Posts, reels, stories: My Instagram experience
After the first learner-led Digital Drop-In workshop in September 2023 at Skibbereen Community School, participants were asked about topics they would like to cover in future workshops. Top of the list was social media, followed closely by AI (that’s Artificial Intelligence, not the AI that farming families might be more used to!). As one participant put it: ‘we don’t know what we don’t know, but for me, social media is an unknown.’
I was a late adopter of social media. Life and work were both busy and I had neither the time nor interest to engage. If I wanted to communicate with friends or family I used a phone for calls and messages, and email for written interactions. From about 2011 I had a Twitter (now X) profile but only used it occasionally to follow updates on things I was interested in. In 2015 I set up a Facebook profile to follow my voluntary interests but I myself was not interested in making friends. That didn’t stop others sending me friend requests which I accepted since I didn’t want to appear rude but this was not my purpose for using the platform. From time to time when my feed was being cluttered up with photos of what they were eating for dinner I would quietly unfriend them and they likely did not even notice…
In 2018 I started volunteering with my local Tidy Towns group and took on the role of Digital Communications Officer. This meant gaining access to little used Facebook and Twitter profiles and creating a WordPress blog with the goal of reaching and engaging a larger audience to support our work. From time to time in recent years I thought about setting up an Instagram profile to try and engage a younger support base who typically did not use Facebook. Facebook was already developing its features such as reels and stories in addition to the more traditional posts, so how difficult could it be? More importantly, how much more volunteering time would it take? I have to admit I was a little put off by a colleague’s experience who had hardly landed on Instragram to share their wonderful variety of photos than they came running back to Facebook! They persevered however, and I love seeing their photos on Instagram. As a Facebook user however, to me there is not much difference. Photos are photos, it’s just a question of who they reach, in my opinion…
Early in 2023, with the guidance of my wonderful hairdressers at Salon 31 and Instagram experts (yep, my experience of intergenerational learning!) in parallel to the account for Skibbereen Tidy Towns (which is working well but does not yet have the 17k Facebook following!) I created a personal Instagram account and we figured out how to connect it to my personal Facebook account. My idea was that it might be a good platform to share content about my fledgling social enterprise, as well as being another channel to share my occasional blog posts. Well, that didn’t quite work out the way I planned. The links to the blog posts I shared were not ‘linkable’ so the only way I could share them was to point readers to the blog address in my profile bio (thanks to Erica for that tip). But that would mean readers would still have to search for the blog post link so I gave that idea up, ah well, it was worth a try. Stick with photos was the message, loud and clear. Then I tried converting a number of photos (up to 10) into a reel, added some music and shared. This works well for the Tidy Towns account, and the music clip ‘Waltz of the Flowers’ is most appropriate! Check out this reel to see how it looks. I think the account is public which means that anyone can see the reel, if an account is private then only followers can see it. Note to self: find out how to check whether an account is set to public or private.
My next lesson learned was in August at Kent Station, Cork, sitting down with a coffee before getting the train to an event in Dublin (I may have mentioned elsewhere that I am an alumna of Social Entrepreneurs Ireland Ideas Academy programme). Since we had just completed a module on social media I thought I would practice by sharing a photo of my coffee and train ticket on Instagram. That was fine and off I went to Dublin. It wasn’t until I returned home that night that I saw all these notifications from Facebook with likes and comments. But I didn’t post to Facebook, or so I thought. Anyway, it was nice that friends were wishing me a good trip, but how did this happen?
/*! elementor – v3.15.0 – 20-08-2023 */<br /> .elementor-widget-image{text-align:center}.elementor-widget-image a{display:inline-block}.elementor-widget-image a img[src$=”.svg”]{width:48px}.elementor-widget-image img{vertical-align:middle;display:inline-block}
Well, Meta is the parent of both Facebook and Instagram so it must have been a setting I had been unaware of. At my next visit to Salon 31, Lorna showed me the error I had made.
For some, the feature to share photos to both Facebook and Instagram from Instagram is likely very useful. For me, I thought the friends I have on Facebook would not be interested in my silly post that passed a few minutes while I was waiting for the train. However, a few of them reacted, which was nice:
/*! elementor – v3.17.0 – 01-11-2023 */ .elementor-widget-image{text-align:center}.elementor-widget-image a{display:inline-block}.elementor-widget-image a img[src$=”.svg”]{width:48px}.elementor-widget-image img{vertical-align:middle;display:inline-block}
At over 900 words this post is considerably longer than my usual target of 500 to 700, so if you’re still with me thanks for reading this far. My parting piece of advice regarding Instagram and indeed any social media platform, is this: engage where the audience you want your messages to reach is. It might be family WhatsApp groups, it might be Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. Don’t create profiles for the sake of it (thinking of you Uncle Joe!), ask the people you want to stay in touch with. And when you’re ready, Digital Drop-In will be here to help you.
Until next time, Sandra
Featured Image courtesy of Gerd Altmann on Pixabay
Further reading:
Central Statistics Office, 2022. https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-isshdcb/householddigitalconsumerbehaviour2022/internetactivities/
An older person’s guide to the different social media sites, 2020. https://www.ageukmobility.co.uk/mobility-news/article/an-older-persons-guide-to-the-different-social-media-sites
Sandra Flynn 