A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Leveraging Instagram for Your Brand
Instagram entered the online space as a creative, visual, and easy to navigate platform – which made it immediately attractive (and addictive!) to so many people. This clever app has brilliantly embedded itself amongst 21st century culture and has been grasped by all corners of the globe. Aside from keeping up to date with our favourite celebrities, brands have a valuable opportunity to promote their identity and drive loyalty. Whether it’s used to promote the daily specials at a restaurant, happy hour deals at a cocktail bar or perhaps a flash discount sale at a boutique. Everyone enjoys being a part of what feels like an intimate community and allows brands to communicate in a more personal way with their customers.
So how are we working with Instagram?
We’ve built some great Instagram integrations on some of our recent website launches. These beautifully designed regions pull through live posts with dynamic functionality that keeps users engaged in the site and provide a real-time snapshot of what these brands are up to.
Ceviche, and Tart
Instagram feeds are used effectively on the homepage to showcase their delicious food and lifestyle imagery. Visitors are given a window into the behind the scenes world of the latest news, recipes and events.
Our eCommerce clients
We take a slightly different approach for our eCommerce clients. For Pravins who specialise in the luxury jewellery market, we feature a sleek and sophisticated homepage integration. Users are encouraged to interact with the brand by sharing their purchases using a dedicated hash tag. For Estella Bartlett we created a tiled design for a dedicated Instagram page, which sits under a hashtag. Images pull through and their captions are displayed when the image is hovered upon.
We were all pretty excited when Instagram made the decision to move outside the “box” and allow users to upload photos and videos in portrait and landscape formats & we will continue to closely watch what other adaptations to the original format will be made available. We’d also love to see a greater extension of the Instagram API which would allow us to create a more unique and adaptable integration on websites.
Watch this space!