by Ima Matthew
Instagram has become one of the most used apps around the globe. It’s a platform where you can share all your visual content, whether these are your personal photos that you wish to share with your friends and family or photos/video of your brand for your targeted audience. Either way, it is fun sharing platform, and it is easy to use.
Instagram, with a family of 700 million active users has evolved through many years. It now has many features which it didn’t have in the past that make it more user-friendly and fun loving app.
If you are an Instagram addict or even if you are new to it, there are some things that you may or may not know that you must be doing to make full out of it.
Let’s now begin talking about what you must be doing with Instagram.
Instagram Stories
The very first thing to say is the very recent feature of adding Instagram stories to your Instagram profile. Instagram stories let you add 10-second videos and photos that disappear after 24 hours. It allows you use many face filters for your photos, to add text and stickers to your stories and allow you to make fun videos with many options like normal, boomerang, rewind and hands-free mode. A recent survey has shown that 250 million users use the Instagram story feature daily.
Instagram stories help you become visible to your targeted niche and also help you gain followers on Instagram fast. Consider the story of Baddie Winkle, the 88-year-old Instagram stylestar.
Another important thing about Instagram stories is in addition to your bio, you can add link/URL in your stories, but for that, you need to be a verified user that requires a business account with more than 10 thousand followers.
Create collages
Photos are the main content of Instagram. You can see lots of pictures on your news feed. People also use collages that are a feasible way of combining multiple photos into a single post. Earlier people were using other apps to make the collage of their pictures and then post it on Instagram. But now Instagram allows you to use a linked app named ‘Layout’ that lets you make a collage of your selected photos and post it on Instagram. You can download the app from the app store for free; it is available for both iOS and Android users.
Once you’ve downloaded Layout, you can make free collages and post it on other social media sites or access it through your Instagram by selecting the collage button when selecting your photos to edit.
Get notifications from your favorite accounts
If you’ve some people in your following list whose posts are something you never want to miss, there is a solution to this. You can enable notifications on their account so that you’ll always get a notification whenever they will post something new to their profile.
You can simply turn on notifications by going to their profiles and clicking the (…) icon on top right of the screen and then select the ‘Turn on Post Notifications’. This is a very useful feature of Instagram as it helps you see the new content of your favorite accounts without ever missing it.
For instance, if you are a fashion blogger, you never want to miss out anything from fashion icons of your niche. So you can simply turn on post notifications of your favorite accounts.
Save posts for viewing them later
You often come across a post that contains inspiring words, or a picture of the place you want to visit and add to your bucket list, or a picture of your favorite celebrity you want to save them. Instagram save option there for you for situations like these.
A bookmark icon at the bottom of every post allows you to save that post in your personal saved posts tab. These saved posts are only visible to you. So, you can save whatever posts you want to view later.
Add multiple accounts
With a recent update, you can add accounts and link multiple accounts to one device. This update allows you post from multiple accounts. This feature is most useful to those who had a problem managing their personal and business accounts. Now they can manage their both accounts simultaneously without signing in and signing out again and again.
These were some points I wanted to share with you all, so you know what you were missing out of this cool app. You must be adding stories to your profile, make the collage of your photos, save posts for later viewing, get your favorites notification and managing multiple accounts from a single device. So, make most of this app and keep Instagramming!
Ima Matthew is a journalist and blogger. She is currently a final year student of English and Literary Studies at the University of Calabar. She reports for The Trent.