Could you make money from Instagram?

If you're already using Instagram, then you may be missing a trick, because you could be making money from your hobby. One company claims that the 1.4 million UK Instagram users with 1,000 followers or more could make £4,160 a year, while those with 100,000 followers or more, could earn more than £200,000 from Instagram.

Technically, therefore, if you have enough followers, Instagram could be your key to a six-figure salary. Dr Mariann Hardey, Lecturer at Durham University, who put these figures together says: "This report shows that new and lucrative careers are being born as a result of the growing social media world we now live in. For the first time, ordinary people, with a passion and flair for photography can commercialise their talent and influence - actually earning a living doing what they love. Some of these people are still in their early teens."
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Making money from Instagram is a matter of either selling your photos or being paid to promote products or brands. This can be through photos, hashtags or captions, which will put the product in front of all your followers - although you need to be very clear in each instance that it's a paid-for promotion.

There are millions of Instagrammers out there, but only a tiny minority are making money from it, so if you want to profit from the service, you'll need to be canny about it.

How to make money

1. Build your followers
You need enough to be considered an 'influencer'. In the vast majority of cases you need 5,000 followers before you will be taken seriously. Once you have more than around 30,000 you may find brands start to approach you, and if you can amass 100,000 or more followers, you can make decent money from this.

Building your followers means posting plenty of unique, good quality, photos and interacting with people who follow you. It's also worth making sure you use at least three hashtags with every photo in order to draw more people in.

2. Find brands that are a good match
This is vital for two reasons. First, you need to be sure that paid-for content fits well enough with the rest of your content that people won't be turned off by it. You can easily lose followers if they start to see your portfolio as too commercial. Second, brands won't want to work with you unless you are a good match.

3. Make yourself more attractive to the brands
This is a very competitive business, so brands are looking for a big Instagram portfolio, with plenty of stylish posts. They may also expect you to have a strong presence on other social media sites. This includes LinkedIn, which may not be so high profile among younger users, but is often checked by commercial partners.

4. Consider a specialised app
An app called Takumi has just launched, which matches Instagram users with companies that want to gain more exposure. If you have enough followers, you download the app, and browse the campaigns. You'll get paid for each image you use: the fee will depend on how many followers you have and ranges from £40 to £2,000.

5. Sell your photos
If you don't fancy running commercial content, you could always sell your photos. There are plenty of websites offering this service in return for a hefty slice of the income, or you can set up your own online store on your personal website. Just make sure every photo you want to sell has a link in the caption to the store page.