Instagram is a great platform for sharing one’s life, connecting with others and finding inspiration but there are still a few kinks in the machine. It’s still too hard to filter and find your own content, too easy for people to overrun a subject with unrelated posts and no way of truly gathering specific moments shared by others into one place.
By creating a product like Curated Hashtags, we believe that we can improve these hiccups by allowing people to take ownership over tags, collaborate and collect the posts of a select group of people into one area, see subjects through the lens of those that they choose and overall reduce the firehose of information that instagram become.
Current habits:
The soul purpose of this account is promotion and advertising. They seek out the participation of their followers and want to gain more of them by getting people to talk about them. They do this through inspiration and occassional contests.
Why Curated Hashtags are great for them:
First, it’s a great way for them to organize contests and feature users (rewarding them with prizes/15 min. of fame). Secondly, it makes it easy to distinguish between what the brand sees themselves as (curated) and what the community sees them as (public).
Current habits:
Janet is a 30 something mom who likes posting picture of her kids, pets, vacations and projects she’s doing around the house. To her, instagram is a fun way of sharing her life with those that are close to her.
Why Curated Hashtags are great for them:
Janet can use Curated Hashtags to organize her posts of her individual loved ones and their lives and therefore more easily look back and relive those lifetime moments. She can also use it for things like vacations or family reunions to make a single hub where all the posts of everyone involved (contributors) in the experience can be gathered into one place to create a more connected and in depth memory.
Current habits:
Jacques is a young (20-35) artist looking to showcase his work, post beautiful images and gain exposure. He tends to take care to post meaningful imagery no matter what the occassion and does a bit of life-logging along the way. Basically, he uses instagram to say, “Look at me. This is who I am.”
Why Curated Hashtags are great for them:
This new feature provides an even greater opportunity to be featured by high profile accounts and further gain exposure. This also will allow him to organize his own instagram based artwork, do collabrative projects and even house a portfolio all through instagram.
The current explore page is a host firstly to a show of cleavage and would-be celebreties that we’ve mostly never heard of and somewhat secondarily to the search feature where one can find people and open up the firehouse of hashtags. Unless a user follows millions of people, this is the gateway to the torrential downpour of who-knows-what within the many topics being mentioned on instagram.
The profile page allows you to see the posts of specific individuals and your own. Your best chance of finding things from the past is long scrolling and a keen eye as well as a geographical filter. When it comes to posting, you can add your friends to a post and even file it away in another social platform. You can also add it to a topic where it will likely get lost among the millions of others in that category unless you create a hashtag that is extremely unique; but even then, the spamming attention seekers may find and exploit your unique tagging system.
Subscribe
Now when you go to the “explore” page, you can be greeted by collections of hastags that you’ve chosen to subscribe to; collections being curated and added to by the sources you’re interrested in the most. If you still fancy the “popular” page, you can add it here as well.
Filter
If you want, continue to look for tags just as you always have through public tags or choose to find subjects based on the widely followed curators on the subject.
You can always look forward to viewing the new explore page, because you’ll know it has content you’re interrested in and it will be easier to find more of it.
Creating your own curated hashtag is easy and will feel familiar. As you start to add a hashtag in the description, your most used hashtags will begin to autopopulate below along with the option to create a new tag. At that point, you can name the new tag, add contributors to the tag if you wish to allow others to freely post to your curated collection.
In the toolbar within the profile page, you’ll find a new icon with the pound symbol better known today as a “hashtag.” This is where the users’ curated tags live. A new tag can be created from the user’s own profile page and one can view and edit the hastags in more detail.
If you’re viewing someone else’s profile, you can view their curated tags in similar detail and choose to subscribe or unsubscribe to their collections.
See instagram the way you wish to;
make it your own.
Instagram is proud to introduce a new way to organize your content and more quickly find the things you’re looking for.
Introducing Curated Hashtags.
Curated Hashtags make it easy for users to organize their own posts into collections, collaborate with others and see topics through more specific lenses of other users whose opinions matter to them. And all through a feature that users are already familiar with.
We’ve partnered with several influencers on instagram to let them explore this new feature and build up their Curated Hashtag collections. We are excited for you to see what they’ve been up to and join in on the benefits of making instagram even more personalized and beautiful than ever before.
For a full list of our partnered influencers, visit our homepage. Thank you!
