How Do you Select the Right Platform?
With so many social media apps to choose from, how do you select the right medium to share a post? It is true that different social networking sites serve different purposes and have different primary audience demographics.
From my experience as a recent college grad, many of my peers are abandoning Facebook and even Snapchat for Instagram. Instagram contains many of the same features as both apps, but has the reputation of a “highlight reel,” displaying curated posts and small snippets of users’ lives through posts or stories. In the sections below, I will break down the main uses of Instagram – posts and stories – to better understand how to take advantage of its features and its purposes.
Why to Post on Instagram
Instagram posts can live eternally on your feed unless you decide to intentionally remove them. Posting on Instagram is a great way to share one or more photos and videos with an audience. When you have multiple posts on Instagram you can create a theme with the common colors or subject matter of your posts.
Another benefit to posting on Instagram is that people can like or comment on your post, and those interactions will be displayed to other users. This can be especially useful for a contest, collaboration, or sponsorship, so that people may tag other Instagram users and engage with your post in a way that is visible and measurable.
I would recommend posting if you have content that excites you and that you think shapes your brand or personal brand and if you are tracking engagement with your post.
Why Post an Instagram Story
Contrary to Instagram posts, Instagram stories are ephemeral photos and videos that live on your account for 24 hours (there is a way to save them to your profile permanently, which I will describe below.)
Instagram stories have become my favorite way to share content with my followers out of any social media app for several reasons. First of all, I like that they fill the entire screen of your phone. While you cannot zoom in on Instagram stories, like you can on Instagram photos through a post, it is a fun way to share a photo or video in real-time. Secondly, Instagram provides geotags that you may use on your story to indicate where a photo or video was taken. I’ve played around with the different colors and with placement on my story. Similarly, Instagram has a library of stickers, fonts, and markers for you to edit and add to your stories as you wish.
I like to experiment with all of the above options to enhance my stories, and it is a fun creative outlet to share with my followers. Everyone has a different style, but I like to make my stories as aesthetically pleasing as possible! If they are too pretty to disappear in 24 hours, you can save the story as a highlight on your profile. You can get creative by separating the highlights by theme, such as travel, and you can add stories according to that category. (Or you can break that category down to the individual places you visit.)
How to Combine Both
You can combine posts and stories by sharing one of your recent posts in your story. If people view your story first, as I often do, they have the option to click on the post in the story to view it. From there, they can interact with your post by liking or commenting.
Like Instagram posts, Instagram stories are useful for contests, collaborations, and sponsorships, however, this tool might be more useful to make users aware of any of these, and posts might be a better way to participate or engage with these.
In the End
In sum, Instagram may be an excellent choice to share content for your personal brand or business due to the various features and purposes it may serve. Direct-to-consumer brands have been very successful at targeting consumers by utilizing both Instagram posts and stories, catching peoples’ attention with short-form content that makes them want to learn more. It’s up to you to weigh the benefits and decide which format works best for you and the content you’d like to share.