One of the most popular social media channels in existence today, Instagram is a photo- and video-sharing platform owned by Facebook and used by Puget Sound departments, programs, and groups to showcase campus life and university-related stories, news, and events—and, of course, to show off our beautiful campus!

Instagram offers four main outlets:

  • Photo/Video posts: Users may post a single image, a series of images, image collages, or up to about a minute of video with a single caption. Posts are visible on the account page and in fans' feeds. Note that posts are either square or horizontal. While there is some flexibility in post orientation, vertical posts will be cropped, and vertical video will not display correctly.
  • Live video: Live video is broadcast at the moment. Fans are notified in the app that your account is broadcasting. Commenting is enabled by default, but you can disable comments. When you complete a live broadcast, it disappears from your account unless you save it to your camera roll and then add it to your Instagram story.
  • Instagram stories and highlights: Instagram stories borrow a page from Snapchat, allowing users to post images that live on their accounts for 24 hours, then disappear. Stories also can support video clips up to 15 seconds long. Highlights are a way to save stories beyond 24 hours, organized by event, category, etc. They live on an account's profile page and are visible to all users.
  • IGTV: Actually separate from the Instagram app, IGTV is an extension of Instagram that allows users to upload vertical videos up to 10 minutes in length (or up to 60 minutes for verified accounts).

Hashtags
Hashtags are an important and useful aspect of Instagram. Use hashtags to align posts with online conversations around a specific topic. When people search on those tags, your posts will appear in the results.

Puget Sound uses a series of promoted hashtags to search for content within our community to share via our account and on the photo wall on our home page: #pugetsoundbound, #totheheights, #alwaysalogger, and #loggerup.