Okay, although I see the huge benefit of social media, speaking from both a marketing perspective and a personal perspective, maybe I’m a little dof, a little slow, or a little old. I have never understood the point of Twitter (who has the time for those 140 characters?), Instagram feels like an extension of Facebook since they bought it, and I’d rather be a content creator than a content curator or consumer on Instagram. I like the utility and ease of use of WhatsApp.
But the global collective can’t be all wrong. At Moshito, the music conference in Johannesburg last year, a speaker told us that local group MiCasa got at least 30,000 hits on a video uploaded on Instagram.
Music industry soothsayers and pundits have long held that YouTube is the best music discovery device available to musicians trying to break through, while the increase in the number of companies offering cheap videos for online marketing suggests that this is a major growth area. The fragmentation of traditional media certainly indicates that marketers need to work harder to get the attention of potential users of their product or service. I haven’t had DStv or SABC or etv connected for years, but I still stay current with news and happenings through that delicious invention called the world wide web. A video uploaded on both YouTube (Google’s baby) and Instagram (Facebook’s baby) must surely be a deadly combo. SEO would probably shoot through the roof.
Instagram’s additional appeal comes through the filtering of images that lend a retro and hipster feel to the content, while also providing another portal for creating exposure for brands, from bands to soap powder. Also, whatever drove Mark Z to purchase Instagram must mean that it has some utility.
The social media landscape will increasingly become littered with the carcases of has-beens (MySpace what?) or still births (what’s Second Skin again?), but they’re worth a try. Note to self: upload video on Instagram…