Instagram is a video and photo sharing application, founded in 2010, where users can upload media that can be edited with the help of filters. It is associated with hashtags and geographical taggings as well.

The platform is secured and offers two kinds of accounts - Public and Private, where the users can share photos either publicly or with their preapproved followers. Here, the users can find celebrities, friends, and colleagues, and also search by tag and location.

Mission

To capture and share the worlds moments.

Vision

Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

How Instagram Started?

In 2009, a 27 years old man, Kevin Systrom enjoyed his fine bourbon and whiskey a lot so he created an app called Bourbon. The purpose of Bourbon was so that the people could make plans, check into locations what good drinks to be had, and share photos. Mr. Kevin had no prior experience with Computer Science despite his previous employment at Google.

While working at another startup in his spare time, he learned to code at night and on weekends. At this point, the Bourbon app was just a small side hobby and Mr. Kevin would not think much about it at that time. As most things make a mark in the world is all about being in the right place and at the right time, and Mr. Kevin got lucky in this.

The turning point took place in March 2010, when he attended a party, which was for Silicon Valley Startup called hutch. Here he met venture capitalists and showed them a prototype of the Bourbon app, and they were impressed. They all decided to meet for a coffee to discuss the idea further.

After the first meeting, he took a leap of faith and decided to quit his job and focus on Bourbon, and within just two weeks, he managed to raise 500,000 Dollars in seed funding from the venture capitalists seemed out of the party. With this money, he began assembling a group and the first to join was Brazilian, 25-year-old Mike Krieger. Mr. Kevin firstly met Mr. Mike at Stanford and decided to work together.

The Bourbon app had check-in and messaging features, photo sharing feature was turned out to be the most popular feature. Bourbon pivoted to become more focused on photo sharing with likes and comments. At this point, they would change the name to Instagram, which means the combination of instant camera and telegram.

Instagram was launched on 6th October 2010, and turned to a top free photo-sharing application. It changed the way of sharing photos and is liked by all the common people and celebrities as well.

Business Model

1. Photographs

Instagram has a good crowd of people, and photographs on Instagram grab the attention of the people. People click photos and like to share their memories with their friends and colleagues, and here Instagram provides the best features for people for uploading photos. The college students share their college memories with their friends on the platform.

Many people share their memories of achievement, happiness, and many other occasional pictures. Celebrities share their recent photos to be engaged with their fans. The leaders, media houses, and business persons are seen active on their Instagram profiles and get connected with the audience. The photographs communicate visually and gain attention.

This is the prior feature of Instagram, and it also provides filters option to bring improvement in their pictures, which attracts the attention of the people towards it.

2. Videos

Initially, Instagram was only a photo-sharing app, but later, it brought video-sharing features as well for the audience and allowed users to share videos for lengths up to 60 seconds. This is a very useful feature for the brands for promoting their products. Our brain remembers visual information faster as compared to text information.

These are great educational medium that lasts in the memory of viewers for a long time. Videos are a great way to tell a story and engage, and have the potential to capture the interest of the viewers. One can voice over a screen recording, and provide valuable context through the video. It captures the interest of the people in a better way.

3. Stories

The users can share the photos and videos on the stories, which disappear after 24 hours. This feature also allows people to go live with the help of this feature. This is being used by the business to place advertisements to promote their products.

Some people use this feature by trying asking their followers questions to get them involved in their story and allow them to share their interests. Instagram stories are discoverable, and hence are visible to those people also who do not follow us.

Marketing with the help of stories provides a great opportunity to reach a new audience. Even before the launch of a new product, you can use Instagram Stories to do a bit of market research and to ask your audience for some honest feedback.

4. Instagram Direct

A Direct Message (DM) is a private communication and is also called a private message. Businesses can engage with their customers through this feature. These messages can be sent to those who do not even follow each other.

With the help of Instagram Direct, the users can share photos and videos, and also chat with their friends and followers. The users can respond to a story with this feature which is one of the easiest ways to make a connection. It also allows the people to send message requests to the people they are not following.

5. Explore Tab

This feature helps the users to find anything and everything. They can find their friends or celebrities whom they want to follow. They can use hashtags and usernames to find what they are looking for. Apart from this, they can explore the featured content by just clicking on the tab.

6. Filters

Instagram provides different filters which is used to enhance the images of the users. It helps in altering an image in terms of lighting, color, and skin tones. It helps minimize glare and reflections, enhances colors, reduces light coming into the lens, and more. This feature is liked and used by most of users.

Revenue Model

The platform earns from two sources – Advertisements and Shopping.

Advertisements

The platform earns through different types of advertisements, such as Story Ads, Photo Ads, Video Ads, Carousel Ads, Collection Ads, and IGTV Ads.

Shopping

Instagram also earns from shopping as well. It is associated with unique features which allow buyers to shop directly from Instagram. It also allows the advertisers to merge the product catalogs with their business accounts. The shopkeepers can build their shops online on the platform, where they can show all their products in the profile, which will allow the customers to browse the products easily.

The sellers can also tag the products in the posts, where the users can see all the price details. They can promote the products with the help of shopping ads, which show the tagged products for users, and also sell products directly from the app by adding a - Shop Now button to end the purchase right in the app.

[The images are being taken from the registered companies and belong to their respective owners only.]