The Fun Side of Technology on Instagram
If your company has a star marketer who knows marketing like the back of his/her hand, you can be sure that your Instagram account is not going to look anything like a marketing pitch should! Especially if you are a technology enterprise company, what do you think would look best on your Instagram account? Pictures of your products, inspirational quotes, your latest software innovation announcement, blah blah blah!
If you are a smart marketer, you would actually not put any of that on your account. That’s how the top brands in the technology world are playing their cards. After all the boring and mundane work at office, doesn’t everyone want to go back to a profile which is more calming and is able to cheer you up instead?
If you wish fresh talent to keep joining your company and innovating, it is important to leave a fun impression on social media. Remember, the fresh talent are college pass-outs and still have that “youngster attitude” in them. For them a little bit of fun between grave coding could actually work miracles.
Here is a glimpse of how those big brands are doing it right on Instagram:
1. Employee Power: Capture the fun and wacky side of your employees as they share coffee over a discussion, or while they play with their colleagues during a short coffee break. This helps in making your employees feel wanted, at home and instills so much more faith in the company.
It also projects the company as an employee friendly one to outsiders. This helps in driving more and more fresh talent towards the company. You see, who doesn’t wish to work with a brand which is not all work but also facilitates a lot of play!
E.g. IEEE Communications Society who urges their employees to click selfies and post, among which the company chooses the best picture with the most interesting story to tell and rewards the winners.
2. Get Out of the Office: If you are conducting a number or events or for that matter even participating in some, what better than giving your audience a glimpse of the same? If you are on social media, you got to be a social brand and events are awesome places to socialize. This also gives your audience, which might be your employees or prospective employees a sense of exposure they might receive by being a part of the company.
E.g. IBM makes use of its event appearances in their Instagram account, along with a few clips of their company’s who’s who attending/inaugurating various events. As fancy as working at IBM is, who are also known for their internal employee engagement activities, they do have a pretty compelling Instagram account.
3. The Innovator: Working towards a cause? What better way to promote that than using social media. It’s a sea full of fishes waiting to carry your message from one corner of the world to another! If your brand is promoting a cause, you definitely need to talk about it. It is possible that someone out there is looking for a scope to work with a brand which believes in CSR. It also adds goodwill to your brand name.
Working towards women empowerment is what a lot of companies believe in, but how many of them have actually been able to put the message across clearly to masses. Google has!
E.g. Be it their ever interesting search engine doodles or out of the box approach towards social media, Google has definitely nailed it. While most technology centered companies were male dominated, Google took a huge step and started promoting the power of the “female brain”. Google’s Instagram campaign “Made with Code” is a huge hit, and it consists of photographs/videos of women working in their organization, messages around women empowerment and a display of the various projects/software their women have built. Now isn’t that amazing?
4. Bring Out the Trump Card: Associate a strong personality to your brand, someone almost synonymous with your brand, for example the CEO of the company and make your Instagram statement through his/her account. In this case, the pain of building a whole community around your brand handle is skipped, also tend to relate more with a living personality than an unresponsive brand.
E.g. Christian Sanz, CEO at Skycatch, a startup that produces aerial drones that have the ability to gather information related to maps and thermal imaging, mostly used by construction companies, uses the same format on Instagram. Sanz makes use of his personal account to post images/videos related to various developments by the company, their stunning flying drones, his travel stories, events and more. In fact, it is evident from his followers count vs the company’s official account’s followers count, how much more effective it is to use his account to promote the company.
While Instagram has been a great marketing platform for most fashion & accessories brands, travel brands, retail as well as FMCG brands, over the past one year even technology firms have learnt to innovate and have created a space for themselves with unique content.
