Instagram releases book to teach advertisers to take better photos

 

 

When Instagram first rolled out ads last November, the reaction was mixed. Some brands quickly latched on to the Instagram specific look and feel, which made their photographs feel like a natural part of your news feed. Others, not so much. Famously, one of the first ads was from Michael Kors, and it looked more like it belonged in a fashion magazine than on Instagram. Now the photography-based social network has released a guide for companies, showing them how to do it better.

The "Instagram Handbook for Brands" profiles 11 different companies that have succeeded in using Instagram to connect to their customers, and discusses tips for how to make the images work within the bounds of the service. In other words, how to make your photos look less like slickly produced advertisements with huge budgets, and more like they were shot on a smartphone, with square framing, and overly used filters. So, like pretty much every other Instagram image.

There's actually a lot more to it than just snapping off a perfectly centered image of a product against an appropriately rustic background. The guide also delves into trying to create a hashtag, getting your users to share their own photos, and more.

Unfortunately, the book isn't available to the general public. But if you're an advertiser who's going to be using Instagram, we're sure you could get hold of one. And even if you can't, the company is starting a series of blogposts "aimed at helping marketers showcase their best creative work on Instagram," which will doubtless contain a lot that you can crib from.

(via The Verge)