Please someone educate me in the world of instagram

[onedayatatime73]

So I've got as far as having downloaded the app.

But I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do next.

I work in a creative industry where I'm supposed to be in the know with this sort of thing but I don't know how to work it.

So when a millennial comes into my office and says "I've seen this great thing on Instagram" I can't work out how you find all these things? Do I have to actually follow every celebrity on the planet? How does it work where the things "everyone is following" just comes up on the screen?

Sorry for being thick. I just don't know what I'm doing.

Find people you like to follow or you can search # for things you are interested in .

Most people probably just follow people they are interested in, or accounts relating to their hobbies. I have an IG account that I primarily use for work purposes- e.g. to see which brands and trends are performing well and to look for opportunities.

The posts are all visual, so it's stuff you see when you're out, experiences, selfies, pictures with friends. Add hashtags if you want more people to see your posts, search hashtags or keywords to find what you're interested in.

I'm watching with interest, I know nothing about instagram either

I've finally got to use it recently. Been baking & it's fantastic for pics of bread. There's a real community feel. Plus I don't think it's curated like FB is, which I like.

Basically search for your interest & follow people who post good stuff. Take a pic & post & people follow you.

Not sure there is much else to it, other than #ing everything.

It's basically what Facebook was at the start when everyone was sharing their photos. Then Facebook went to shite and people's feeds were clogging up with "Share to be in with a chance of winning X" and people left FB and went over to IG.

So you start by looking for close friends and following them. Every celeb in the world is on it, so you can find someone you actually like and follow them. You can also search for things like "Victorian townhouse renovation" and find accounts who specialise in showing photos of doing up their house. So you can follow people who share a hobby/interest.

The most crucial thing is to be as comfortable unfollowing as following.

You just scroll through their photos and you can comment or not, as you like.

There's also Stories on the top of the page, which are videos but which disappear after 24 hrs unless the person has purposely pinned them as a Highlight (so a renovation project may pin a video of the day they put in the windows as a Highlight as its interesting/instructive). These stories are usually only a minute or two long and rarely more than 5 mins. They are easily my fave part of IG as people are quite funny when they know it disappears after 24 hrs.

Do you have to use hash tags? Some people use eleventy million hash tags and I don't think I can be arsed with all that. But like the idea of going back to how Facebook was.

No, the only reason to use hashtags is to allow new people to find you (I. E. #victorianrenovation for example) so then people would stumble across you through searching for them.

But if you have zero interest in gaining randomers eyeballs on your photos, then no hashtags required.