This week on the podcast I discuss the Instagram 6.0 update, why Facebook (or any other social network) can’t and shouldn’t take the place of your own website and my resource of the week will help you automate some of your more mundane tasks or just do something really cool for you.
If you are an Instagram user you may be very excited about this update as it adds 9 new features that allows you to now do more than just apply a filter. You can perform adjustments to crop and straighten, brighten or darken your photo, apply contrast, adjust the warmth or coolness of the photo, over saturate colours, apply highlights and shadows, apply a vignette and even sharpen your photo. The biggest addition would have to be the ability to now decided how much of the filter to apply to your images though the filter strength option.
These additions clearly move Instagram into the photo editing realm of other mobile photo apps including Google+ Photos and Camera Zoom FX (which I use) on Android as well as many other photo editing apps on iOS and Android. I have used both Snapseed, Camera Zoom FX and Google Photos on my mobile device to edit and clean up images and have been happy with the results that I have achieved often then importing them into Instagram to share. With the ability to do more photo editing within Instagram I think many people are going to feel the same way and with how big and fast Instagram is growing I can see this update killing off a few other apps.
What do you think of the update? Will you be editing photos within Instagram now?
A trend that I have been noticing more and more lately is small businesses relying solely on Facebook to host their “website†meaning they have no other digital presence and no actual website other than Facebook. This is dangerous. I’m not here to pick on Facebook either as this could just as easily go for a business that relies on Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn or any other platform as their sole digital presence.
Why is this dangerous? I have 6 reasons.
Use social as a method to build an audience, connect with others, grow your brand and push users towards what you own and that is your website. The website you own is your central hub and the social networks are your spokes that are connected to this.
This week for the resource of the week I would like to share a swiss army knife of helpfulness in the tool of IFTTT which stands for If This Then That. This is a website and mobile app that allows you to create or find a bunch of really useful recipes that help you accomplish or automate so many things. I currently use IFTTT to turn off my ringer at bedtime and then wake it up again in the morning, send an RSS feed to Instapaper and I also have created a recipe that works with Feedly to send my tagged items to an Evernote notebook for later use. It really is an awesome tool and I highly recommend checking it out and seeing what it can help you with.
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The post Episode 16 – 6 Reasons Why You Still Need A Website appeared first on Social 360.
