Instagram, launched on October 6, 2010, is a photo and video-sharing social media platform with over one billion active users as of July 2018. Software engineers took eight weeks to develop it before it reached that mark.
Instagram has since evolved into an all-out social network, offering its users an ever-expanding selection of creative tools and features. Users now have access to tools for video creation, editing, filtering, posting stories, tagging people or places, including links in posts and adding emojis for captions – not to mention TikTok-esque Reels to create 15 or 30-second looping videos for any purpose – like never before.
As soon as you download Instagram, you have several options for signing up: personal, creator or business accounts. In addition, connecting Instagram with your Facebook (FB) account enables you to share photos and videos across both platforms.
If you opt for the personal route, you will first need to select a username and password before providing some basic details about yourself like your name, age and location. From here you can start following people and sharing content.
If you want to use Instagram professionally for business-related purposes like promoting your book or engaging your followers, creating a business or creator account gives access to analytics and other business-related features; furthermore, private profiles allow only approved followers see what posts have been made public.
Active Instagram accounts can help attract more engaged followers and increase the chance that Instagram’s algorithm will pick up on your work to appear in more feeds. Post at least once daily to ensure optimal engagement; also experiment with different times of the day to see which get more engagement than others – for instance if your target audience consists of young teens then posting around 8am Tuesday might not be effective since most will likely be at school at that time.
Instagram Explore page and hashtag search bar are invaluable tools for optimizing your account by showing what types of posts other users are sharing in any niche, while popular tags and geotagging could get your posts to rank higher on this page. Stories feature allows for restricted audience sharing (only your followers can view your Instagram Stories), while Close Friends feature allows for private accounts to limit who can see their account or send direct messages (this can be particularly beneficial if publishing children’s books and don’t want the public seeing your work).