Using Instagram to Market your Ecommerce Site
First off, I want to say that this model is not necessarily going to work for every type of eCommerce customer base or store. This tactic is probably only going to be effective if you sell a product that is built around a lifestyle. My company makes ultraportable speakers and we market to young adults, teens, tweens, and people that just LIKE mobile music gadgets.
Several months ago, we were contemplating how we could crowd-source user-based content. The idea of turning everyone into bloggers seemed daunting and impossible. We wanted to create more pages on our site with relevant content, but we didn't know a platform that would allow us to do it.
That's when we came up with Swagonomics. We built the site to pull from the #BOOMBOTIX hash tag and we created a back end that gamified the process so that our users got points for generating content. When enough points were accumulated, users would be able to redeem discount codes on our Shopify site.
In several months, we've now accumulated over 4,000 indexed pages to the site. We have loads of user content, and we've actually seen a number of transactions go through for our best users. I'm not going to say this site will sky rocket your Shopify sales, but it will help SEO.
You can read more in depth on how we hacked this together: http://boombotix.com/skullyblog/2012/10/11/using-instagram-to-build-seo/
If you're interested in the implementation, I'm sure we can help you and your company with getting this type of social media integration onto your site. We can also tell you about the NUMEROUS technical hurtles along the way.
This are some pics are users generate:
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Sounds like a great idea but unfortunately not really geared towards the type of products we provide. Best of luck with everything though!
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Sounds interesting. We design and build Remote Operated Camera Camera ships. Would be nice to have our customers "show what they filmed" linked to our content. I would like to discuss the potential of this for our products.
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The whole site is built around Ruby, Shopify, and Instagram API. Instagram is the way that we collect media so this is strictly built around mobile. It's possible to expand it into desktop submissions but it would be a different animal. Contact me directly lief [at] boombotix.com and I could tell you more about it.
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this sounds great and im really interested! can you help me put this on my site?? :)