As a language person I have not been too inspired by Instagram. I’ve set up an account a few times, and in recent months I’ve actively updated it and studied how others are using the service.
The channel seems best suited to visual art professionals: museums, artists, and photographers. For organizations, Instagram mainly offers an advertising channel with little payoff for those who follow. As for people who blog professionally about things like food, lifestyle, fashion and travel, their Instagram activity is mostly a rehash of what’s already on their blog.
Experts and scientists clearly have difficulty in aligning content: images in their stream can come from dissertations, articles, seminars and lectures, lacking visual impact and relevance. There are some exceptions – for example, Linda Fitzharris, who illustrates medical history in an interesting way. Authors seem to have the same problem as experts: their images tend predictably toward bookshelves, the covers of books they’ve read or written, and selfies.
One of the smartest users of Instragram is Clicksaver (”Klikinsäästäjä” in Finnish), which makes fun of clickbait sites by posting their headlines and giving away the rarely-surprising secret with wry comments. This short-form mockery works well in this channel. Like those professional bloggers, though, Clicksaver publishes its material elsewhere, like Facebook and Twitter, and so if you follow them on multiple sites you’ll get all the repetition you can stand.
Snarky people say that picture-sharing services are for the illiterate. While I don’t want to take so strong a stand, I do think that for people who work mainly with words, Twitter for example is a better fit than Instagram. CMIIW (correct me if I’m wrong).