

Other posting options you will see here include ‘Post’, Reels’, and ‘Live’.

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.When you do this, you will launch the ‘New Post’ window from where you may pick ‘Story’ from among the different posting options you see at the bottom of the screen.

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. Reels are a brilliant opportunity for all of us. 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. They disappear after 24 hours - but they can be pinned in themes to be found later by the more curious among your followers. They do NOT appear on your grid they’re found when people click your profile pic. They can have music and gifs and animations and - crucially - links, added to them, natively in Instagram. because they’re only really intended to be viewed on phones. They’re orientated as portrait rather than landscape or square. Stories are 15 second videos (or a longer video broken into 15s chunks) or a 7 second-long still. Shots of objects from Special Collections often get engagement, like this one from the BL. 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. 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. 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. In the library world, it’s photos of interesting things that do well here, rather than incredible photography per se. You might post a few times a week to the Grid, even if you post more often to Stories. It’s what people see when they click on your profile. The Grid is the bread-and-butter, the ‘main’ posts you put on your Instagram account.

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