Proyecto Empresa

Tools and Tips to Help Marketers Inspire and Engage on Instagram

This video for marketers showcases how some of the best brands on Instagram—@nikerunning, @generalelectric and @benandjerrys—bring their stories to life and constantly connect with their communities.

When it comes to brands and businesses, our goal is to help companies reach their respective audiences through captivating imagery in a rich, visual environment. One way we can do this is by providing new resources and tools to educate and inspire marketers.

So today we’re publishing the first in a series of blog posts aimed at helping marketers showcase their best creative work on Instagram, and we’re also announcing the launch of the The Instagram Handbook for Brands.

The Instagram Handbook for Brands

This book profiles eleven brands on Instagram that post incredibly engaging content. From @patagonia to @disneyland to @chobani, these accounts bring their unique identities and values to life through captivating imagery and a focus on their respective communities.

The book also features Instagram’s brand values and ten popular hashtags that highlight the collaborative creativity within the Instagram community, such as #chasinglight and #thingsorganizedneatly. Though the book isn’t broadly available, you can expect to see content from it featured right here on our blog.

Tips for Brands

We learned a lot from these brands about what makes for great creative on Instagram. Here are five tips you can start acting on now, based on their work:

Be true to your brand: Ensure that your imagery expresses a clearly defined personality and voice. Photos from eyeglass retailer @warbyparker, featured in the handbook, never feel overly staged or serious, but instead draw from trends in the Instagram community to reflect the company’s quirky creativity.

Share experiences: Offer a view into the world or lifestyle that your brand makes possible through the eyes of the people who use your products and services. The customer images and videos shared by @gopro prompt viewers to wonder what moments they could capture with a GoPro.

Find beauty everywhere: Show how your company sees the world and make it meaningful to people. @generalelectric showcases the beauty of their technology by transporting people to giant jet engine factories and remote wind farms, capturing the machines with elegant symmetry and imparting the grand scale of these man-made wonders.

Inspire action: Start a movement around your brand, whether that means inspiring people to capture photos while running like the #runfree campaign from @nikerunning, or to celebrate a delicious yogurt concoction, as @chobani has done with their #creationaday hashtag.

Know your audience: Learn what people love about your brand, and explore how can you capture the imagination of new customers. @missionbicycle takes the beautiful simplicity that customers love about its bicycles and uses imagery on Instagram to turn these everyday objects into works of art.

GE Instagrapher Contest: A Look Inside General Electric

General Electric (GE) is a multinational company that operates in areas such as energy, health and home, transportation and finance. Despite the company’s size and breadth, GE’s @generalelectric Instagram account builds a personal connection with followers by taking them right to the heart of their research labs, factory floors and locations where their products can be seen in action. They even post photos sent in directly from their employees.

Last fall, General Electric launched the GE Instagrapher campaign as part of an effort to educate consumers about GE. They explained that GE works in four major ways: Building, Powering, Moving and Curing. They encouraged users to take photos inspired by the four ways that GE works, post them to Instagram and tag them with the hashtag #GEinspiredME. The winner would become the next official GE Instagram photographer - the GE Instagrapher - and would be flown to the UK to photograph one of the GE jet engine plants.

GE announced the contest on Instagram, Tumblr and YouTube. They created promotional videos explaining the contest rules and posted photo updates during the campaign. In total, GE received over 4,000 photo submissions for the contest. All submitted photos were displayed in gallery on GE’s Facebook page where users could vote on their favorite photographs.

PayPal Re-imagines Money

Since joining Instagram in January 2013, @PayPal has been using its account to connect in a new way with followers. PayPal is taking a unique approach to building authentic associations with its brand by highlighting the experiences that the PayPal service enables. PayPal frequently invites guest Instagrammers to “take over” the account and share these experiences. For example, Brooklyn based fashion blogger @keikolynn recently documented her shopping excursions using PayPal. Followers are encouraged to share their own adventures on Instagram using the #paypalit hashtag.

As part of this experience-based approach to branding, this past July 4th, PayPal invited guest Instagrammers to share what freedom means to them through a single photo and caption. For the five day “Freedom” July 4 photo series, PayPal enlisted the help of five Instagrammers who had guest posted on the PayPal account before — @danielsunglee, @mlle_michele, @alice_gao, @trotterpup, and @tylersharpphoto — and asked them to delve into the spirit of independence underlying the holiday.