Now, before you photo purists out there roll your eyes at the cheesy filters that Instagram is famous for (yes, I agree, I finally posted my first Instagram picture last week), let me toss up a few numbers as a reminder that our job as marketers is not to love the tool, it is to use it to help the brands we work for. So, as of August 2011, Instragram was boasting:

• 7 million users
• 15 photos uploaded per second
• 150 million photos

Since then, the growth has continued to explode. In case you have never used the app at all, Instragram is nothing more than a social network of photos fed by an app that lets you makes your photos square and lets you apply some random filters and blurring to your photo. You can follow other accounts, like photos, comment on photos, etc, but it is all self contained. Most users tend to push their photos out to other networks like Twitter.

An Extra Hundred Followers Anyone?
As I mentioned, you can follow people. So, how many followers do resorts have? Here’s a quick sample of a few I follow (Twitter followers in paranthesis):

• Mountain High – 273 (4,642)
• Aspen/Snowmass – 935 (10,898)
• Breckenridge – 474 (15,065)
• Whistler/Blackcomb – 1,096 (28,653)
• Boston Mills / Brandywine – 56 (1,705)

On average, these 5 resorts (they were the last five to post pictures on my feed) have 5% the followers on Instagram as on Twitter.

What This Means
What I see is more followers, more chances for people to see your photos, and more bang for your buck for each photo you take with no extra work. Simply take mobile photos through Instagram (make sure you are linked to Twitter) instead of whatever tool you were using before. No extra effort (and no, you don’t have to apply filters if you aren’t a fan), and your photo becomes a little more effective.

You won’t have followers overnight, but a quick post or two on Twitter and/or Facebook (each photo you share will be identified as an Insta photo as well) about your new account might give you a great head start. Like I said, not a game changer, but a small tweak that might help your resort’s Twitter reach a bit.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.