Instagram Guidelines

Instagram overview

Use Instagram if your department naturally has a strong visual component. Examples of this include, but are not limited to, the departments of art and design, theatre and dance, the offices of sustainability and public affairs, and intercollegiate athletics.

Strengths

• Enables storytelling via images and video
• Provides easy-to-use filters to enhance images
• Streamlines sharing across other social media platforms
• Utilizes searchable hashtags
• Is natively a mobile platform

Challenges

• Disables hyperlinking in post descriptions
• Does not assist with post scheduling
• Is not as useable in a desktop computer setting
• Images and videos are not shareable, compared to Facebook and Twitter

Audience

According to Pew Research Center, Instagram:

• Has more than 300 million monthly users
• Gains more than 60 million shared photos every day
• Hosts 53 percent of adults between 18-29
• Hosts 29 percent of adult women and 22 percent of adult men
• Has the largest population of younger users on social media networks

Discover more about Instagram demographics

Checklist

• Pursue the platform only if your department has a strong visual component
• Set a unique avatar (profile picture)
• Write a concise description of your department in the description box and provide a link to your website
• Interact with users by tagging other accounts in your photos (as appropriate), or by liking or commenting when others tag your account in their photos
• Download the Layout app for iOS or Android to combine several photos into one collage
• Focus on quality posting instead of quantity