With all the words that are floating around the internet these days – on blogs, on Twitter, etc., one of the best ways to reach through the noise, and grab your customers attention is to use visuals. Research has shown that posts on both Facebook & Twitter get more shares and likes if they contain a visual, but why not go one step further and use a dedicated photo-sharing platform such as Instagram or Pinterest? Any business which sells products should be on at least one of these sites anyway, but there are creative ways that other small businesses can use them too!
Before choosing the right photo-sharing platform for your business, or any social media platform actually, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to achieve with this network. Do you want to give customers an insight into your company culture, or your products, or both? Do you wish to share photos, or do you need a site which can help with your content marketing plan too? Once you have decided what you want to achieve with the photo-sharing service, then you need to look at which one fits best with your aims for your business. To help you make that choice, Zool Digital is taking a closer look at two of the most popular platforms: Instagram and Pinterest.
Overview of Instagram and Pinterest
In 2014, Instagram went from strength to strength, growing its user base to 150 million active monthly users. Figures recently released by L2 Intelligence Service reveal that Instagram gets 10000 comments per second, around 8,500 likes per second, and about 16 billion photos have been uploaded to the app since its launch! A great platform to use if you are trying to catch a younger audience, as at the moment, around three-quarters of its daily users are teenagers which reflects its slightly quirky tone and more casual sharing of images.
Pinterest started out life as a platform that was primarily used for food lovers and wedding planners but has quickly risen to be the leading platform for social sales. Pinterest is basically a virtual pinboard and is extremely useful for anyone whose business is in the E-commerce world. If you are in the retail or restaurant industry, then Pinterest is perfect for sharing highly attractive product pins, but you can also use Pinterest to share Infographics if your business is more easily described with words than pictures, e.g. digital marketing!
Platform & Cross-Platform Posting
The primary platform for Instagram is mobile; in fact, the app was designed for mobile-first and is constantly in the top ten mobile apps for both US and UK users. This makes it a great platform if you aim to increase mobile engagement. Instagram is also unique amongst the other photo-sharing platforms available as it allows for the easiest cross-platform sharing. As soon as you upload a photo to Instagram, it takes you to the “share” screen which offers you the option of also sharing the photograph to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and Flickr.
The primary platform for Pinterest is online, and the fact that you can share both product photos and infographics means it is perfect for those businesses who wish to supplement their content marketing strategy with some photo assets. It is pretty challenging to post items from Pinterest onto other platforms, as Pinterest’s main aim is for you to gather content from around the web onto your boards – a mission it makes as easy as possible with the “Pin It” browser button, which enables you to quickly and easily pin items from any web page you like!
Tagging
Instagram also allows you to tag your photos with hashtags, geo-tags and other users. This not only helps you to sort through your own images faster, but it also allows other users to discover them more easily. If your aim for your chosen photo-sharing platform is to start to engage with your social media audience and join in with their on-going conversations, then tagging is an essential part of this. The beauty of Instagram is that not only does it allow you to tag other people – which can really boost your profile if your business hosts events and you can tag people who attended those events in the pictures, but it also allows for geo-tagging so that you can easily engage people within a particular area and really focus on being a “local” business.
Pinterest does not have the capability for tagging as widely as Instagram, but you can use hashtags and keywords to help users discover your photographs more easily.
Photo Storage
As both Instagram and Pinterest are social media networks which are based around visual media, they obviously both have photo storage capabilities, but the way the photos are displayed is very different. Pinterest is based around allowing users to display pictures on themed boards, whereas Instagram displays them in a grid setting with the most recent photo shown first. These different ways of displaying the images can really affect the way your audience interacts with them. For example, Instagram would be the photo-sharing platform to use if you wish to promote your company culture and give customers a behind-the-scenes look at what is happening as it happens, whereas Pinterest would be more suited for a company who wishes to allow their customers to browse through their photos by category or event.
Primary Audience
As stated previously, Instagram’s primary audience is made up of 18 to 24 years old, with a 49% female and 51% male breakdown. Pinterest, on the other hand, has a similar age span of 18 to 29 but is more heavily weighted towards females with a breakdown of 68% female and 32% male. It is important to remember, though, that with all social media networks, these numbers constantly change from quarter to quarter, and there can be dramatic shifts overnight! For example, Pinterest’s age range may surprise you as to when it started out it was seen as a network for the over 35s, but recently the range seems to have dropped as people have really started to explore its capabilities. Another word of caution too, it should be no surprise that most networks largest age range is in the younger end of the age scale, as this is the demographic who tend to use social networks daily for personal interactions.
Photo Editing Capabilities
If you are a small business that doesn’t have an in-house design team, then it may be wise to choose a photo-sharing network which has photo editing capabilities, as high-quality visuals will uphold your brand standards, and can really help with customer engagement. Unfortunately, Pinterest does not have any editing capabilities at all, whereas Instagram allows you to do basic editing such as cropping or adding highlights, and it also has its unique filter adding process too.
Analytics
Last, but definitely not least, are analytics. As with all social media networks you use, you should be reviewing the analytics regularly to check engagement such as likes and comments, which will allow you to see what is working and what isn’t.
Instagram users can access simple analytics themselves by looking at the number of likes and comments on individual photos, and seeing how many followers they have gained or lost. However, for a more in-depth analysis, they can use a tool such as Iconosquare, which provides summaries of such metrics as most-liked photo, filter usage, hashtag clouds and monthly follower growth charts. Iconosquare is a free tool, which can now also be added to your Hootsuite account if you use this to keep track of your social media accounts.
Pinterest, on the other hand, has a built-in free analytics tool on its business accounts, which allows you to look at: average daily impressions, average daily viewers, your audience by demographics, what your audience is into, and your top pin impressions in the last 30 days.
Zool is a Cheshire based Digital Marketing Agency, For more information on Social Media Marketing Campaigns for your business, give us a call today on 01625 238 770.
Instagram vs. Pinterest – Which Photo Sharing Platform Is Best?
Digital Organic & Paid Social Media Photography / Jan 29, 2015
With all the words that are floating around the internet these days – on blogs, on Twitter, etc., one of the best ways to reach through the noise, and grab your customers attention is to use visuals. Research has shown that posts on both Facebook & Twitter get more shares and likes if they contain a visual, but why not go one step further and use a dedicated photo-sharing platform such as Instagram or Pinterest? Any business which sells products should be on at least one of these sites anyway, but there are creative ways that other small businesses can use them too!
Before choosing the right photo-sharing platform for your business, or any social media platform actually, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to achieve with this network. Do you want to give customers an insight into your company culture, or your products, or both? Do you wish to share photos, or do you need a site which can help with your content marketing plan too? Once you have decided what you want to achieve with the photo-sharing service, then you need to look at which one fits best with your aims for your business. To help you make that choice, Zool Digital is taking a closer look at two of the most popular platforms: Instagram and Pinterest.
Overview of Instagram and Pinterest
In 2014, Instagram went from strength to strength, growing its user base to 150 million active monthly users. Figures recently released by L2 Intelligence Service reveal that Instagram gets 10000 comments per second, around 8,500 likes per second, and about 16 billion photos have been uploaded to the app since its launch! A great platform to use if you are trying to catch a younger audience, as at the moment, around three-quarters of its daily users are teenagers which reflects its slightly quirky tone and more casual sharing of images.
Pinterest started out life as a platform that was primarily used for food lovers and wedding planners but has quickly risen to be the leading platform for social sales. Pinterest is basically a virtual pinboard and is extremely useful for anyone whose business is in the E-commerce world. If you are in the retail or restaurant industry, then Pinterest is perfect for sharing highly attractive product pins, but you can also use Pinterest to share Infographics if your business is more easily described with words than pictures, e.g. digital marketing!
Platform & Cross-Platform Posting
The primary platform for Instagram is mobile; in fact, the app was designed for mobile-first and is constantly in the top ten mobile apps for both US and UK users. This makes it a great platform if you aim to increase mobile engagement. Instagram is also unique amongst the other photo-sharing platforms available as it allows for the easiest cross-platform sharing. As soon as you upload a photo to Instagram, it takes you to the “share” screen which offers you the option of also sharing the photograph to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and Flickr.
The primary platform for Pinterest is online, and the fact that you can share both product photos and infographics means it is perfect for those businesses who wish to supplement their content marketing strategy with some photo assets. It is pretty challenging to post items from Pinterest onto other platforms, as Pinterest’s main aim is for you to gather content from around the web onto your boards – a mission it makes as easy as possible with the “Pin It” browser button, which enables you to quickly and easily pin items from any web page you like!
Tagging
Instagram also allows you to tag your photos with hashtags, geo-tags and other users. This not only helps you to sort through your own images faster, but it also allows other users to discover them more easily. If your aim for your chosen photo-sharing platform is to start to engage with your social media audience and join in with their on-going conversations, then tagging is an essential part of this. The beauty of Instagram is that not only does it allow you to tag other people – which can really boost your profile if your business hosts events and you can tag people who attended those events in the pictures, but it also allows for geo-tagging so that you can easily engage people within a particular area and really focus on being a “local” business.
Pinterest does not have the capability for tagging as widely as Instagram, but you can use hashtags and keywords to help users discover your photographs more easily.
Photo Storage
As both Instagram and Pinterest are social media networks which are based around visual media, they obviously both have photo storage capabilities, but the way the photos are displayed is very different. Pinterest is based around allowing users to display pictures on themed boards, whereas Instagram displays them in a grid setting with the most recent photo shown first. These different ways of displaying the images can really affect the way your audience interacts with them. For example, Instagram would be the photo-sharing platform to use if you wish to promote your company culture and give customers a behind-the-scenes look at what is happening as it happens, whereas Pinterest would be more suited for a company who wishes to allow their customers to browse through their photos by category or event.
Primary Audience
As stated previously, Instagram’s primary audience is made up of 18 to 24 years old, with a 49% female and 51% male breakdown. Pinterest, on the other hand, has a similar age span of 18 to 29 but is more heavily weighted towards females with a breakdown of 68% female and 32% male. It is important to remember, though, that with all social media networks, these numbers constantly change from quarter to quarter, and there can be dramatic shifts overnight! For example, Pinterest’s age range may surprise you as to when it started out it was seen as a network for the over 35s, but recently the range seems to have dropped as people have really started to explore its capabilities. Another word of caution too, it should be no surprise that most networks largest age range is in the younger end of the age scale, as this is the demographic who tend to use social networks daily for personal interactions.
Photo Editing Capabilities
If you are a small business that doesn’t have an in-house design team, then it may be wise to choose a photo-sharing network which has photo editing capabilities, as high-quality visuals will uphold your brand standards, and can really help with customer engagement. Unfortunately, Pinterest does not have any editing capabilities at all, whereas Instagram allows you to do basic editing such as cropping or adding highlights, and it also has its unique filter adding process too.
Analytics
Last, but definitely not least, are analytics. As with all social media networks you use, you should be reviewing the analytics regularly to check engagement such as likes and comments, which will allow you to see what is working and what isn’t.
Instagram users can access simple analytics themselves by looking at the number of likes and comments on individual photos, and seeing how many followers they have gained or lost. However, for a more in-depth analysis, they can use a tool such as Iconosquare, which provides summaries of such metrics as most-liked photo, filter usage, hashtag clouds and monthly follower growth charts. Iconosquare is a free tool, which can now also be added to your Hootsuite account if you use this to keep track of your social media accounts.
Pinterest, on the other hand, has a built-in free analytics tool on its business accounts, which allows you to look at: average daily impressions, average daily viewers, your audience by demographics, what your audience is into, and your top pin impressions in the last 30 days.
Zool is a Cheshire based Digital Marketing Agency, For more information on Social Media Marketing Campaigns for your business, give us a call today on 01625 238 770.
