On Instagram | Weboptim

Instagram is one of the most popular photo sharing apps for smartphones. Compared to other social media apps, Instagram is relatively simple - it's just for sharing photos and videos.

Introducing Instagram

Instagram is a social media application that allows you to share photos and videos on your smartphone.

Similar to Facebook or Twitter, everyone who creates an Instagram account has their own profile and news feed.

When we post a photo or video on Instagram, it will appear on our profile. Users who follow us will also see our posted photos/videos in their news feed. Similarly, we can see the posts of users we follow.

It's like a simplified version of Facebook, with a focus on mobile and visual sharing. Like other social apps, you can interact with other Instagram users. By following them, you can send comments, likes, tags and private messages. We can even save pictures we've seen on Instagram.

The Instagram app is free to download for iOS and Android devices.

Thanks to its latest development, you can now share content not only from a mobile app, but also from your computer via the internet. This allows users with few mobile phones or poor internet connections to stay active.

Create an Instagram account

Before we start using the app, Instagram asks us to create a free account. We can sign up through our existing Facebook account or by using our email account. All you need is a username and password.

The app may ask us if we want to follow some of our friends who are present on our Instagram network. We can do this immediately, or skip the process and come back to it later. To customize our profile, we enter our name, a short description/intro by adding our website, and a profile picture. This is important because if we start following others and expect them to follow our profile in return, they will be curious about who we are and what we stand for.

Using Instagram as a social network

As mentioned earlier, Instagram is all about visual sharing, so the main goal for users is to share and find the best pictures and videos. Each user profile has a 'followers' and 'follow' counter that collects how many people we follow and how many people follow us. If you want to follow someone, just tap a button. If a user's profile is set to private, they must first accept a follow request.

Please note that when we create and publicly post our profile, anyone can find and view our profile and all the photos and videos we post. However, if you want to have a private profile, you can set it up so that only people who have had their tracking request accepted can see our posts.

It's easy to interact with your posts: you can leave a comment, like or share them privately. If you want to find more friends or accounts, you can use the magnifying glass icon to find the personalised posts that are right for you. You can also search for specific users or hashtags in the search bar.

Apply filters and edit entries

Instagram has come a long way since its early days in terms of the possibilities for posts. When it was launched in 2010, users could only post photos through the app, and filters could only be used without any additional settings. Today, you can upload content from your phone's gallery. Videos can be up to a full minute in length and there are plenty of filter settings and other options to choose from. By tapping the + icon in the middle, you can take a photo/video with your camera to upload, or select the content you want to upload from your phone's gallery.

There are 23 filters to choose from, which can be applied to both photos and videos. Other editing options include brightness, contrast, texture, saturation, highlights, stickers, tilt, and you can crop videos to your liking.

Share the Instagram post

Once you have applied the optional filter and any edits, you can add a description to your image or video, tag other users, tag it to a geographic location, hashtag it, and publish it to other social networks at the same time.

Once published, our followers will be able to view and interact with our post on their feed. We can always delete or edit our posts after publication.

View and post Instagram stories

Instagram recently unveiled its new Stories feature, which is a secondary feed that appears in a bar at the very top of our main feed. You can see that the users we follow are marked with little photo bubbles.

Tap on any of the bubbles to see the story or stories that user has posted in the last 24 hours. If you're familiar with Snapchat, you'll probably notice that Instagram stories are similar.

Instagram's popularity means that not only individuals but also businesses are signing up to the app, and a presence is almost essential for success. Users are eager to learn about new products/services through Instagram, so any business can effectively promote itself through Instagram, just like on Facebook.

Thanks to Instagram, users can not only get to know our brand, but we can also run competitions and advertisements on the platform. Most entrepreneurs don't have time to monitor and manage their social media channels. Our agency helps you achieve your marketing goals and new customers with our social media management services.