Doing One Thing and Doing It Right: How EyeEm Is The New Instagram

If there is one takeaway from the insatiable growth of Instagram, SnapChat and Pinterest, it is that there is a lot of potential in photo-sharing. Along with photo-filter options, it's a short yet effective way to communicate a message.

Since Zuckerberg decided to add video to Instagram there is a lot of debate about whether adding more services onto a platform is indeed adding more value. It should be no surprise that the owner of Facebook has taken this route, after his platform has adopted more widgets than Angelina Jolie has foreign family members, but what could he have done to improve Instagram instead of expand it's services? Better filters? Different interface? It's no secret that Instagram is a huge point of contention within the Facebook decisionmakers as since the purchase of Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, they have done very little to change it or make a profit off of it. It's almost as if they don't understand it. So what do they do? Attempt to appease users while making a stake against Apple's Vine by adding the rising popular service of video.

The issue with this is that Instagram users are not inherently Vine/video users. Video has sound, takes a bit more time to put together and doesn't make our selfies look beautiful in sepia tone. But there is one app that DOES get it.

Behold, EyeEm.

EyeEm not only has better, new and improved filter options but it has improved the user experience so changes in filters and frames are in the inherent swipe of your finger across the image. EyeEm also crops in shapes other than box and puts images together in unique montages across individual's profiles.

The truly revolutionary facet however, is the tagging. Upon posting you are giving an action and a place that uses geo-targeting. The application then guesses upon your location as to what you are doing.

An example is that I was in Edinbergh this weekend taking pictures outside of a cathedral. It then tagged the cathedral I didn't even know the name of yet along with that I was praying. While that wasn't correct, the accuracy of not just predicting the location correctly but a closely corresponding action was impressive. Another example was later that weekend I was in Newcastle taking pictures whilst drinking with friends. I didn't have time to post so I just did them all the next morning on EyeEm. The app used the iPhone's geo-location to remember where they were taken and did the same predictive tags of "Out for drinks," "Dancing," or "Dinner" with each corresponding bar or restaurant by name.

It gets better. Upon using each tag a drop-down function also lets you know which tags are trending and how many pictures are tagged under those categories - a function that could be insanely beneficial for all users across all platforms. And praise Jesus, there is no need for hash signs! EyeEm uses keywords and even spaces for tags so we can do away with the obnoxious in-text, one word translating business of #omgImsosickofthis.

While EyeEm, like Instagram, still hasn't figured out how to pick up a decent profit off its services - it has done loads to improve a service many have left alone, assumably with the UX perfected (or at least 'good enough'). Thankfully, that was not the case for EyeEm and time will tell if it's the case for 100 million Instagrammers.

Optimizing a Tweet, Connecting Topic with Timing

Since Jack Dorsey first launched Twitter it has quickly became apparent how much data we can fit and share in under 140 characters. And while shortening links, using hashtags and abbreviating words have become commonplace, here are two simple methods to help optimize your tweets.

Timing: More than Memes

In the world of instant communication, timing is everything. During the 2013 Super Bowl half time show, the power went out for most. For Oreo cookies however, the light went on as they threw together a quick tweet that read “You can still dunk in the dark.” The post was retweeted 15,000 times and their following increased by about 8,000 followers.

Perhaps your thinking, that’s Oreo and the Super Bowl, what about the rest of us on a day-to-day basis?

The answer to that is knowing your audience, and this takes research. Know when your followers are on and when they are active. There are oodles of tools to assist in this but my personal favorite is SEOMoz’s Followerwonk. While a majority of its services are paid, you can analyze your followers for free. The result looks something like this.

Targeted Topic: Informed Hashtags

It’s easy to throw a hashtag at the end of a tweet to gain exposure about a topic, but many times there are synonyms that people are using more. In general, as always, Twitter values brevity (i.e. using #marketing instead of #digitalmarketing). But you can take it further than that. To make informed decisions about hashtags visit Hashtags.org. It will analyze the popularity of any given hashtag over the last 24 hours giving you an idea of popularity on any given day (and if you pay, even suggest more popular hashtags).

To take it further than this, you could do your own research (or buy a Hashtag.org membership, but it isn’t cheap). Use one hashtag and analyze and print off each day of the week for a few weeks. Then over the course of a month see if you notice a topic trends over a particular day and time over another. This can then be overlaid with what you know about your current existing followers’ favorite time to tweet to fully optimize topic and timing.

Know of other services worthy of note? I’d love to hear about them.