Learning Instagram

When I learned that Instagram had overtaken Twitter with more than 300M users, I though it might be time to try it out. I was in the early majority on Facebook and Twitter, but obviously I’m way behind the laggard curve on Instagram.  Here’s what I’ve learned since joining and participating on Instagram since January 1, 2015.

• The UI is great. I’ve read a lot of other people’s opinions on the Instagram user experience, and they’re right. It’s simple, and very intuitive. Capture, edit, add text, share.
• Not friendly with Twitter. But don’t share directly on Twitter. Obviously, the higher ups on one side or the other have decided they don’t want to play nice. When you share an image from the Instagram app to Twitter, you get a link and not an image. Bad form, and I’m guessing it’s on the Twitter side. Anyone know for sure?
• Integration with Facebook is complete. Instagram is a startup unicorn success story (<2 years old, 10 employees, sold for $1Billion to Facebook), and Facebook has done well in integrating the service into its main UI. When you share an image to Facebook from the Instagram app, it looks great; however…
• The image in Instagram has to be square, or else it’ll get cut off like mine did yesterday, when I shared an image and quote from MLK. The quote got cut off, as you can see below, on both Instagram and Facebook.

• “Take and share pictures that nobody else would see otherwise” is the main calling of Instagram, so it’s not (or at least no longer) about selfies (thank. you. God!).  That’s a great mantra, and I hope they continue to preach it.
• Instagram breaks their own “Best Practices”. I teach classes on Digital Marketing for General Assembly’s Atlanta location (in fact I’m leading “Social Media Strategy” tonight!). Instagram is now a big part of the Digital Marketing strategy for any business. One of the best practices is to use less than 200 characters of text with any image.  Follow Instagram on Instagram, and you’ll quickly find out that they don’t abide by that rule.
• You can’t share links. This one was the biggest surprise for me, but now I get it. Instagram wants the image to be the destination, not the bright shiny object that takes you someplace else. You can tag users (like @kevinrsandlin) and use Twitter-like hashtags, but not URLs to other sites.

I avoided Instagram for a long time because I figured it was just selfie-central, but that’s not the case (or maybe I just don’t follow any selfie-kings).  It may have been like that early on, but because the crew at Instagram has done a really good job eating their own dog food and teaching their users how to use the medium very well. It’s a great place to share and see great images of life.