Instagram, Facebook’s photograph sharing social network, has been changing its look and feel, shoring up its corporate and business features, and aiming to broaden its appeal in the last twelve months. Today, the modern Instagram service has over 500 million regular users, a little under half that of Facebook or WhatsApp, and has proven a more robust advertising platform for some businesses compared with Twitter. And as more people start to use the Instagram service, so more and more companies are starting to use the platform. The news today is that Android now has an Instagram account and has put up an initial six posts to form a “Hello World” collage image. These six posts consist of four images and two videos, showing an animation of the Android waving.
@Android’s “Hello World” harks back to many people’s first program written and the images show off parts of the Android ecosystem. The posts show of a collection of Android devices – the Google Pixel, Google Nexus 6P, the last tablet device released in the shape of the Google Pixel C and two Android Wear devices. We also see Android Auto and Android Pay referenced and plenty of references to a number of Android platform names, such as donuts, jelly beans, lollipops, marshmallows and of course, some nougat as well. It appears that Android are setting up their account to cover all things Android-related, which of course would make sense. However, until the account starts publishing more media, we cannot be sure how Google will be using this new outlet.
Nevertheless, the introduction of @Android, combined with Instagram’s improved business systems and of course the growing audience for the photo-sharing social network, ties in well. Instagram started setting up their service to better allow businesses to cater for customer’s questions, to better understand how people interact with their account and of course, to help them find more customers. These features included giving Instagram customers the ability to better contact the business account via calling, texting or emailing. Instagram have also made it easier for businesses to promote their services and have incorporated the Insights system to allow businesses to understand their customer needs. Despite Android commanding almost 90% of all smartphone sales, and of course being backed by Google’s search engine, it’s likely the company will be using at least some of Instagram’s business features. At the time of writing, the @Android account only has a small number of followers. This may not change much until the company start publishing posts and word gets out.