As Instagram begins to roll out paid advertising in the UK, and the number of users continues to grow (great infographic on this by Global Web Index), it remains a tricky old platform for large organisations to manage.
There are two main reasons for this:
1. Hands-on management of the platform is frankly a bit awkward: there are few tools available to help publishing content (unlike Facebook, Twitter etc), so it’s typically fed through a single mobile device – not great for community managers.
2. It’s used best when lots of people contribute: that’s going to require lots of time-consuming co-ordination, let alone reviewing for quality content.
Here are five ways to help use the photo-first social network in large organisations…
- Pick one thing: choose one topic or theme to focus on, and be amazing at that. If you can’t explain the purpose in the bio, it’s too complex.
- Incentivise: give employees a reason to contribute images from across the organisation, give it some kudos to “get on the Instagram feed”.
- Share visual best practice: don’t tell people what a good Instagram photo looks like, show them with examples of what you’re looking for.
- Setup an inbox: make it super simple to collate content by setting up a central email inbox for photos to be sent to (or even better use an internal Dropbox or equivalent).
- Add it to your social listening: integrate Instagram monitoring into your social management system ASAP. The majority of tools now let you respond to comments on your Instagram content, so don’t treat it differently to your other platforms.
One tool that I’ve recently spotted to help with publishing is LaterGram which has a novel approach of pushing content to your phone to post. Have you used any others? ScheduGram?