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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.

Adobe’s New Pen And Ruler Tease The Future Of Digital Creativity

Its not just a neat stylus and ruler. If Adobes new tools are a hit, Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects change forever.

I draw a perfectly straight line on my iPad. Then I bisect it at a true 90 degrees. I draw triangles and circles and squares until the screen is cacophony of pristine shapes.

I’m using Adobe’s new hardware—a stylus called Ink and a ruler called Slide, which are available as a pair for $200 today. Born from an unfunded, skunkworks project within Adobe’s walls, the company teamed with Ammunition—the same design firm behind Beats—to craft this aluminum hardware that teases the future of the company and how all of us will create digital media tomorrow.

“Our interaction methods are pretty long in the tooth. The mouse and keyboard are growing ancient. A lot of things we did were innovations 20 years ago. Now they’re habituations,” admits Michael Gough, vice president of Experience Design, Adobe. “We’re used to using that control key. Was that the best way we could expose that experience? Probably not.”