Instagram and Your Community
Instagram can be a pretty neat social tool to interact with your building community, giving them small peeks at your life away from your content. It’s a great tool to connect more, interact and depending on your content, to build up.
What You Need
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Set-up Instagram account.
Creating your environment.
What are you gonna use Instagram for is the first thing you should ask yourself what to do of it.
This will help you direct create an “environment” helping interested people to get into your style and manage to make it clear about what your community can expect to see from there.
Obviously it doesn’t need to be only about one precise thing. As a streamer I could go ahead and set a reminder video to tell people about a soon to start stream, while usually posting pictures of my food or me cooking it.
Showing a bit of everything that occurs outside of your usual content always makes a community happy when they try to get to know you, interacting them via Instagram itself is also pretty easy and offers closer contact with your viewers.
As I mentioned before as well, Instagram can be used to help the community grow via the ease to share content with its easy to use UI for creators and for the receiving end. Sharing over there is so simplified that you can assure that many eyes will catch on to your stuff. But obviously there are a few things you need to do correctly.
Using instagram is easy, using it properly is a different story, as if you want something to work out, it needs to work like your videos or streams, you need a certain standard of “quality” to set up yourself. This means that you should at least avoid posting whatever you please either, you will need to work a bit on your photography skills, avoiding constant blurry photos, respect a certain quality and try to stay consistent in your overall “album”, doing so can help build up as newcomers via I-G usually would react much better and maybe get a closer look at you if you have an interesting, neat looking “album”.
Interacting with your Community will also be a very strong point that you will need to work with during the entirety of your instagram experience. Some things are crucial during your use and every social platform you can use well can often lead into a stronger bond with you and your community !
Interacting with commenters is essential, Instagram is not supposed to be a photo-dump, any questions can have an answer and every picture (or video) some context, a little story or any other interesting things you can talk about. Generally discussing with your community makes you understand them, makes it easier for you to work (really) and also ends up creating a lasting connection with your community, creating a bond and to some way loyalty.
Hashtag usage
Now, Instagram visibility doesn’t come only from your already following community, the other way to get it around a bit easier is to make proper use of hashtags. The way to use them is very close, if not exactly like the hashtag system over on Twitter. Using Instagram hashtags with that idea in mind can help boost your numbers a bit, but assures you that users have a way bigger chance to scroll through it, which gives you then a chance to have them stop on it and you know how it goes.
As goes for youtube and its tag system it will be the same, strongly avoid tagging something trendy wrongly or any other usual hashtag mistakes that could end up with no results at all or very unwanted attention. A proper use will surely be beneficial in the long run and in the end the amount of passerbys will be absolutely random, you cannot and should not expect a certain number of “views” because you used one hashtag, but it doesn’t mean it cannot happen either, it will all depend on the content, shareability and quality of the post they will see, so keep up some good work!
A Hashtag a day keeps the community at bay
Another big use of the Hashtag that can be super interesting are the “daily-hashtags”, each day has a selection of hashtags that you can try to fit yourself in. There is one rule, being in relation to that hashtag, don’t tag your freshly made tacos with #MusicMonday it is still important to create a link between the tags and content shown exactly like every other types of content you put online.
To find some hashtags that appear each day, a simple internet search can be a great help, but here a few for you so you can have a grasp over the concept:
- #MondayFunday (share fun stuff about yourself or else)
- #GoodNewsTues (Share some positivity, good news !)
- #WoofWednesday (Share a pic of your doggo)
- #ThrowbackThursday (most popular one of the week, show some good ol’ past memories)
- #FeatureFriday (Turn on the spotlight to someone using Instagram or other media platform !)
- #SaturdaySwag (Tag stuff you sell or give away in contests or such)
- #SelfieSunday (Self-explanatory really)
Introducing your Instagram to your community
This part is just how to make sure you know how to make your instagram clearly available to your community so that they can follow you easily, as this is what it is set up for.
First of all, make sure that once the account is set, to introduce it in your video description, twitch banners , basically everywhere you can group your social platforms at, this can get the curious ones to find it easily.
Now, you can also go and plug it in during one of your videos, if it can be plugged in easily, usually at the end of a video with the outro, being it an outro screen or you announcing it yourself. You can introduce it whenever in the video too, but the best fit will usually be the outro and screens.
To be fair, introducing your community to your instagram is something very easy and doesn’t need to be shouted out every two minutes and spammed everywhere. Although you can also link your Instagram with twitter so it posts on both sides, inviting the twitter side to click on the link, as they are then just provided a title, precisely the one you used for your picture over to IG, try to make sure to not overflow your twitter with it to avoid annoyed people being more distanced from all Instagram related things.
A few important points to get you into the right mindset.
With all that has been said above, you now should have a bit of a grasp over what you can do via Instagram and what you can expect from it. It needs to be clear that everybody will have a different experience and varying opportunities rising if your Instagram works well, it’s not your solution to climb up in numbers in any case, same as every other social platform it will just help but cannot be expected to become the turning factor in your content creator experience.
Don’t forget to use Instagram for other reasons than just promoting or pushing out your stuff too ! People usually feel way more happy using a social platform for varying reasons, to have people interacting with you and also having you interacting with other people, don’t just use it to have your stuff there, exploring the platform and it’s common users can get you to learn a few things and interacting with others is always a great benefit from contact to potential curious person. Being aware of the users of a platform will help you develop and know what people like around and adapt or create trends while learning about a bit of everyone. This creates personal development overall, from your own content to your own social interactions, you can learn a lot that way and so can your community via yourself or you sending them to others to see that one amazing thing you saw.
Basically, don’t use it “selfishly”, this will always lead to a one-way experience and you can lack that “feel” of using the platform, make this experience also your gain on a cultural level!