Engaging Content on @instagram - putting the users first

Community First

At Instagram one of our core values was Community First. It meant that for us, the members of our community, Instagram users, were the target of our engagement efforts.

In order to be successful on that front, we decided to focus on two areas: community building and community content. There's a lot to be said about the first and you can find out more in my Projects section.

But here I'll tell you a bit more about the latter: community content.

If you want to engage a group of people, our Instagram community, in this case, you need to be able to create content with them and there's no better way to do that than having your own dedicated account to highlight the best content created by them.

That not only gave us amazing content but also strengthen their sense of community. To this date, the @instagram account still highlights mostly content from its community

There are many ways to create content series to highlight and engage your community and on my course Content Strategy for Engagement in Social Media, I talk in more detail about examples like the Weekend Hashtag Project, shown above.

But the key thing to remember is that for us highlighting the best content from our community on @instagram was one of the key ways to achieve engagement from our community. Like the example below.

This is the original copy we used for the post above at @instagram:

One night, after an encounter with his own sadness, Daniel Serva (@daniel_serva) tried to save his heart inside a self-portrait. That marked the beginning of his 365 project, a visual diary to vent his emotions, 365 times a year.

“I don't usually talk about my feelings, but with the help of photography I can have a catharsis,” says Daniel, a Venezuelan Marketing Engineering student who lives in Paraguay.  

Inspired by nature, Daniel builds images using two different perspectives. “There's a creative side, with a lot of light and very positive. And there's the dark side, which in my case tends to show fear,” he says.

His strength and means of expression come from the land of dreams. “One of the reasons why I play so much with surrealism - beyond the fact that I'm a dreamer, is because I want to show to people another version of what's possible,” he explains.

Photo by @daniel_serva

Through this we were able to highlight Daniel's work and inspire others to do the same.

Finally, we also knew that we wanted to create an experience. One way to achieve that was to account for the multicultural, multilingual nature of Instagram so at one point in time we had 6 other community channels in different languages.

As you can see, the focus was the same: highlight great content from our community in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German and Japanese.