Welcome to the crazy world of social media. You know, the marketplace segment where one day there's nothing and then 24 hours later there's a brand new company that's worth billions. The story of Instagram is just like this. This photo sharing social networking hub came out of nowhere and wound up being bought by Facebook for US$1 billion. Now comes the hard part: how will Instagram's product managers change things to ensure that Instagram can begin learn this here now to produce money... ?

Instagram's World Today

Instagram is an "app" that runs on both Apple and Android mobile devices. The organization has identified its mission statement as being "... to fully capture and share the world's moments... " It does this by allowing its users to snap photos using their cell phone cameras and then share them online.

When Facebook purchased Instagram for US$1 billion, they made it happen for a single purpose: to simply help Facebook expand into the mobile market segment. Facebook was struggling to fully capture an item of this ever growing market.

Instagram has an active user base of roughly 150M users who all take pleasure in the app's cool, clean design that allows them to easily share photos. Any change to this will quickly cause users to leave and go find another app to utilize due to their photo sharing needs - remember what happened to MySpace?

What Instagram's Product Managers Can Do

Instagram's product managers have a genuine challenge in front of them. The main element with their success is always to rethink their product development definition and find a method to add advertising with their app in a way that will not anger or upset their current base of users. The first faltering step that the merchandise managers have taken is always to catalog all the brand marketers who are using Instagram for free. This is a good effort and they can probably add it with their product manager resume.

The item managers are now actually sitting down with those companies to observe they can make advertising on Instagram a lot more valuable to them. The challenge that they face is that if the ads on the app become too "in see your face", chances are they risk driving their base of customers away.

What's still missing from the merchandise manager's bag of tricks will be the quantitative tools that they are going to need to produce selling ad space successful. These tools allows advertisers to find out the reach and the efficacy of their Instagram advertising efforts. The long-term goal must be to keep things simple for the conclusion users. If they make things too complicated, then their product will not be successful.

What All Of This Means For You

There's undoubtedly about this: Instagram is really a popular social networking service. However, they've an enormous problem: today they do not have in whatever way to produce money. Facebook didn't spend $1 billion dollars to purchase Instagram simply because they liked just how so it looked. They need it to produce money. Changes need to happen.

Instagram's product managers have a fragile balance that they should strike which was never discussed in their product manager job description. On a single hand they've to keep Instagram's clean design that has attracted 150M users. On the other, they should start to add ads so your company may make money. Among the biggest challenges is that lots of companies are utilizing Instagram for free to promote their products.