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18/05/2011 by
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Mobile Photography Communities And Brands

Photography in general became more and more popular the last decade. With the rise of social media, Flickr (launched in 2004) became huge with millions of users. This upward trend grew for years but since 2010 we see a decrease in the use of Flickr. Is this strange? No, it’s understandable.

There are many different social media channels nowadays and it’s impossible to keep them all up to date. So what will social media users do? They choose the channels with the best and most options to share their pictures, updates and other information to.

Especially Facebook and microblog Tumblr (the last one had more than 9 million users in November) have taken a lot of territory from Flickr. Daily Facebook users upload pictures on their profiles to share them in their network. Automatically, we see a lot of them not posting that often on Flickr anymore. Besides this, Tumblr, a microblog launched in 2007, got more popular also. Tumblr is a mix with pictures and blogs and has easy sharing and reblogging options.

What also pulled people away from Flickr is the rise of smartphones and its popular photo applications with easy sharable and edit options. It’s so popular a new term called “Iphoneography” is created for photographing with your iPhone. This trend has a huge community with its own blogs and different photo apps are launched to provide the need for the mobile photography addicts. In January a “Hipstamatics Exhibition”  hit London. People from all over the world could send in shots made with this very popular iPhone photo app and Apple itself organized its own “Iphoneography Exhibition”  in Zürich on the 13th of May this year.

In the beginning of last year’s October, photo app Instagram was launched. Within only one week more than 100.000 people downloaded it and in May there seems to be already 3.6 million accounts but this number is not officially confirmed yet. With Instagram users can easily make pictures and edit them with beautiful vintage filters. The pictures are sharable in Instagram, or through other social networks like Tumblr, Flickr, Facebook and Foursquare. Instagram is not only a photo app, it’s a community itself. People can easily follow each other and when a picture receives a certain amount of likes in a short time, it can enter the popular page where every IG-er wants to be. Instagram is so popular because it’s simplicity: it’s like Twitter with pictures instead or words. Another popular photo app is Leme Camera, which used to be named LomoLomo.

So what’s in this mobile photography trend for brands? To answer this question we take a look at what Starbucks does with its Instagram account (see picture above). Starbucks has more than 16.000 followers which is quite a lot. They show behind-the-scenes pictures to their Instagram community first. It makes their followers feel part of the Starbucks life and family. Next, Starbucks has entrance to a huge collection with user generated content. There are thousands of pictures from Instagramers with hashtag Instagram (#Instagram). Every day fans show the love they have for Starbucks by uploading a picture of Starbucks coffee they just bought.

In short, it’s like every other social media channel, the difference is the content being placed, the rules are still the same. Another brand on Instragram is Levis Brasil, showing inspiration visuals and collections to its followers.

Instagram or other mobile photo apps are not suitable for every brand or company. As a brand you have to be able to show content in pictures or come up with a plan to do this. But there are nice opportunities for many brands here!