Class 10: Instagram as a collaboration tool

INSTAGRAM:

In another class I took here at Boston College, (A marketing class with Prof. Nick Nugent) we learned that we are currently in “the decade of Instagram”. What that means is that Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform and one of the most popular in terms of marketing. If a company or team wanted to collaborate using Instagram as a platform, it would be easy for a few reasons. The first and biggest is the use of hashtags, which can easily group things into categories, and another is the ability for more than one person to run a single account. With the combination of these two, a team could consistently be posting and hash tagging on instagram which would help get their name out and possibly begin a much bigger marketing process.

Instagram is also widely used for a similar reason by individual people such as celebrities. Individuals can market their own products, or create posts to build their fan bases by using Instagram and hashtags.

Instagram is a photo sharing  social media venue.  It has a number of features: There is instant sharing to social media sites with unlimited upload capabilities.  It also allow “tag” capabilities like facebook where you can provide information on the pictures.  I tend to use instagram a lot more than snapchat as instagram allows comments to be posted back and forth which adds to the collaborative nature and benefit of the application.  

Instagram is known as an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that allows users to take photos and videos. Also, it allows users to share those photos on a variety of social networking platforms, including Facebook, Tumblr, and etc. One unique feature of Instagram is that photos are confined in a square shape, which looks similar with Polaroid images. The maximum duration for videos is 15 seconds. In December 2013, Instagram introduced a new feature called “Instagram Direct” which has a feature of sharing photos with a specific user or group of users. Similar with a privacy setting of Facebook, Instagram users can change the setting so that photos are not viewable by general public.

Users can share photos only with people who follow them. If users want to share photos or video clips with users who do not follow them, that recipient will get an alert that photos/clip has been shared.