Group: Promoting ipernity

I will ask my son and daughter if they have a suggestion for how to promote to open source communities.

My daughter suggested advertising on instagram. She thought thinks because one can target the audience that it is useful. She also thinks that there will be people who use instagram that will want a deeper connection to photographs like through ipernity.

Then each of us who has an Instagram account should try to find a way to promote ipernity on their Instagram posts. There are several issues to overcome:

- Basic user can not post URL links on the posts, only on their Instagram profile.
- People using Instagram may not read image captions, or reads them hastily.
- Hashtag #ipernity alone says nothing and does not make people to react in any way.

So, somehow the image itself should make people to find out more. But how, that we should try to figure out.

There is also an ipernity instagram account, but it has been without use because no one at ima team does not know to what and who's email account it is bind to. I do not know how, but we should try to take into use. We may need an official contact to Instagram helpdesk.

Account here: www.instagram.com/ipernity

That would then provide some more options to promote ipernity, but as long as ipernity itself ia pretty unknown, that account will not get much attention, no matter what would be shared there. It would take a lot of time and effort to make it appealing to wide audience.

✅ This is probably a good idea. Given our really small budget, we have to weigh up where we can reach the most attractive target group. And there would have to be someone who knows Instagram well enough to tell us what attractive advertising looks like there.

✅ It's true: nobody in the ima team ia familiar with Instagram. That is why it is completely neglected. We should question our members.

Advertising on instagram is easy to find - it's filled with companies. The posts themselves are just showcasing with hashtags and maybe a mention to find the site through the link on the bio page. So in ipernity's case it would be the photos of ipernity being shown, or maybe some other ingenious type thing, but mostly member photos.

An easy place to start would be with the photos that are already approved for advertising because they are on the frontpage (though maybe the release would need to be made explicitly for being on instagram? I don't know what people agreed to specifically).

Note, the hastags on ipernity should be like the ones on youtube. I think the article Sami pointed to: backlinko.com/hub/youtube/tags Is a great place to understand how to pick hashtags.
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I recommend the IMA to get a new instagram account 'ipernityphotoclub'. This would get us around the issue with the login for the current account, and also help with the issue of people not knowing what 'ipernity' means.

Finding one or two members to become Instagram Advisors to support the team is a really good idea. If we could find a couple people who would be willing to find and post to the instagram account on a weekly basis, that would be amazing. But even if it only happened once or twice a month, that would be great. Each post can have more than one photo (I think up to 3?), but one or two is probably enough.

They would be tasked with finding appropriate photos and asking permission to use that photo, include a cute quick statement, and finally picking the hashtags (though these could be mostly the same everytime, with maybe one extra that relates to the subject of the photo picked) and uploading to instagram. The other part, and an important one, is to 'follow' people and businesses that 'follow' ipernity instagram posts. Sometimes finding similar posts and 'hearting' them. Finally, one of them would need to monitor the account and reply to any comments that are made to the photos, if needed. Mostly they just get 'awesome' or 'cool' and don't need a reply, but someone should be checking.

Set up wording should look very similar to flickr's instagram account - yes, they have one! Looking at flickr's statements with their posts is helpful to get ideas.
www.instagram.com/flickr

And yes, we can 'heart' photos from flickr. It's about back and forth with lots of people, getting one's name out there. And then sometimes people will click through to ipernity itself.