Page 8 - St Maur marketing and social media thoughts.

Pros and Cons of Instagram for St Maur
Instagram was set up as a photo-sharing app, and it’s become incredibly popular. It is a great place to show off your portfolio. It’s very easy to get started and has a very user-friendly interface The sheer numbers of users means that it’s possible to get hundreds of likes with any half-decent images. In short, it’s the go-to place for sharing photographs, and potential for businesses is enormous but it does have a few annoying limitations
Pros:
• Over a billion monthly active users (an eighth of the world’s population!);
• 200m users visiting at least one business profile every day;
• Over 25m business profiles on Instagram;
• Free access;
• Fastest growing social media site;
• 80% of users follow one or more companies;
• 72% of users have bought a product they first saw on Instagram;
• 75% of users visit a brand’s website after seeing a post.
Cons:
• Instagram can’t pull through any EXIF or IPTC data when you post, eg titles, captions;
• You can’t share pictures in 3:2 portrait format without cropping them - even though 3:2 is the
standard aspect ratio of DSLRs!;
• There is no way to rotate your phone to show videos or photographs in full-screen mode (as you
can on Facebook);
• You need over 10,000 followers before you can include clickable links in your posts;
• You need to convert your personal account to a business account before you get any
performance statistics, eg reach, views, engagement and likes;
• Switching from a business account to a personal account deletes all the statistical information
about your posts;
• You can’t easily link your Instagram posts to products on your website, eg to sell prints or books
(There is a way, but it took me months to set up, and I needed professional help!!)
These missing features would be of huge value to photographers, but I’m not expecting things to change any time soon
Written by Jeremy Pascoe @ Walking Gun Photography