Instagram is currently the third most popular social network used by U.S. college students.
While it still trails Facebook and Twitter in terms of adoption rate, the level of engagement on the network appears to be higher. According to Melanie Shreffler of Smarty Pants, a youth and family market research firm, teens and somethings are spending less time on Facebook and more time on niche social networks like Instagram. Instagram reaches a younger, more diverse audience than other social networks. Instagram users skew much younger than Facebook user which means that every incoming class of college students is bringing with it a larger pool of Instagram users. Many of them are eager to follow campus identities as they adjust to their new home. Instagram also indexes highly with African Americans and Latinos, and is particularly popular among urban residents.6 If your library is targeting a young, diverse, urban demographic, you might have more success with Instagram than other social media outlets. Our own experience certainly reflects
the trends noted above. At Powell Library, we appear to be reaching a distinct audience
on Instagram that has little overlap with our followers on Facebook and Twitter. Furthermore, our Instagram followers are much more interactive, even though we have a larger number of followers on Facebook. One reason for this might be
Facebook fatigue. Another reason might be that Instagram users still see every post from
the accounts they follow—unlike Facebook, which, by default, filters out posts it deems
less interesting to the user.