Instagram as a Tool for Advocacy - AgChat 2014 Cultivate and Connect Conference, Austin, Texas
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Instagram is one of the fastest growing social media tools on the scene. It's a great tool for sharing your photo's, but it has some real potential for outreach and education. This slideset (with notes) was prepared for attendee's of the AgChat annual conference. It explores the value of Instagram as a tool for Agriculture advocacy.
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Instagram as a Tool for Advocacy - AgChat 2014 Cultivate and Connect Conference, Austin, Texas
- 1. Instagram is Pictures Amy E. Hays Texas A&M AgriLife Extension ahays@tamu.edu
- 3. Add filters to photo’s to enhance or “fun” the experience
- 6. Uses #hashtags and other common social media practices
- 8. ‘Shares’ (‘plays’ nice) with other social networks
- 11. A little on the Numbers
- 13. 150 Million Active Users
- 16. The Basics
- 17. Add a picture (from your phone, OR connect to existing photo repositories Ability to link, share, or email Allows for unlimited space to describe your photo Allows for use of #hashtag (multiple up to 30) Users can “love” or comment
- 18. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words "Selfie!" by Sandra Jovanovic Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
- 19. Hundreds of things you do …. few people get to EVER see or do Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) http://www.flickr.com/photos/agrilifetoday/
- 23. Gender Matters for Generation Y– www.atkearney.com
- 24. What does Advocacy look like on Instagram???? https://www.flickr.com/photos/bionicteaching/6723636413/
- 25. Use your photo’s to show the ordinary to the extraordinary Don’t hesitate to tell the WHOLE story! Use this space, don’t just give a brief Follow Best Practices for quality content writing: Be descriptive: This is a great picture This is a great picture of Asparagus right before it is ready to be harvested. Asparagus plants are planted in small rows which allow equal sun light and water to each stem. Link if you have them: Asparagus is a great crop in zones 1-8, read more at http://tamu.edu/soilcrop/asparagus.tamu.edu
- 26. Follow others
- 28. Instagram allows (and promotes) #hashtags to aggregate content
- 29. #felfie – Farm Selfies! 2014 has been designated the YEAR of the FARM SELFIE
- 30. #plelfie – Plant Selfie!
- 31. #MyParkPic – Texas Parks and Wildlife State Park photo contest
- 32. InstaPonder….
- 33. PhotoMap option in Instagram When you upload a photo, you have the option AT THAT TIME to add a location (x,y – coordinate data) FYI – default is OFF, you must turn on this option EACH time you load a picture
- 35. Hmmmm…. • Location of farmers markets? • Farms that allow pick your own? • Farms to visit?
- 36. Hmmm….Hmmmm • Crop/field monitoring – pictures over time • Field condition – pictures over time • Animal identification • Hay for sale
- 37. Hmmm…Hmmm…Hmmmm • Crop emergence • Pest emergence • Citizen scientist • Invasive species mapping
- 38. Summary • Social networking centered around pictures • Create story through your pictures • Advocate through message section • Uses Hashtags • Geotagging capabilities open new options
- 39. Amy E. Hays Texas AgriLife Extension aggie94_amy ahays@tamu.edu
Editor's Notes
- Presentation for the AgChat Austin Meeting – August 21- 22nd , 2014
- Instagram can really be Insta AWESOME - today I’m going to go over briefly the tool that is Instagram, what it does (really briefly), who uses it – demographics, some ways you can use it well, and go farther then that and talk about using Instagram to deliver your advocacy message. Some of you call that outreach, some of you call it education, but for today, we are all going to call it Advocacy.
- Instagram is basically a social network centered around pictures. By the way, it’s entirely built for mobile and mobile only. It works great on phones, iPads, tablets, ect… it’s absolutely not built for the desktop.
- Instagrams earliest appealing tool was the ability to apply “filter” to your photo’s that basically turned your everday smartphone pictures into something that looked like professional photography.
- You can also do some neat corrections including tilt and contrast, as well as a few other basics to make your pictures really look good.
- It also uses some common things familiar to those in Social media, such as social share-ability to other social networks (twitter, facebook, foursquare, ect..) as well as things like hashtags as hyperlinks (more on that later)
- You can follow people and be followed. You can have a private account so only people YOU follow see your stuff, or you can have a public account where anyone can see your stuff. There isn’t a whole lot of in-between. You are either private or public. That is all.
- It also includes the ability to geotag (add spatial coordinates) to your photo if you choose but ONLY when you upload it the first time. You can enable or disable this feature. We’ll look at that more closely in a few other slides.
- If you do geotag your photo’s there is a built in handy mash-up with Google maps. Again, we’ll look at that in a while. This is just a basic to get you familiar.
- So WHO is using Instagram and HOW would be the next logical questions for someone who is looking at this as a tool for advocacy. You may not care if you are just using it for your own use, but once you adopt a tool to reach an audience, you are going to want to see if it’s going to yield results.
- As a newcomer to the block, you can see that Instagram comparatively has a small market share compared to the big guys. But remember, this is a new tool and it’s already as popular as some of the older tools. That’s interesting. It’s easy to adopt.
- If you want to compare Instagram’s 150 million active users to other in how consumers are using these, you can pick out a few things. It’s pretty active for marketers, it incorporates both video and photos (one of the reasons Vine might not make it as a tool, but “Vine” is now a “type of video” so the vernacular of Vine you’ll hear in concert with Instagram)
- You’ll want to pay attention to WHICH age group of consumers uses the tools you are adopting. Clearly, Instagram is a hit with the 18-29 year old generation. In it’s infancy, you can already see that for this particular age group, it’s the tool of choice outside Facebook. Other data that looks at teen use (under 18) confirms that it is a high use tool among the 13-18 year old group.
- Finally, how’s the adoption rate and what are people doing? High adoption, most people do the lowest form of interaction (liking), high level of shares to other networks. The engagement LEVEL is 15x that of Facebook, probably because it’s just so easy to engage and scroll.
- So what makes this tool so handy? An easy choice if you are targeting audiences that you either want a high level of simple engagement, or you are targeting a younger consumer? Let’s be real, for the Ag industry, your consumer (VOTING) group fits nicely in this niche and your upcoming client (VOTER) group is right now using this tool heavily. But there are some other things that really make this a nice outreach tool. You just may never have through about using this tool that way.
- You can take a picture on your phone, or you can upload one from a tablet device (which translates into you can add your photo’s from directories if you are connected to them on your tablet device). Most people use photo’s from their phones, but you CAN upload other photo’s. You can also upload video, and it plays very nicely on Instagram . You can link, share, or email from Instagram, so can your followers. There is a huge space (unlimited) to describe your photo. The majority of people don’t use this space, but you could and some accounts use this space very well. You can add links in that text, very handy. You can use hashtags that become a hyperlink within Instagram to create collections of photo’s – Twitter style. You click on a hashtag, all public photo’s with that tag show up. Users have the basics, they can love, or comment (or share)
- The beauty is truly what you can do with your pictures. If you are setting up this tool for advocacy, your story is going to be completely told by the pictures you share. Keep thinking about that as you ponder this tool. WHAT will your account tell people about.
- One thing that happens in the Ag and natural resource filed is that we forget how privileged we are to see the things that we do. Most American’s see very little of what we might see every day. They may glimpse it, but we get to be up close and personal with things that people find (or could find) pretty amazing. The average American most likely can’t tell the difference between seed heads, but they know the difference between and McDonald’s and a Burger King sign (even if the words are missing). Our “environmental literacy” is pretty low. A picture, a picture can show someone in 2 seconds what takes you 10 minutes to describe. The key is that your story needs to be told through the lens of your smartphone. Once you think about that, you see thousands of opportunities for advocacy.
- For instance, we grow crops everyday that consumers see only at the final end product. But from growth to harvest is a pretty amazing process. Instagram helps to document that and share it in the way humans love to explore most – with their eyes. How many people know what your best native forage is? How many consumers have ever seen a cotton on the stalk? If you are a producer, almost everything you do is foreign to most Americans. They simply haven’t had the chance to see up close what you see. What does a new calf look like? What do spray heads on an irrigator look like? Things you find everyday, are not so everyday to the consumer. If you work with producers, you even get to see the variety between them. One day at a farm, one day at a ranch, one day at the production facility.
- Take a look, for the Ag consumption market, Instagram is a huge tool. It is also a huge tool among audiences that Ag would say they have the least contact with, Urban and underserved audiences. So what are you doing to promote the value of Ag and Natural resources to this group? Do you want them to come to you or are you willing to go where they are?
- What are the generations that we are dealing with?
- Growing population of GenY who will spend a long period of time in the workforce. Mainly 47-56 but they have feet in both older boomers and GenX
- So, if you think “boy, this is a great tool for me”, you are going to want to know what best practices seem to deliver the bang for the buck in this tool. Not surprisingly, they are the same best practices you should be using in all online content.
- 1.) Think about what your picture is showing and be ready to DESCIBE that in words. The biggest problem is that most people take very little advantage of the space given to them in Instagram. The picture IS the subject, but the users can easily choose to read or not read the content. 2.) If you are using this as an advocacy tool, then educate. 3.) Link to other information, you can find it and place it into the description. Why not? No good argument against it. Hate typing? Use a bluetooth keyboard, save your pictures from your phone to the cloud. Use your tablet later on to put them into Instagram.
- Look for others that do well at this and imitate them.
- Take a look at NASA on Instagram. Rich text, they get lots of comments. Yes, they DO have the advantage of amazing pictures. But their account tells a vivid and interesting story. Probably better than any medium they use.
- Yes, yes, yes, in Instagram, use HASHTAGS. They make it so easy to explore and take advantage of hashtags.
- The Hashtags themselves can create communities. Promote the hashtag you want in your other social media’s and invite people to use them. Here’s an Instagram campaign entirely focused around FARM SELFIES (#felfie) – the campaign was conducted in blogs and other sources, but the photo’s were added and aggregated in Instagram. The results are pretty cool.
- Here’s a local effort by a Travis County Horticulture agent- Plant Selfies or “plelfie”
- Here’s a photo contest by Texas Parks which ran for 6 weeks. Couldn’t have been easier! No extra programming needed. Simply created a unique hashtag.
- I mentioned very early on, that one of the cool features in Instagram is the mash up with mapping – or the geotagging of photo’s. I want to spend a moment on that.
- When you choose to add a location to your photo (and as always, safety first) you add a whole spatial element to your outreach. So here’s how that works.
- You take a picture, you choose to geotag it, it now is in Instagram on a map. If you are a public account, that photo can be seen by anyone. If you are private, only by those you follow and you allow to follow you.
- It’s not necessarily exciting if you are thinking about selfies. But what if your advocacy role were to say – promote local food markets? What if the only photo’s you geotag are when you visit a local food market. Pretty soon, you’ve just helped create a map of local food markets. You can share that map, and since it’s a Google map mashup, you can even port that map to things like some blogs, or other API plug-in ready tools (WordPress).
- Maybe you are someone who works in the Ag industry? Rangeland monitoring includes photo points. A geotagged photo on Instagram is a dream, it has the photo, the location, and the temporal info (time, date) build right in. If I follow you and you follow me, we can see each others pictures. You can share your field conditions with me easily. Own stock? Use photo’s to do some quick inventory. Show condition, advertise for sale.
- Mind blown - what IF I was working in field pest emergence. Building a mapping reporting system is expensive and difficult. But here, I could ask my producers to take photo’s in Instagram, tag them with some hashtag I created, and I could “see” pests emerge on a map in near real time. Perhaps in real time enough to prescribe a treatment in a more timely manner or learn something I didn’t know from my general field visits.
- So here’s Instagram, this simple little easy to use mobile social network for your pictures. You can use it to take awesome photo’s and share them. You can build a story, you can build advocacy, you can participate in research. Wow!
- Thanks for your time!
- This slideset is part of the Texas A&M 21st Century Agent program – find it and other resources at http://21stCenturyAgent.agrilife.org