The first time I saw Instagram was a few months ago, Ann from Holier Than Now was using it to take a photo of something. At the time I thought it was just another photo filter application, so I didn’t think much.
Then I started seeing more bloggers use it on twitter and their blogs. Was I missing the point? So I go to download it, two things struck me right away, 1. It is FREE and 2. It has 496 FIVE STAR ratings. In my limited smartphone experience, I’ve never seen anything like that. Hipstamatic is great, but a few bucks, takes forever to figure out, and each of their filters is a few more dollars. You can share pretty well, but was it worth it?
I have been going crazy over the last few days with Instagram, and think it’s great for fashion bloggers for a number of reasons, but mostly they boil down to these two points.
1. Instagram makes it easy to engage with social media platforms
Instagram takes no time to figure out. It has probably the simplest interface which makes it easy to select which networks you want to share your photos on, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Foursquare, Posterous, and Flickr. Even within Instagram, the community is amazingly fun to interact with, as you can just ‘like’ images and comment on them with ease. The reason why I like Instagram so much more than other social media feeds, is that most the images taken there are done by the users themselves. It breeds a new life to the social media experience that is so inspiring.
click for larger view
2. Instagram can make the crappiest iPhone photo look amazing
Since downloading it really has opened my world with photo sharing. Part of what was holding me back with micro blogging networks like Facebook and Tumblr was the process of taking photos, editing them, then uploading, and then writing. If I was going to go through all that, why not just make a post on my blog? Then it became a thing of, “Is it blog worthy?” Goodness gracious, now I have a headache!
With this new tool, I can snap a photo apply any of the 15 filters plus the blurring tool to create an effect that turns an non-descript image into something special, even it it’s a traffic light!
So all in all…Instagram makes it easy to share all the little moments of my day, the little thoughts that inevitably goes into to what makes a post… or not. It’s such a wonderful tool to help bloggers participate on a multitude of different platforms as well as find other people who take amazing photos.
Does Instamatic drive traffic to your site? Not directly. Can you save and share great images you find on there from other users? Not unless you find the images on an external network. Is it an invaluable tool for bloggers wanting to share on the go? Absolutely.
The only thing now, is how to take so many photos without overloading the community with random pics of tiny moments? That’s a whole other can of worms.
Come overshare with me on Instagram! I’m thecoveted.
Its so great. also like that KateSpade is on it too!
my username for instagram is:blueiris.
yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! love it J.
xo