Now that people can upload both images and video to Instagram, marketers and bloggers have been clamoring for more. We’ve wanted to be able to embed selected images and videos into web pages and blog posts, and Instagram has heard our pleas and granted our wish.
Here’s how.
1. Go to Instagram.com and log into your account. You can view mine at http://instagram.com/mallton
2. Find the image or video that you want to embed and click on it to open it in its own page.
3. Click on the Share button and select the iFrame embed code.
4. Paste the embed code into your website.
Note that the embed method uses iFrame, which means you are dealing with HTML code. You’ll need to insert the code in a way that supports HTML. You can’t just paste it into the middle of your blog text.
Here’s what an embedded image looks like:
Not only is this easy, it’s a brilliant implementation from Instagram. Only Public content can be embedded, so if you’ve set your images and videos to be Private, even if your friends can view them on Instagram, they will not be able to embed them anywhere. And when content is embedded, your ownership of the content is still prominently displayed.
Bloggers and marketers and can obviously use this to display great content they’ve found or created to help illustrate a point. But it’s also huge for businesses. Any business can create their own Instagram account and create branded content. Share beautiful images and videos, and now your content can be embedded on other people’s websites, if they find it interesting enough.
And of course this is huge for Instagram. Every embedded piece of content comes with Instagram’s logo that’s linked to Instagram.com. Embeddable video is something that helped YouTube explode, and the same could happen here.
Do you use Instagram now for your brand? How do you think might use the new embed functionality?