Why focus on applications for Instagram while Instagram itself is an app?
Apps for Instagram? What for?
Instagram attracts more and more users. Advertisers are aware of it and are beginning to be interested in it. Some “hot” stats here. This shows a quick professionalization of Instagram usages for the coming months.
Instagram is the “Picture Marketing” medium by excellence
What is Picture Marketing ?
“Image increases engagement much more than text: different mechanisms and procedures are combined to form what is called the Picture Marketing. We are all attracted by the image, and social media have all opted for this approach. Brands love it and want more of it, because beyond Picture Marketing’s viral potential importance, it also allows them to be more visible among the exponential daily mass of available digital content. Easier identification, more massive commitment, the Picture Marketing simply requires (very) good visual accompanied by a caption fiting their interpretation. “Peter Cappelli, Consultant & Trainer in digital communications and online reputation”
You can understand that content put on Instagram must be dealt in a customized and esthetic way. They must awake… emotion.
At Dialogfeed, our work is to highlight your Instagram accounts on great designed social walls (eg test our Instagram widget and tell us what you think about it!).
But before that, Community Managers work is to create contents that will attract their audience.
Create the desire to share content.
This is where applications can help for Instagram: more and more mobile applications are available to community managers (and to everyone) to improve their content before sharing.
The list is long but all are not great.
We therefore propose you a list of 10 tested and approved applications that will help you to optimize “your” marketing picture on Instagram:
10 applications to optimize your contents for Instagram:
WORK ON IMAGE
Snapseed is the Rolls Royce of image management on Smartphones. Ergonomic and ultra functional, this application allows you to correct, amend and take your picture as a whole or in pieces. Auto correction, selective adjustment, manual correction, rotation, cropping and custom filters: everything is there.
Also available for Android.
Pixlr Express is in some ways the “handyman”, the multitasking app for Instagram. You will not have the same flexibility with Snapseed, but you can roughly do…everything : custom filters, add text overlay, add effects, multi-photo collages, frames, resize, crop, etc. etc. A must have! (Note that the web version is also magical app).
Diptic has more specificities: it provides hundreds of different formats of collages of pictures, with a large range of settings.
Diptic 7 Demo from UpTop on Vimeo.
PicLab also focus on specialization: the heart of the product is to integrate slogans in overlay of pictures. Countless number of fonts, lot of messages customization possibilities .
To complete the picture part, it seemed important to us to emphasize the need for many of us to implement their “paw” to their visual: logo, signature, etc. (remember that Instagram can lead to real problems of copyright or trademark). iWatermark app brings good track solution.
Also available for Android.
VIDEO
Instagram is also about video: 15 seconds to convince, you better be good ! This is an excellent application to generate beautiful videos on Instagram:
This application offers you the features of an image editor … in a real-time version for video. Their own video will tell more about it:
REPOST
Repost function is not provided by Instagram. This function allows (would allow?) to share with your communities a photo you liked. Instagram does not wish to provide this type of functionality Especially for image rights reasons.
Listed Instagram repost applications below offer an alternative solution, to show photo author in overlay:
THE HYBRID “CHEATERS”
Hybrids are cheaters and they are perfect for storytelling;-)
Flipagram allows you to turn your photos into a video! 3 steps:
- Choose your photos
- Choose a title
- Select music
Simple and very impressive if you do the right things.
Artwork is the second “cheater” in this article: it allows you to embed audio on a static image. For instance, you can comment on a product, a picture, a graph, etc.
Did you test some of these tools for Instagram? Do you know any other? Let’s transform this list into a useful collaborative ressource!
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