Instagram: Channeling Your Inner Photographer…In an Instant!

Why Instagram is refreshing and unlike any other social network

Ever taken a great photo but in dim light?  Happen to catch a nice shot that you wanted to upload right away? Or want to share photos with friends without manually e-mailing them or having them search on Facebook?  All of these problems are easily fixed with Instagram, an easy app that gives your inner photographer a chance to shine and to be noticed. With a click of a button, you can take a picture or use the “upload a photo” option to apply and filter effects on your photo, any photo. The effects provided range from simple black and white to rustic ones that give a vintage feel to bold and daring ones. Special effects include adjustment in lighting that can brighten and dim pictures in a natural looking way. There is even a blur option that allows you to blur out the background and focus on what you want to emphasize. There are countless combinations at your fingertips. 


The word “instagram” itself has made its way into our urban dictionary where it acts as a verb. Uses include for example, people saying “I’m going to instagram that” or “ I’m instagramming this dessert right now.” This new verb is starting to get more recognition if not already very well understood. The most popular and frequent “instagrammed” photo themes include landscapes, food, fashion and pets. It really gives the user to express what they like and what styles and tastes they have. What gets a personality across better than through pictures? And because instagram is international like Twitter and Facebook there is no way of describing the bliss of viewing pictures through all cultures. 

Linking Instagram with Twitter and Facebook

Instagram allows for finding friends the easy way by having the options to connect with your email, Facebook and twitter. You can see which one of your friends on any of the three social networks have an instagram and you can choose to “follow” them. Instagram is more like a photo version of twitter in that you have the ability to not only follow your friends but practically anyone using the network, including celebrities. There is also a privacy setting where you have the ability to you’re your photos private and share them explicitly with certain people. Instead of people tweeting what they are doing or what they are thinking about they now use pictures to visually show it. Also like twitter, there is also a use of hash tags in a photo. Such as a landscape photo could have a hash tag of #beautifulmountains.  

There is also a popular page that shows the most “liked” photos. Unlike twitter though you cannot re-instagram someone’s photo but you do have the ability to ‘like’ it so it is stored in your files and you can go back to look at it again later. You can also comment to the person. Instagram is actually linked to Facebook and Twitter in that both social networks allow the ability to connect this app to it’s own sites. Instagrammed pictures can automatically upload to both twitter and Facebook at the same time when uploaded on the instagram app if you choose to do so.

Instagram climbing the social network ladder

Instagram first launched in October of 2010. By 2011 it was ranked number 609 on the most-visited social networks list and by 2012 it jumped up an incredible 598 spots or grown a whopping 5,124% into number 11. Within one year it had surpassed so many social networks and beat out so many contenders to be listed with the top tier social networks including Twitter, Facebook and Google+.  This is incredible considering that instagram is only accessible via iPhone or Android which already narrows down the consumer/user to be someone who must own an iPhone or Android. Only since the spring of 2012 did Instagram becoming available in the Android market prior to that it was only accessible by iPhone users. Another special occurrence occurred in spring of 2012: Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock. Instagram chief executive Kevin Systrom says he looked forward for Instagram to be working with its new parent company. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg even claimed that Facebook and Instagram were good for each other by stating “We believe these are different experiences that complement each other…” 

The power of Instagram is in the fact that it has as completely different take on social networking in such a different and innovative way. With the help of Facebook the goal was to expand the app and grow it even more by giving it more global recognition.

Comedian Dom Mazzetti's take on Instagram: 

Who is Watching and Who is "Tuning In"

Ratings vs. shares: measurements of the audience

Most of us are only familiar with TV ratings and we associate how many people tune into a show with the popularity of the show. But just because the program is on do we really know if audiences are actually tuning in? That’s where shares come in. There are two measurements that are used to see which households are tuned into a program and which households who are tuned in are actually watching it. That is the difference between audience ratings and audience shares.

Two shows, one network: possible cause and effects

An audience rating is the percentage of all possible homes with televisions that had the program on. We can take examples to compare and contrast a new season of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory that has been on air for many seasons now to CBS’s new hit, Elementary. We see that the ratings for The Big Bang Theory, which is a 4.8 is a lot higher than the ratings for Elementary, which is a 3.1, that’s why it is still on the air after multiple seasons. A share on the other hand is the percentage of all homes that were watching TV at the time, that had the program on and actually tuning in. The share for The Big Bang Theory was 15 while it was 9 for Elementary.

For being a new show, Elementary surprisingly brought in a good crowd. A good reasoning could be that CBS had the highest ratings and shares in general over the other TV networks during that specific night meaning most of their shows are more popular and more successful and so new shows are more likely to be watched or that the shows both aired on the same night so an audience might have just left the channel on CBS.  

What it takes to make the top ratings of 2011

TV ratings are easier to find than TV shares also because shares are sometimes estimated or rounded so a share for a show could potentially be 0.0. Sports games and reality/ competition shows bring in the highest TV ratings and we can see that in the 2011 rating rankings with Sunday night football, American idol, the X-factor and the Voice all being in the top 10 spots.