Behind the evolution of Instagram after it was acquired by Facebook

Foreign media recently wrote about the evolution of Instagram after it was acquired by Facebook. The photo sharing service has a rapidly growing, highly active user base that advertisers drool. Now all it needs to do is figure out how to commercialize it and make money for its parent company.

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Karston "Skinny" Tannis, 29, is passionate about Instagram. He is an accounting manager at a publishing company who goes to Instagram fan club almost every weekend and uploads photos to the service every day. He has 35,000 followers on it, which is not a small number, but not enough for him to commercialize.

However, his use of Instagram is largely due to his passion for the service. He calls Instagram a "visual diary" connecting him with other creative people. The first thing he got up in the morning was to turn on the phone and look forward with an expectation of seeing what happened to the app while he was asleep.

That was exactly the kind of passion that Facebook had inspired and why Facebook CEO Founder Mark Zuckerberg spent nearly $ 1 billion buying the photo-sharing app two years ago. People thought he was too crazy at the time. Instagram had only 13 employees at that time, with less than 22 million active users and no web service yet.

Today, it claims to have more than 200 million active users - almost comparable to Twitter - with 60 million daily uploads. According to Nielsen, users spend an average of 3.7 hours per month on Instagram, overtaking Twitter and Pinterest. The acquisition also brought good to Facebook to help it connect more young users.

Mark Mahaney, managing director at RBC, said: "It may be one of the best deals in consumer Internet history."

This is not unreasonable, in part because Instagram has created an overwhelmingly new social phenomenon: just as Kodak invented the film a hundred years ago to make taking pictures easier, Instagram invented a social flow of information with easy-to-use editing tools So that everyone can quickly generate and share polished detailed photos. Its photo sharing function has brought a variety of unexpected effects.

For example, a 13-year-old professional skateboarder attracted as many as 42,000 followers with a skateboarder's photo. Like YouTube on Google, Instagram puts Facebook at the center of an increasingly important communications medium.

Businesses have flocked to the platform. Companies from the clothing company Free People to General Electric unveiled their own Instagram stream, which reflects that the service generates far more user engagement (like "likes" and reviews) than other social networking sites. Patagonia invites climbers to take a selfie on Instagram during mountaineering, tag their photo with #VIDAPatagonia and post it on Patagonia.com. Puma and other brands are also up to 5,000 US dollars a day to recruit a large number of active audience Instagram users give it a picture of the product.

Future challenges

Currently, it seems that only one party did not try to make money on Instagram, it is Instagram's parent company. Facebook also do not need to do that. Its revenue rose 55% YoY to $ 7.9bn last year - none of it comes from Instagram. Zuckerberg said at Instagram's earnings call for April that there is still plenty of room to grow Instagram and it will start to become an important business in the future. However, as he said, "Commercialization is not a priority for us in the short term." In March, Instagram signed its first cooperation agreement with an advertising agency, where Omnicom will deliver about $ 40 million in advertising .

Of course, no one can guarantee that Instagram's steady upward momentum will continue. The two co-founders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, are very clear about this. On the one hand, it faces a number of technical challenges, from maintaining basic services to more users to providing foreign language support.

In addition, a growing body of communications services, such as Snapchat and WhatsApp (now part of Facebook), have emerged as people increasingly need to be private instead of publicly shared. Instagram has to work hard to meet people's changing tastes while maintaining their original features.

Hystrom believes Instagram can overcome this challenge. He recently hired a 45th employee and the Instagram office has just expanded, occupying much of the space on a building floor in Menlo Park, FL. Hystrom recognizes that expanding Instagram services and realizing their economic potential is never easy. In the interview, he also has a question: how many companies can create a social service with more than one billion users? He himself replied, "There is one that is the one we are working for."

At the beginning, many people questioned why Instagram should be sold at an early stage of rapid growth. However, the team at Instagram insisted that the parent company executives would not interfere with Instagram's operations. Kriging praised Jay Parikh, Facebook's infrastructure chief, "Before we came here he told everyone that 'do not bother them, but if they ask for your help, Do whatever you can to help them. "

Krieger and Heath Strom said in fact Facebook brought a lot of value to Instagram. For example, Instagram relies heavily on Facebook's spam and fraud prevention teams to revamp its platform. Krieger also often visits one of Facebook's executive advisors to provide management advice to address the challenges posed by a ten-fold increase in team staff.

The first real test

The first real test that Instagram faced during its own operations occurred three months after the acquisition was completed. Facebook recommends that Instagram modify the terms of service to allow Instagram to use their photos for advertising purposes without the user's consent or notification. Instagram then made the policy changes. Changes to the terms of service were posted on a Monday night, and by the very next day Hyström and Kriging suddenly found the move sparking strong customer dissatisfaction, seeing the number of account cancellations skyrocketing.

"It was a terrible moment.I was thinking that we had just strangled Instagram?" Said Hyström. Kriging convened an Instagram executive meeting immediately, Hyström met Zuckerberg, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and the legal team. "Let's revert to the original terms," ​​Hystrom urged. Heathtrom said they tried to persuade him to adhere to the policy changes. However, he responded that since there is no plan to introduce advertising to the platform in the short term, it is not worth alienating users now. They can reconsider this change in the future.

"It took a while for everyone to accept the status quo, but I firmly believe that reinstating the original terms would work," Hyström said. Later, he published a blog post announced that the terms of service will be restored to the original Instagram, the user's deletion of numbers immediately stop. Users made their own voice, Instagram listened, and Facebook did not interfere with Instagram as it had promised.

Charm

Unlike some social media competitors, Instagram does not explore the nature of its own appeal. Snapchat hired social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson to study why people like the photo "burn after reading." Facebook is working with researchers to explore the mood and mental state behind user status updates.

And Instagram takes the approach of distributing stickers to create a community atmosphere. The company has a 9-person team that encourages community formation. It is responsible for maintaining Instagram's corporate blog, which is delightful to fanatical users like Skinny as it brings with it the latest information on Instagram. When hosting InstaMeet gatherings around the world, Instagram distributes to all organizers, such as Instagram-branded red balloons and stickers.

Why is Instagram so popular? A survey of academics, photographers and investors shows that its rise is linked to the megatrends of visual communication. People want to describe their life experiences by sharing photos. This is evident when Facebook replaces old social networking dominance Myspace, which makes it easier for users to upload and share photos. The iPhone in 2007 turned out to be even more greatly reduced the difficulty of photo shooting and sharing, and brought more fun. The services of Hystrom and Kriging went further on the evolution.

By adding simple editing tools such as filters, Instagram makes ordinary Internet users seem to have become excellent photographers. Today, ordinary people are able to express their thoughts and feelings by modifying their photos.

Today, many professional photographers find Instagram a great place to promote and complement their work. One example is David Guttenfelder, a veteran photojournalist who travels around the world for the Associated Press. In 2013, he entered North Korea for a one-year local resident's life record, at which time he began publishing some of his photographs on Instagram. Its Instagram stream now has 349,000 followers, as if it had become a photo gallery of wonders of the world. Time magazine named him Best Instagram Photographer of the Year.

Hyström and Krieger think the stories of these users are cool, but their focus is on delivering a great and very fast experience for Instagram. Hystrom is excited about issues such as delays (delays between uploading photos and photos). In the past three months, the two shortened the delay by two-thirds. The communications platform needs to be stable and user-friendly, which is why Instagram took off and earlier services like PicPlz and Hipstamatic fell.

Advertising action

Despite the huge demand from advertisers, Instagram has been slow in ad products promotion. Hystrom said the company does not want to go too fast in this area and does not want to screw things up. The company did not test 10 campaigns until November last year, rolling out the first sponsorship ads.

Sandberg talked about the success of Levi's advertising campaign at a recent Facebook earnings conference. Allegedly, those ads hit about 7.4 million people aged 18 to 34 in the United States. Sandberg said it "brought a 24% increase in ad memory, up three times as much as the control group."

On social media, early marketing campaigns tended to have great success because they were pleasantly surprised by the user's attention. However, Hyström places great emphasis on the quality of advertising and avoiding alienating users. When choosing the first 10 advertisers, Instagram chose carefully the brands that made the ads so natural and appealing. Hirström himself reviewed every one of these ads, and he would not hesitate to comment. Airbnb recently advertised on Instagram, and in fact, Hystrom initially bounced back Airbnb's planned ads, asking them to make better use of location features on annotations to document camera locations.

There are also many emerging companies that help advertisers reach Instagram audiences. Companies such as Mobile Media Lab are dedicated to bringing together big brands and Instagram hot accounts (many belonging to more than 100,000 followers of amateur photographers). Companies like Pixlee provide data analytics that help brands like Ugg identify user-generated photos about their apparel products and determine which photos best contribute to their brand.

Adapt to changes in user tastes

Social media services are like nightclubs. They are cool, and at a stretch can attract a lot of people who are in the trend, at the same time, they can disappear without a trace. The surviving services have evolved from entertainment tools to practical ones. In this way, they are still needed even if the user no longer loves them.

Hyström and Kriging attach great importance to the user's tastes. Despite Instagram user base continued to expand, the two are still highly focused, stepping up the development of new products to expand service attractiveness. "I think we are in the process of being private," Hyström said. This shift can be seen in the rise of applications such as Snapchat and WhatsApp, which allow users to share photos with a small audience. "It's not a technological change, it's a social change and we're adapting," he said.

Instagram introduced an account visibility setting feature. Last December, Instagram launched a private messaging feature called Direct. At that time, quite a few tech media outlets were not optimistic about it, but the data showed that it is gaining momentum. According to Instagram, 45 million users (about 25%) have used private messaging on Instagram in the past month.

The company's short video sharing service was less successful. The service was launched shortly after Twitter, Vine's widely-favored company. Heathtrom said Instagram is satisfied with the performance of the feature but declined to disclose specific usage figures, two sources said the actual performance of the video feature was disappointing.

Despite the worry, but Hestrom believes that if the current level of execution can be maintained, Instagram will usher in a huge growth in the future. At the same time, the product will appeal to more fanatical users like Skinny, who has been using it every day for three years. When it comes to the beauty of Instagram, he says, "It's a bit of a snooze on the psychology of others." How much would advertisers pay?

Translator: Le Bang

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