The Power of a Picture is Worth 1000 Words

The business that had no more than 15 employees is now the talk of the town in picture technology. Yes, I am talking about none other than Instagram. Acquired for £630M by Facebook, Instagram became the most used photo sharing platform in the world and has not been rivaled by any other company.

The power of not only images but video’s is now more apparent, especially in social media. People respond to a visual, more than they do text. Take Barack Obama’s first tweet after finding out he had been re-elected. The three words; “four more years” were not what made it the most retweeted tweet in history, it was the picture. A picture that was worth a 1000 words.

If you want to give your business an edge, a picture is simple yet more effective than we could have ever imagined. Facebook saw the importance of it, otherwise they wouldn’t have paid what they did for a small business like Instagram that had barely made a penny.

Launched in October 2010, Instagram is a photo-sharing programme and network that has over 100 million registered users. You are able to take a photo, apply a digital filter to it and then share it with other Instagram users and pay forward to your social networks.

Initially supported by iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, Instagram has now added Android to its compatibility list and is distributed via the iTunes App Store and Google Play.

It is the big player in the market for those who need a quick photo fix and don’t have the ability to use photo editing tools properly. Instagram has received mixed reviews from it’s users with most of them in agreement that the popularity of the application is down to how cheap, simple and effective it is to use.

Instagram is not only great for personal use, but also for businesses. It is a great way to “jazz” up a photo and make it more appealing. Instagram is now allowing you to upload a photo from your Instagram account, directly into your Facebook Business Page (iPhone only). To do this, follow the steps below;

1. Connect your iPhone to your Facebook account (I’m sure you have already done this) and make sure you are an administrator for the page you would like to post a picture on.

2. You will now need to go to your sharing settings in Instagram and click on Facebook to make sure the two applications are connected. When the Facebook authorization page appears, make sure that the Facebook username at the bottom is an administrator of the brand’s Facebook account. (If the account you are logged in as isn’t the one connected to the page you want to edit, you will need to “log out and unlink account”.

 
3. After you have followed the above steps, you Facebook account will be linked to your Instagram account. By default, Instagram will post on to your personal facebook timeline. To change this tap the “post to” button.

4. This will display your posting options, including your personal wall, and a list of any pages for which you are an administrator. Select the page that you would like your Instagram to post photos to.

5. When you click back, you will see that your brand will replace “Wall (Default)” in the “Post to” category. Later, when you are sharing a picture to Facebook, you can also verify that the photo will be posted to the correct Facebook page.

Not only have Instagram made the above change to their platform, but they have just released web-based profiles for users. This is a long awaited feature of the once mobile-only platform. The future is looking good for Instagram.

How long will they reign in the picture networking world?