Instagram now supports horizontal and vertical photo formats, and people all over the world are rejoicing. Regular users no longer have to use a supplementary app that fits their portrait and landscape photos into the mandated square shape, and organizations can post comfortably knowing that none of their photo or video content must be cropped.
As mentioned in Advertising Age, marketers no longer need to worry about specifically tailoring their visual content to fit Instagram’s standards. What does this mean for your nonprofit Instagram account? It’s time to get on it, and it is now easier than ever.
Expand Your Social Media Platforms
If your organization has any social media presence at all, it’s probably concentrated on Facebook. Facebook is a great place to share organizational updates, event invites, photos and videos. It is also one of the many social media platforms that already supports photos and video in many formats. That means that expanding to Instagram, which is coincidentally Facebook-owned, should be simple.
Instagram is still limited in the sense that it’s meant purely for photo and video content. However, with the challenge of engaging online audiences, Instagram is a great way to relay a quick message in the short amount of time that you have their attention.
Attract a New Online Demographic
We all have fast-paced days and short attention spans, but there is a particular tech-savvy demographic that is difficult to attract and retain. Teenagers and young adults thrive on Instagram, from sharing concert footage to prom and graduation photos. Often referred to as millennials, they enjoy simple visual content and will often overlook too much text or sites that are hard to navigate (speaking from personal experience). This is one downside to Facebook’s cluttered news feed, and users often only see the first few posts before moving on.
On the other hand, Instagram’s feed is simple and always in chronological order. You can trust that many of your followers will see your post and remember it more than if they had to search for it through Facebook.
Get Started
Instagram is Facebook-owned, which makes creating an account ridiculously easy. You can link it to your organization’s existing Facebook account. After creating an account, post a few photos that showcase your organization to make sure that users know your account is active.
Shortly after, start to advertise it as much as you can on your already-existing social media accounts, like Facebook or Twitter, to gain followers and begin your engagement. In our fast-paced environments, a picture can truly become worth more than words, and your organization may just be communicating with an audience it didn’t know it had.
