My name is Alex Copeland and I work with Richard Fairbairn and the Online Success Model Team. And this is another video in our INSTAGRAM course.
Now that we know what INSTAGRAM is all about, let’s show you how to use it. Here we are on the INSTAGRAM home page. As you can see you can actually have multiple accounts; its asking me if I want to switch accounts or you can sign up. I’ve already signed up so I just need to click to log in, but if I hadn’t and I could create a new account. If I click on switch accounts here you’ll see that they’re asking you for a phone number username or an email and then a password. You can log in with Facebook, login here or you can sign up. As I already have an account, I’m just going to continue as that account.
Depending on how you have it setup it might ask you to turn on notifications. This means that you will actually be told when things are happening even when you’re not actually on the account. For now I’m going to say not now. The first thing you see is your feed and on your feed here you can see all the people that you follow and all the things that they’ve been up to. You can simply scroll down this and you can see what everyone’s been doing and all the different parts here, but I’ll go through that properly in a minute.
First, let’s look over onto the right. Here’s your profile, here’s your picture and then down here is stories. Stories are where people add their stories for the day that you can see. Here we can see people that have updated and you can go down and have a look at what different stories have happened.
Underneath that you have suggestions. So these are suggestions for you based on people that you follow or people that are new or people that are similar to who you already follow and maybe they’ve got the same interests.
You’ve also got a small menu here which tells you all about different things like the ‘about us’, the ‘support’, the ‘privacy’, the ‘terms and conditions’ and etcetera. But for now let’s check out what makes up a post.
As you can see here, you’ve got the username at the top of the profile. If we’re to click through to that it would go through to their profile. But for now let’s just stay here. Here’s an image of something they posted and then underneath you have these different functions;
The ‘heart’ will like it.
The ‘comment box’ will make a comment on it.
This symbol here will send it to contacts.
And this symbol over here is a bookmark so you can add it to one of your collections.
If you look underneath you can see how many likes it had and you can also click on this and see who liked it if you want and you can see the comments. You can also like or heart the comments themselves. This is the same for all of the different posts. So it’s up to you how you want to engage with it, but as you can see engagement is a huge part of it. If you do like something and then change your mind you can tap it again and it will take that like away.
Let’s have a look at the top menu. You’ve got the INSTAGRAM logo here which takes you back to www.instagram.com as does the logo here. You’ve got a search bar which we’ll come back to in a minute. Then over here we’ve got the explorer icon, the account activity icon and your own profile. So first of all let’s click on explore. As you can see what it’s doing is showing me some different things it thinks I’ll be interested in. Here are people and here are different posts. This is based on things that I have already liked and if you hover over them you can see how much they’ve been liked and how many comments they’ve got.
If you want to check one of these out you can just click on it and it will take you through to it. Now, you’ve got the familiar look of the post that we saw on the home page except it’s actually been put into its own separate place. We can see the image, we can see how many likes, we can add a comment and we can do all that good stuff again. If you want to come out of this just click and you’re back.
Let’s click on one of these to go back to the beginning. As you can see I clicked on the logo and it took me back to my main feed. The next one along here is activity. If we click on here we can see what’s been happening; we can see who’s followed you and what you’ve been up to, you can see likes on your photo and etcetera. You can also use this to directly follow someone that’s followed you. Or you can just click on their name to check out their profile before you do so.
The next one is our profile. If we click on this we can see things we’ve posted and we can also see the stats with our followers, how many are following and we can edit our profile. This along are the top stories where you’ve added things to them.
If you come down here you can see the different post you’ve made. If you want to edit to your profile you can do so clicking here. Once you’re inside here you can change your photo, your username, the website, the bio and lots and lots of different things. Likewise you can change your password, the applications that authorize the user and other things down here with contacts and privacy. You can also temporarily disable your account if you want to be offline for a while. But for now let’s go back to the home page; I’ll just click that icon and it sends me back to the beginning.
Now, let’s look at the search box. In the search box you can search for topic or for a person. So let’s do marketing and search. It will come up with people and it will also come with hash-tags. If we click on one of these or on the hash-tag you’ll take us to that place. Let’s go to a marketing digital. As you can see this hash-tag as nearly 5,000,000 posts and we can search around and we can look at all the things that are going on underneath this hash-tag.
What you’re looking at now is the desktop version which means we can look at all these things and we can search around, we can follow people and we can find what they’ve done. But as this is a mobile based app, you need to be on the app itself to actually add content. Once you’re on the app all you need to do is click the ‘plus’ button and you can take a photo or video and upload it.
As you can see it’s fairly self-explanatory how this works. They’ve made it nice and simple, but it’s always good to have a walkthrough so you can see exactly what you’re doing. Now that you’ve had this walk through let’s move on and see how we can use some of these functions.
