Social platform Instagram

How you can use Instagram

Instagram was release in October 6, 2010 (for iOS) by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Facebook Inc. acquired this service only in April 2012.

You can use this platform for different things and tasks. At first, the most people use Instagram like place where you can share your own photos and videos, you can watch for celebrities and their life or can subscribe on people who are your contacts, friends or relatives.

You can find a lot of interesting stories and reviews on places you are interested in. Only choose the right hashtag or geolocation and see what another people think or what they share about this place.

This social networking service makes it possible to have dialogues, chats, comment on post, etc.

On this platform you can find a lot of official pages famous companies and brands. They publish various news, special offers and announcements in their profiles too.

Apart from that, this platform gives a job for different workers, for example: social marketing manager, user acquisition manager etc.?

Even though Instagram has shown negative audience growth over the past year (statistics as of January 2023), the social network is still one of the most popular and used media platforms.

A lot of Influencers are on Instagram (here's a list of those in the top with the most subscribers). Because it is a very convenient and relatively clear Internet platform for promoting your own brand (the algorithms work quite clearly), and the audience just comes to this network to see fresh fashion and current news. And smart ads fit very natively into the content that bloggers and brand pages make.

What aspects of Instagram can be personalised

It depends on what you use: you own profile or maybe account of some company or professional account for page.?

If we speak about you own page:

- choose your username (this name will be free on Instagram platform – it means that nobody except you haven’t figured it out yet;

- you can change your profile photo;

- choose the language that you prefer;

- on your personal page, there is a special field where you can tell something about yourself and your interests (not much, however, up to 150 characters):

- you can also change the settings that show the owners of the accounts you're subscribed to whether you're 'online' or not, as well as see when you were last active;

- from the useful settings for your page you can also choose your advertising settings. You can't, of course, turn off ads from Instagram in your news feed, but you can choose topics of interest to you and the social network will show you more ads based on those settings.

- you can also create special "folders" in your account for your videos or photos that you want to mark, called "highlights". These allow you to structure your important creations into separate folders on different topics. And such highlights will be at the top of your page, and your subscribers or guests on the page will be able to see these materials immediately. Online shops and bloggers on their Instagram pages very often use this tool;

- the important thing about the Instagram page is that you can set up shows of your page to other people. That is, your page can be 'closed' (the information will only be shown to your followers after your special adding them) or 'open' (the information will be visible to everyone who visits your page).

Connect with other users

When speaking about how to find the right person on Instagram and subscribe to that person, you either need to know his or her username or you can search in a special search field through the name or brand name. If the person or company is well-known and popular, usually this account has a special sign that confirms the reality of the user (white tick in a blue circle).

You can subscribe to this account and if your page is of interest to this account, it may become your subscriber in return.

When speaking about communicating with users, then:

- to communicate with other users, Instagram has a special messaging tool called Messages. This is the tool that allows you to privately message your friends, contacts, followers or accounts to which you are subscribed.

Whether you can write a message to a person or company straight away via their profile page, or whether you need to be subscribed before you can send messages depends on the configuration of the profile page of the person or company you want to get in touch with.

As a rule, many brands, if you go to their messages, text the most common questions they get asked by Instagram users (for example, the Nivea brand page);

- you can also communicate in the comments under the post or in the ad creative. But in this case you need to keep in mind that every user who sees the post will also be able to read your comments;

- you can also communicate with bloggers through special surveys or question windows in their stories.

Examples of tools you can use on Instagram

A special tool to note is hashtags on Instagram. They are used very often and in large numbers almost every post (especially promotional posts). These hashtags are used by Instagram's algorithms to sort information by topic. That is, by making a request for a specific hashtag, you can see how many posts there are on the platform marked with that tag and, if necessary, view materials that contain that tag.

It is also possible to place various links to other content in posts and stories (often bloggers make a stories to increase the reach of their new post with a link to that post).

Or you can tag other bloggers' or companies' pages in your creatives if you want your content to appear on that account's page (to do so, it must confirm sending to it). This method is often used by bloggers in their advertising integrations.

Interesting tools are also the additional surveys, questions, and other elements that the Instagram platform allows bloggers and account holders to publish in their stories.

In addition, the social network has many emoticons and gifs that can make your content more interesting and bright. Which is very important for Instagram, with so many posts and advertisements.

Key issues related to social media etiquette

When discussing basic social media etiquette, of course the most important things are literacy, truthfulness of the information and relevance of the information.

But as far as Instagram is concerned, it should be noted that keeping accounts in constant tone for your followers is a very important point. After all, not only do you need to be able to create content (interesting posts, videos, banners, stories), but firstly, you need to make promotional integrations very natively in relation to your regular main material, and secondly, you need to understand who your audience is and what they are interested in.

For example, it is important to know the age of your audience and to understand whether there are enough of them on the platform (Distribution of Instagram users worldwide as of January 2023, by age and gender).

It is important to choose the right types of posts to ensure that your page is consistently interesting to subscribers and well viewed by viewers (Average user reach per post type on Instagram in 2021 and 2022).

And in order to communicate effectively and correctly with your audience, you need to offer content on different topics (around your main topic of the account). That is, you need not only serious and branded posts, but also educational material, entertaining creatives, etc. (there are content plans for this, which are developed 2-4 weeks in advance in order to create a right schedule with different content for the page).

After all, sometimes quite unexpected post topics make it to the top in terms of the number of reactions and views (Most popular posts on Instagram as of December 2022, by number of likes).