From #Instaspam to #Instagenius: How to tell a new story on Instagram?
800 million or ten times more than population of Germany. According to statistics, provided by Instagram in the beginning of 2018, this is the number of the platform’s monthly active users. This might not be seen tremendously impressive compared to 2.2 billion on Facebook, yet the number is still surprisingly high (for instance, Twitter and Snapchat are both balancing around 300 million monthly active users).
Despite the constant growth of the platform, Instagram can hardly avoid being heavily criticized. Baby announcements, celebrity pictures and intimate shots dominate the platform’s most-liked images while the most popular hashtags are #love, #instagood and #photooftheday. Lurkmore or Lurkomorye, an informal Russian-language MediaWiki-powered online encyclopedia focusing on Internet subcultures, folklore, and memes, has even created a new platform‘s nickname — Instaspam.
Although Instagram is hugely occupied with personal often so-called soft content, there are other ways of treating the platform. Business-oriented users have already discovered thousands of opportunities for their products (in November 2017, Instagram announced it had 25 million active business profiles), so maybe there is still some free niche for other purposes too? Mostly focused on storytelling, in this article I will try to examine techniques used (or on the contrary, ignored) by two different Instagram projects in order to explore possible ways of creative storytelling on Instagram. Although, it is important to outline, that this article does not have a purpose to identify which project is better as their background and goals differ in a significant way.
Ok, let’s have few bits of information
Both projects I am referring to were released in 2017. As mentioned before, their background and intentions are very different. Where is Home? is a project by Nfeatu Nnaobi that has been a submission to #veryveryshort (a competition sponsored by Canadian public film and interactive content producer NFB as well as the Franco-German broadcaster Arte). It is designed as a personal diary including personal insights and interviews with different people. The main author’s intentionality — to interrogate people‘s understanding and experiences of home.
Ete is a product of another genre. It is a soap opera and the first Instagram comic (that is also a palindrome since it is possible to read the story in both directions) about a happy couple in a relationship for a year that decides to take back their freedom and spend summer separately just before moving in together. Co-produced by Arte France and Transmedia Production Agency Bigger Than Fiction, Ete was broadcasted on Instagram one episode per day from June 29 to August 25.
Why these projects?
Claiming that Instagram has rarely been used as a storytelling platform would be unfair or even absurd. With over 40 billion shared photos and videos on the Instagram platform since its conception, there are almost as many personal stories about love, friendship, trips, achievements or eating habits.
Professional storytellers are also working on their Instagram pages. For instance, by 15/02/18 National Geographic (@natgeo) has posted 16,374 posts and has been followed by 85,9 M followers; World Press Photo Foundation (@worldpressphoto), non-profit organization known for holding an annual press photography contest, begins every new week while featuring a new photojournalist and his work on its own Instagram page increasing World Press Photo and photographers’ visibility.
Despite having adapted to Instagram and successfully using the platform for their personal purposes, there is a feeling that most of the professional storytellers still see it mainly only as medium for their work extension. Showcasing products created for contests or other organisations, informing about future exhibitions or other plans, promoting new stories, building reputation… So far, these Instagram usage strategies are the most common among professional storytellers. Where is Home? and Ete projects are different because they are driven by contrasting logic and treat Instagram as a platform worth original content.
How does it look like in practice?
Where is Home? project is formed using the space provided by Instagram in a non-traditional way. The project looks like a little diary written on ripped pieces of paper with many visual elements such as images and videos, hand-drawn illustrations or short textual comments (see the picture below).
Instead of telling the story through the series of single images or building photo essays out of them, Where is Home? can be experienced only on the actual page of the project. All 249 images and videos can only be read together when scrolling down the interface of Where is Home? Instagram page. Despite the fact that splitting pictures into the grid for Instagram is not a new feature (there are many apps such as Pic Splitter, Tile Pic or Planoly allowing achieving the grid effect), Where is Home? project is one of the rare examples when this practice is applied to tell a coherent continuous story. As a result, without any help from professional coders, Where is Home? Instagram page functions almost the same way as many scrollable interfaces of other webdocs featured on professional websites (for instance, Snow Fall by The New York Times or Will to Win by Nanook).
Nevertheless, Where is Home? project visual strategy also has certain drawbacks. When splitting the story into the grid, Nfeatu Nnaobi has not ensured the ability for her visual content to stand alone in the Instagram newsfeed (not only on the actual Where is Home? Instagram page). As a result, visuals appearing in the Instagram newsfeed might look as chaotic fragments unable to engage audience with the project (see the picture below).
Creators of Ete project, on the contrary, decided to use a single picture or a series of images with comments as an independent storytelling element. After uploading 28 images on the 7 of June that served as an introduction to the project, they limited the number of their daily publications to one post containing 9 visual elements drawn by Erwann Surcouf. The text driving the plot was put in the bubbles appearing on the images, Instagram stories broadcasted videos related to the comic (see the picture below).
In comparison to Where is Home? project that treated Instagram feed in a similar way as one uses a webpage, creators of Ete decided to behave on Instagram almost as they would have on a TV channel broadcasting new series on a regular basis. “Instagram has established itself as a broadcast network because it is the image. In the summer, everyone shows their feet in the sand or sunsets. So we accompany people to their vacation spot. We will look for the readers where they are — rather than creating a device in itself”, said one one of the comic’ writers Thomas Cadène (Telerama.fr, July 2017).
As a result, the project available only in French has been followed by more than 60k followers whereas Grazia, French women’s magazine, described it as “an innovative concept that will not give any more excuse to get read during the holidays”.
Conclusions
While mostly seen as a platform for existing content promotion, Instagram has a lot of potential to be treated as a medium worth original production. Analysed projects demonstrated that there is a number of ways of telling continuous and coherent stories using embedded Instagram tools both for aesthetics and communication strategies. Without an opportunity to change original layout of Instagram, Nfeatu Nnaobi, who created Where is Home? project, used traditional Instagram squares as a puzzle for her own visual tactics achieving professional look and feel of the interface. Creators of Ete demonstrated thoughtful communication strategy considering habits of their target audience and instead of creating TV or web series, decided to use mobile first approach allowing their users accessing information from different locations and consuming it in a very short time.
Nevertheless, it is interesting that creators of both projects have not fully exploited collaborative platform’s affordances. I would like to especially address Where is Home? project as, perhaps having achieved its initial purpose (Where is Home? was selected among the finalists of #veryveryshort competition) it has been almost entirely closed for the audience input. The agency of the project’s audience has been limited to reading, watching images and videos, scrolling the interface and writing comments (those features are automatically provided by the platform). Not necessarily suggesting that this particular project would benefit from being more open to the audience, it is important to mention that Instagram storytellers might want to consider this option as the platform provides a lot of tools allowing engaging with its users or even creating some content together (creating a special tag for the project, mentioning other users in one’s posts or calling them for action, sharing a control over the project’s platform, etc).
To conclude, there is no universal recipe for a “perfect Instagram story” as most of the creators work towards different goals in unequal circumstances. Although, deep analysis of the platform’s tools and affordances combined with practical application of existing knowledge perhaps gained in a different field as well as openness and willingness to experiment might result in producing efficient yet affordable stories using already existing platform.
