A Beginner's Guide to Instagram Reels, Stories, & the Grid: what to post where

Instagram is a fun place to market a cultural org, but it’s also a complicated space in which to work. It has so many layers and ways to post, and to a certain extent they all work together - which just makes it even more confusing to people trying to get the most out of the platform! It all makes Twitter seem very straightforward by comparison.

It is worth trying to do Instagram well, however. It’s worth taking the time to familiarise yourself with what each facet of it does, and then craft content for your audiences.

Before we go into the details, let’s look at how an Instagram account is displayed to its audience.

(Click the pic to open a larger version in a new window)

So, what do you post, and where should it go? At the time of writing, there are four ways to post Instagram content.

The Grid

The Grid is the bread-and-butter, the ‘main’ posts you put on your Instagram account. It can be photos or videos. It’s what people see when they click on your profile. You might post a few times a week to the Grid, even if you post more often to Stories.

In the library world, it’s photos of interesting things that do well here, rather than incredible photography per se. A perfect shot of a book, taken on an expensive camera, will reach fewer people than a nice picture of your library’s interior taken on your phone.

Remember: pictures of Words do not work! Shots of library interiors seem to do really well, as to shots of library exteriors… Archive photography is always popular. It’s worth noting that not all your posts have to be about your library: images of the geographic location you’re in are often popular, as in this Liverpool Uni Library example.

Shots of objects from Special Collections often get engagement, like this one from the BL.

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A post shared by British Library (@britishlibrary)

Stories

Stories are 15 second videos (or a longer video broken into 15s chunks) or a 7 second-long still. They’re orientated as portrait rather than landscape or square. because they’re only really intended to be viewed on phones. They can have music and gifs and animations and - crucially - links, added to them, natively in Instagram. They do NOT appear on your grid; they’re found when people click your profile pic. They disappear after 24 hours - but they can be pinned in themes to be found later by the more curious among your followers. And the more you use them well, the more your account will grow and the greater your engagement will be with your audience… Got all that? Just in case anyone is still scratching their head, the next post in the Instagram Mini Series will be All About Stories in more detail.

Reels

Reels are a brilliant opportunity for all of us. There’s a whole post on Reels coming up, but in essence they are portrait videos, maximum 90 seconds long, and massively favoured by the algorithm. They’re shared waaaay more widely than any other type of Instagram post - the reach will be several times that of a regular video or image. (Confusingly, Reels also appear on your Grid unless you disable this, but let’s not dwell on that now!)

Here’s the kind of content that seems to suit Reels well - firstly the Book Sorter POV video which I made by literally blutacking a GoPro to a book! It’s not serious, it’s a bit silly, but it’s also introducing people to the Book Return machine by stealth…

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A post shared by Uni of York Library & Archives (@uoylibrary)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Uni of York Library & Archives (@uoylibrary)

Music is important in Reels, so the second video with shots of the library cut to fit with the music behind it, is a type that can work well.

Instagram TV

Instagram TV is almost not worth worrying about at all. It use to be IGTV and was the home of any videos longer than 1 minute. It didn’t really work, no one watched it, so they rebranded it to Instagram TV at the end of 2021 and now all your videos go there, regardless of length - except Reels. It’s really little more than filter now - people can click on the relevant tab on your profile and see all your videos (except your Reels!) in one place - but they can find them all on your Grid anyway. The thing about regular videos - rather than Reels - is that they simply do not get seen. Instagram doesn’t share them. So even brilliant videos won’t find an audience.

The tl;dr is, focus your energies on the Grid, Reels, and Stories.

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This is Part 6 in the Instagram Series. Read Parts 1 - 5 if you’re interested.

Instagram is the most engaged with social media platform, and that matters a lot for libraries

This is Part 2 of the Instagram mini-series. In Part 1 I suggested Instagram could be the thing to focus your time and energy on for your library’s social media in 2022.

Let’s talk about why Instagram is worth the time it takes to learn and do well as an institution.

3.6 billion people use social media (we’re getting close to exactly half the global population now, which is ridiculous!), and most of them do so in a very passive way most of the time. Instagram is, to invert the title of this post, the least passively used social media channel. I get asked a lot about what social media metrics matter - analytics can be overwhelming, so what should we look for? It basically all comes down to engagement rate: if you focus on that, everything else flows from there.

What is engagement rate?

In short, the engagement rate on any social media post is the amount of people who DO something with it, divided by the amount of people who see it. The ‘doing’ part includes replying or commenting, Liking, reposting, following a link, clicking on the profile of the poster etc. In other words, engagement rate shows you the relative level of interaction your posts are getting. (There are other definitions of the term, but this one - specifically known as Engagement Rate by Reach, is the one I find most practically useful.)

The ‘total number of impressions / views’ for a social media post isn’t always overly meaningful - more is better of course, but a lot of it is dictated by how big your network is already or if someone else with a large following has drawn attention to it. The great thing about engagement rate is how universal it is. Whether you have a huge network or a relatively new, relatively small one, the engagement rate can be similar.

So for example, the University I work for has an Instagram account with 38.5k followers - clearly everything they post is going to be seen way more times than the library’s Insta with its 2.3k followers, and they’re going to get way more Likes than us, making comparison meaningless. But engagement rate is still meaningful for comparison, because it is interactions divided by views, and what matters is how one performs against the other. If the University’s engagement rate is considerably higher than the library’s I know we’re doing something wrong, because the same audience is engaging more with the Uni than with us. If the figures are similar or ours are slightly higher, then I know our strategy for Insta is working well.

Engagement rates are, generally, surprisingly low. People consume social media in droves, but rarely actually react to it in any measurable way. My library’s twitter account has, at the time of writing, an engagement rate of exactly 2% over the last 28 days - and trust me, this is GOOD. My library’s twitter is a really popular, hugely engaged-with organisational profile. (2% engagement is more than 40 times better than average across all industries - to give you an idea of what is typical.) My library’s Instagram engagement rate is currently 3.56% (and that is just above the Uni’s, so we’re on track!). So if only 2-3.5% is considered a big success, why even chase this particular metric?

If you have an account with 10,000 followers who do NOTHING differently as a result of following you, this is of less value than an account with 100 followers all of whom act on your posts - after all, why are we even on social media in the first place? To inform, of course, but also to drive behaviour (in a non-sinister way) - to start conversations, to help people and to answer questions, to get people to sign up for classes or find books or click on the link to use that new resource you’ve invested in. Essentially, size of network / following is just a means to an end - that end is engagement. We want people to DO something when we take the time to craft some content online.

Instagram versus the other platforms

According to Rival IQ’s 2021 social media industry benchmark report, average industry engagement rates are as follows.

Twitter: 0.045%
Facebook: 0.08%
Instagram: 0.98%

As you can see, Instagram is stratospherically higher than the other two (more than 12 times higher than FB). I found this graph particularly interesting:

This Rival IQ graph (click to see the original report) shows Higher Ed and nonprofits as being among the leading industries for engagement rate

You’ll notice that Higher Ed is waaaay up there above all the other industries in terms of engagement, and non-profits is also ahead of all but three other industries. It also appears that less is more - three or four posts a week seems to be effective (with Sports Teams being a particular outlier here!). So not only is Instagram the most-engaged with platform, but libraries are part of the most engaged-with industries on the platform, and we don’t need to be posting every day to make it work.

A disclaimer here is that I’ve not found credible engagement rate averages for TikTok so I can’t add it to this comparison - I suspect the average would be high though.

What do we do with enagement rate stats?

So we know that people take more actions on Instagram than on other platforms. This is good because they’re proactively responding to our posts: the next step (and ultimate goal) is try and turn that into offline behaviour - or at least not-just-on-Instagram behaviour. Visiting the building, using the resource, attending the workshop and so on.

The most useful thing you can do with Engagement Rate as a statistic is record it and try and make it better. That sounds over-simplistic but it really is an incredibly productive use of your time. Don’t focus on amassing followers, or even on total views - just focus on trying to post content that people appreciate enough to do something with. Experiment with content types, with tone, with time of day and make a note of what works. If you’re current engagement rate is 0.3%, try and get it to 0.5%. If it’s higher, try and get it higher still. Make a note of the least-engaged with posts and do fewer of them. Everything else - the size of your network, and their off-site behaviour - flows from this.

With Instagram specifically, Comments and Likes are important because it’s not a democratic, merit-based platform. It’s owned by Facebook and so it has an algorithm which decides how many people to show your posts to (unlike Twitter which is pretty straightforward - if your followers are online when you post on Twitter, they’ll likely see it), and that decision seems to be influenced by how the people who HAVE seen it respond to it. So I look at the number of Likes / Comments per post, and work out from that what my library’s community responds best to, and do more of it. Every year I divide the number of posts by the number of Likes in total to get a Likes Per Post average, and compare that with the year before - if it’s moving in the right direction I know that what we’re doing is working.

It also provides a benchmark - if the average likes per post is 70, then I know that a post with 90 Likes has been especially successful, and a post with 50 Likes hasn’t quite hit the spot.

The next post in this series will be all about making the case for Instagram at your library if you don’t already have it. If you have any question about engagement rate, you can ask me a question in the comments below, and boost the engagement rate for this post!

How to post to Instagram from a PC

Posting to Insta is officially mobile-only, and the desktop version doesn’t have the button to add media. But it’s relatively straightforward to trick your desktop into displaying a mobile view, and then you can post from it directly.

There’s a million articles online about using Instagram from a PC or laptop but they’re all ludicrously complicated or involve using third-party apps etc - none of that is necessary, if you follow the steps below. (The screenshots are from Google Chrome but you can do more or less the exact same thing in Firefox.)

1) Go to instagram.com on your PC, and log in

2) Right click anywhere. You’ll see Inspect listed at the bottom of the menu which appears: click that

Log-in to Insta, right-click, and choose Inspect from the menu

3) You’ll see the html on the right of the screen. At the top of that there’s an icon showing a phone and a tablet - if you hover over it you’ll see it’s called Toggle device toolbar. Click this: the rest of the screen will then display the website on a mobile view. At the top of the screen you’ll see a drop-down menu which allows you to choose what kind of device you want to simulate, so you can choose an iphone or whatever else you want

Choose a mobile device: Chrome will show Instagram as it would appear on that device

4) Now for the absolutely key bit (thank you to my colleagues Hannah and Antonio for getting me up to speed on this part!): refresh the browser using F5 or the Reload page button. You’ll then see the crucial button, missing until now, that you get on your phone: the + in a square which represents ‘Add picture / video’. Pressing it on your PC will open up the usual file explorer, allowing you to navigate to the media of your choice.

Refreshing the website brings up the Add Media button, highlighted in yellow here

5) Choose a Filter if you like, press Next, add your caption, location, tagged people (and in Advanced Settings you’ll find the option to add Alt Tags too) and click Share to post to Instagram.

Why would you want to use Instagram on your desktop in the first place?

This technique is useful for three main reasons in my experience.

The first and most important thing is, Instagram is such a key social media tool for organisations, but not everyone wants organisational accounts on their personal phone. I work with people who’d rather not mix those two worlds and I completely understand that - but I want them to be able to contribute to our Instagram account without having to compromise their principles! This method means everyone can get involved.

The second reason is, if you already have photography on your hard-drive or network drive, it saves having to get that onto your mobile device’s camera roll.

The third thing is, you can write the post at any time of day and it will stay there waiting for you to post it at the time of your choosing (unless, obviously, you close the window / tab / browser). So if you have 5 minutes to compose the perfect Insta post first thing, but don’t want it to go live till the peak time to post later in the day, you can do the work at 9am and actually post it at 3pm.

Okay that’s it. Happy posting!