Instagram As A Marketing Tool

Photo-sharing application Instagram saw its userbase grow to one million in only three months. The service enables people to share their finest moments by letting them take a picture, choose a Hipstamatic-like filter to transform the look and feel, and share it with a small text and/or its geo-location on numerous social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Recently Instagram has drawn considerable interest from a number of brands. Levi’s Brazil is one of the first to roll out a marketing campaign using the service.

The fashion brand takes fully advantage of Instagram’s unique features to display new products that will be released in the forthcoming collection, as well as images that represent the brand’s personality. Users can start following ‘levisbrasil’ in order to stay updated about the latest stuff, all in a purely visual way. I think Instagram’s photo filters totally breathe the Levi’s style. For the moment the campaign generated limited results — only 127 people started following Levi’s Brazil. Nevertheless, many predict a big future for Instagram as a marketing platform. Interestingly, Giles Fitzgerald from London-based communication agency Frukt claims that the service opens up new social media marketing opportunities for visually oriented brands.

“For fashion brands word dominated social media platforms such as Twitter can be a barrier to the more tactile and lifestyle-oriented element of their brands. Instagram with its ability to turn humble photos into works of art manages to blur the lines between a humble snap and the kind of imagery that dominates the advertising billboards and print ads.”