Instagram!!!

I had an Instagram account since last year but I was not actively using it at all until I came to Tallahassee, and only a few months ago I started to use it and explore the various functions!

For Instagram, in order to fully utilize the features, you will have to have a smartphone. For example, if you want to post a picture or video, you can only do it via a smartphone and you can't do it on a computer. But you can comment, like or edit your profile through both mediums. As Dr Dennen has briefly mentioned in the voice thread that Instagram is more of a visual type of a social media platform where people can post pictures or videos of anything that are of interest to them, many people also use it as a platform to promote their products or business for example fitness products. You can hashtag your pictures or videos, it is like Twitter where people can view all pictures or videos that contains the hashtags. For example, you post a picture of a dog and you put a #dog, your dog's picture will appear on the #dog feed where all pictures with the #dog will appear on. You can do multiple hashtags like #dog, #puppies, #doglover, #rottie and etc., whatever hashtags that you can think of, there will be someone who have thought of it and used the hashtag, or you can start to create new ones and eventually there will be people who will start to use the new hashtags. You can follow people and people could follow you as well, there are privacy settings like you can make your profile private or public. With a private profile, your pictures or videos are private, only you and the followers (whom you have approved) can see them. If there is someone who wants to follow you, he or she will have to make the request and you can decide whether to approve it or not. As for public profile, anyone can just follow you freely and whatever that you have posted are publicly accessible.

There is a messaging function for us to contact anyone on Instagram, you can connect it to your Facebook or Twitter accounts to sync the friends list. You can even include geographical information to the photos or videos that you have posted (where the picture or video is taken or recorded). It is a pretty neat and easy to use tool! You can find a lot of people with common interest on Instagram through the hashtags. Like for example #rottie you will be able to see people who likes rottweiler or have one as a pet.

It is pretty cool if you are someone who prefers visual information, a little bit of text and some interaction/communication function, this is the application that you can consider using! I have started to use it pretty frequently now and I am using it more on fitness kind of stuff like fitness progression but there are also other random pictures that I put up there. Give it a try!