Instagram For Dummies

By Jenn Herman, Corey Walker and Eric Butow

Are you on Insta? Start sharing pictures and a lot, lot more

Instagram For Dummies helps you navigate Instagram and all the updates coming to the platform. For new and experienced users, this book keeps you in the know, so you can post to your feed, create Reels and Stories, broadcast and watch live video, and so much more. This handy guide covers creating Reels to attract more followers, adding updates and stickers for stories, and the addition of multiple feeds so you can customize your experience. There are so many new features coming to this ever-more-popular social platform, you need a friend like Dummies to help you keep up. Create viral content, or just share cat pics with your close friends and family.

• Learn the basics of the Instagram app and web interfaces
• Get started with your first posts, Stories, and Reels
• Discover the many new features that are making Instagram more fun than ever
• Find out how to make your posts scroll-stopping and more popular

This is the perfect how-to guide for both newbie and experienced social media users who need a guide on setting up Instagram, expanding their audience, and doing more on the app.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Nov 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781119931805

Jenn Herman

Jenn Herman is a social media consultant, speaker, and globally recognized Instagram expert. She is the forefront blogger on Instagram marketing and her blog, Jenn’s Trends, has won the title of a Top 10 Social Media Blog in 2014, 2015, and 2016. Through her blog, consulting, and speaking Jenn provides tips, resources, and training for small to medium-sized businesses that need to structure their social media strategies. Her business background includes Administration, Sales, Human Resources, and Marketing and she enjoys bringing all these skills together to help you grow your business. Jenn has been featured in Inc., Fox News, Yahoo Finance, CBS Radio LA, and numerous other podcasts and publications. She is the author of Instagram for Business for Dummies, The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Instagram and Stop Guessing: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Social Media Strategy.

Book preview

Introduction

Are you excited to discover how to use Instagram? We hope you are! Because we love Instagram, and we’re excited to show you how to use it and how to have fun with it! Instagram is all about entertainment and creating enjoyable content. Because you’ve chosen this book, we know you’re ready to get started creating an Instagram account you enjoy!

More and more people are joining Instagram every day. But with that growth comes a lot of noise and saturation from people who don’t quite understand how to use the platform effectively. After reading this book, you’ll have the tools and tactics necessary to build a successful Instagram profile.

About This Book

This book helps you use Instagram successfully. Instagram really is as simple as uploading a photo — and that was how the platform was initially designed. But you can do so many things with each photo or video — like adding filters, writing creative captions, and having conversations in the comments. And as Instagram adds more features to the platform, such as Reels, multi-image posts, and stories, understanding how to create additional content is just as important.

We take you through every step of setting up your profile, creating and uploading content to Instagram, writing descriptive captions, finding hashtags that help you get more exposure, adding new followers, and using all the fun features built into Instagram.

Foolish Assumptions

We made a few assumptions when writing this book. We assume that you

Have a smartphone

Have photos and videos you want to share

Don’t want to look like an amateur, even if you’re new to using Instagram

Are committed to devoting time and energy to build a presence on Instagram

Want to be a part of the Instagram community

If these assumptions are correct, then this book is for you! We’re confident that the tactics and information in these pages will help you achieve your goals.

Icons Used in This Book

To make sure you don’t miss important details, we use the following icons throughout this book. Here’s what the different icons mean:

Tip Anything marked with the Tip icon is a small piece of expert advice that will save you time and make your experience on Instagram easier.

Remember This book is a reference, which means you don’t have to commit it to memory. There won’t be a test on Friday! But every once in a while, we tell you something so important that we think you should file it away with other important information, like your best friend’s birthday and the name of the newest royal baby.

Technical Stuff Most of this book is all about telling you what you need to know to use Instagram, and nothing more. But every once in a while, our inner geeks emerge, and we get a little technical. When this happens, we flag it with the Technical Stuff icon. If you’re in a hurry, or you just don’t care about this kind of thing, you can skip anything marked with the Technical Stuff icon without missing the point of the subject at hand.

Warning When you see a Warning icon, you’re not at risk of blowing up your Instagram account or doing irreparable damage, but you can rest assured that some helpful advice is at hand — advice meant to prevent any headaches or minor snafus.

Beyond the Book

In addition to what you’re reading right now, this book also comes with a free, access-anywhere Cheat Sheet that provides a handy list of Instagram lingo, size limits for photos and videos on Instagram, and steps for sharing posts and profiles. The Cheat Sheet also includes Instagram limits for everything from usernames to bios to the number of posts you can like in an hour. To view the Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and type Instagram For Dummies Cheat Sheet in the Search box.

Where to Go from Here

You don’t have to read this book from beginning to end — in fact, you can use the Table of Contents and Index to find the information you’re most interested in right this very minute. You don’t even have to read every word. If you’re short on time and just want to know what you need to know to get the job done, you can skip anything marked with the Technical Stuff icon, as well as sidebars (the text in gray boxes).

The first few chapters dive into how to set up a new Instagram account. If you already have an Instagram account, you can skip the first two chapters, but we encourage you to check out Chapter 2 because it contains information on how to set up an effective profile. Don’t worry, you can easily update or edit anything you’ve already started! And if you’re looking for inspiration, read Chapter 15.

Tip Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy — just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.

We would love to hear from you about your experience with this book. Did you find it helpful? Was there something else you wish we had covered? Are you enjoying using Instagram now? Please feel free to email us. You can reach Jenn at [e-mail], Eric at [e-mail], and Corey at [e-mail].

It’s time to jump into all the fun of Instagram that we’ve been talking about! Enjoy the book!

Part 1

Getting Started with Instagram

IN THIS PART …

Explore the various Instagram features and find out how to navigate the app.

Set up your Instagram profile to attract more followers.

Chapter 1

Setting Up Your Profile

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Deciding what info to use in your profile

Bullet Creating an effective bio

Bullet Upgrading to a business profile

Bullet Determining your privacy settings

After you install the Instagram app on your mobile device, the first major task you face is setting up your profile. Your profile should accurately represent you.

In this chapter, we show you how to set up the different components of your profile, including a username and name and a bio. We also explain how to set up a business profile, in case the account you’re creating is for, well, a business. Finally, we end the chapter by showing you how to select your privacy settings.

Practicing Good Personal Profile Management

Instagram gives you the option of choosing between a personal or business profile. We start by explaining how to set up a personal profile. Later in this chapter, we discuss how to upgrade to a business profile.

Tip If you want both a personal and a business profile, you can’t do that in one account. You have to set up two separate accounts — one with a personal profile and another with a business profile.

Your Instagram profile is not only your first impression to potential followers and new visitors but also your consistent message to your existing audience. Your profile should be recognizable as your style and representative of what you want people to see about you. Figure 1-1 shows you what a standard personal profile looks like on Instagram.

Snapshot of the Instagram profile consists of these standard components.

FIGURE 1-1: The Instagram profile consists of these standard components.

Instagram profiles are composed of the following six components: username, name, pronouns, profile photo, bio, and web address.

Choosing a username and name

Your username and name are two of the most important components of your Instagram profile because they help other users find you in search results. When users type a keyword or name in the Search field on Instagram, the app looks at the username and name fields of accounts to determine if an account is relevant to that search query.

Tip Instagram also scans the caption text within your posts and your profile bio description to see whether your content appears in a user’s search results when looking at keyword searches. If you want to get even more eyeballs to your profile, start adding keywords to your posts’ captions and see what good things happen. We explain how to add captions in Chapter 3.

Remember The username is the string of characters at the top of the profile. The name is the bold text below the profile photo. If you want your account to be found by a keyword or phrase, be sure to include it in either the name or username for your