Instant Ways to Boost Your Audience on Instagram

Each social media platform has unique capabilities and demographics, but one thing that ties them all together is that they cast a wider net to create a larger community for your library and keep everyone connected digitally. We’ve blogged about how Facebook has remained the top platform, but fun fact: Instagram and Facebook have merged, so it’s time to give Instagram a little love too and highlight their ever-evolving features that can be utilized to grow your audience!

Instagram Stories

Instagram stories are a great feature for businesses where you can post in the moment content to drum up interest or interaction – and then it disappears after 24 hours. If you have an event coming up and would like to increase registration, creating a graphic and posting it on your story could help. This is also a section to create fun videos that show what goes on with your staff in your library behind the scenes. Sharing a peek behind the curtain makes people feel connected or in the know, and can increase their engagement with your account. About a month ago, Instagram rolled out a number of new features that make stories more community-oriented. They have an “add yours” sticker now that allows you to add a photo or video to a global topic, which will make it easier for people to find your library’s account. Instagram has also made the story link sticker accessible for all accounts, not just verified accounts with a specific number of followers. Making the platform more link-friendly allows for you to share a link to your latest blog, or a link to your event registration page to get more signups.

Audience Interaction with Hashtags

As you might’ve learned in our previous blog “How To Hashtag Like A Pro,”  choosing the right hashtags for your posts can spark a conversation with followers and extend your content’s reach beyond the typical audience that you have. On Instagram, you could encourage audience interaction by creating a series that your followers can be a part of and attach a specific hashtag to it, so everyone can follow along with the trend. For example, National High Five A Librarian Day just passed, but you might’ve asked your followers to share content of them high fiving a librarian with the hashtag and then reposted the best ones. People love to feel like they’re a part of the trend or discussion and Instagram makes it easy to involve everyone.

Reel In That Video Content

Instagram Reels is a newer addition to the platform that is solely focused on short video content. Videos can be up to sixty seconds long and are optimized for people to scroll through and be entertained or interact. As we’ve stressed before, there’s no need for any film or sound equipment to shoot a sixty second video. All you need is a cellphone and your own creative ideas! Reels has editing, sound, and now closed captioning built into the feature. Using Instagram Reels is a very user friendly and simple way to create something fun that will make your library relatable and bring followers together!