One of the most important features of my phone isn’t the paltry 16GB of storage, the ability to install an app that will show me some guy who is 16 feet away, or the super-fast processor that allows me to watch Green Acres episodes on YouTube while I’m on the treadmill.
The most important feature of my phone is the camera.
I’m one of these guys who takes a picture of just about everything. From the dirty martini at dinner to the new shirt I scored at Target for $6, I love to take pictures. Before phones had cameras I carried a Nikon Coolpix in my pocket to capture images I wanted to preserve for whatever crazy reason
My “free” Picasa account costs me a couple hundred bucks a year for storage thanks to the thousands and thousands of photos I have saved there.
Oh, the price we pay to hang on to a memory or two!
With the advent of social media, all of us have pretty much turned into pic-freaks. Admit it, you’ve taken a picture of at least one meal, your cat sleeping on top of the toilet, or your significant other making a duck face and posted it on Facebook.
A quick scroll through your newsfeed will show you just how much of a visual society we’ve become. In fact, according to Techcrunch we share 350 million photos a day on Facebook. For the marketing people in the room, Facebook posts with photos get 39% more interaction than posts without photos. A post with a photo gets 53% more likes, 104% more comments and 84% more click-thrus than a text-only post.
So start snapping!
A couple months ago, I was caught in the act of snapping a photo of my dinner and posting it on my Facebook page. When my friend Lindsay saw what I was doing, she asked, “Facebook?” I shook my head yes and she said, “Facebook is old school, Instagram is where it’s at!”
I suddenly felt like the geek in the $39 Keds being called out by hot-shot with the $499 Air Jordans.
I have an Instagram account, but up until that very second never used it. Lindsay’s social media slap across my face got me to take a second look at one of the most popular photo sharing apps out there.
Unlike Facebook, Instagram is all photos. No text-only posts here. So for the purely visual in the room, this is the shizzle! As you scroll through Instagram’s equivalent of the newsfeed, you have the ability to “like” and comment on your friend’s photos. If you desire to hack someone’s IG account for some reason, you can rely on Pirater Instagram.
Want to contribute to the stream? You can snap a photo right through the Instagram app or pull one from your phone’s camera roll. Unlike Facebook, Instagram gives you the ability to pretty up your photos with different filters and borders that make them look semi-pro. You can also share them simultaneously on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other social sites as well as embed them into your blog or website.
Since rediscovering Instagram, I freely admit that I’m hooked.
I enjoy peering into the lives of others via their photos. I’ve secretly fallen in love with a few adorable puppies, tried a recipe or two from my friend Robin’s food blog, Knead to Cook, just because she posted a photo that made my mouth water, and I felt horrible for a friend who’s suffering it out on vacation in Bora Bora.
I’ve begun to share more and more photos of what I find interesting on Instagram in the hopes that Lindsay will someday congratulate me for stepping out of my comfort zone and into the ‘gram where the hipsters hang.
If you’re an Instagrammer, be sure to add me. If you’re not there yet, why not come over and see what it’s all about?