We often tell people that they probably don’t need to be on every social media platform possible, and we do practice what we preach! Up until recently, we hadn’t been using Instagram as an organization. It just didn’t seem to be one of the platforms where we’d get the most bang for our buck.
But recently we decided to rethink that, and it’s a good thing we did! (Definitely for the fun factor, if nothing else.) For one thing, we wanted to try out the new Instagram Business accounts, which were rolled out in the last couple of months.
For another, we wanted to use Instagram to showcase more of our company culture than we do on other social media platforms. We post about events we’re at, brag about who’s been winning office games, and share some of our sillier moments.
After setting up our business account and playing around with the platform for about a month, here are a few things we thought worth mentioning, in no particular order!
1. Currently, you can only set up Instagram Business accounts through the Instagram app on your smart phone. I know that’s a little weird, but some things in life just are.
2. You can add people from your phone’s contacts or your Facebook account. Or both. We had a few team members link their Facebook account to our Instagram account. Together, we were able to invite a large number of people to follow us on Instagram in a short amount of time.
3. If you’ve linked your Instagram account and your Facebook account, you can cross-post from Instagram to Facebook, which can save you time.
4. Don’t cross-post to Twitter. It doesn’t share the image, it just shares a link to the image. Lame!
5. If you have both a personal and professional Instagram account, it’s pretty easy to switch from one to the other in the app.
6. Speaking of personal Instagram accounts, Leann is our uncontested Instagram champ—she has over 1K followers, and she says she hasn’t even been trying to get them!
If Instagram doesn’t make sense for your organization’s typical online marketing purposes, you might find that it’s a fun platform to use for other purposes, like we do. If your company culture is important to who you attract as clients or future team members, give it a shot!