Crafting Community on Instagram

Community Building

When it comes to community building two things matter: content that highlights your audience [see my other Instagram project] and community building activities. This is what this project is all about.

Since the early days of Instagram, community members for together in real life to walk around and capture images in their city or neighbourhood. Over time we came to call these Instameets or Meetups for Instagram.

They were organic but we would send organisers Instameet kits with stickers and other goodies as a thank you gesture

Another example of community building was the "empties". This consisted of us facilitating access to a group of users to an emblematic place (think Tate Modern in London) behind closed doors, just for them. We called them "empty" because they gave them entrance to an iconic place with no one else around, meaning they could capture beautiful images.

As time evolved other organizations were interested in this kind of activity. In 2015, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York was hosting an exhibition of Latin American architecture from the 50's.

They asked if we could help them organise Instameets in different cities of the region so that community members could capture how those landmarks looked in our time. They hosted them in a digital exhibition next to the old photos. It was beautiful.

As Instameets became very popular, we ended up officially organizing Worldwide Instameet, twice a year. Over one weekend we would ask people to go out and capture images related to a specific theme and post them on Instagram. In the last edition, we ended with over 10 million pieces of content!

And some things just happened organically. Take for instance #myinstagramlogo which started with the old, vintage, polaroid-type logo of Instagram. Using their own craft and style, community members would recreate the logo in their own way.

When we changed our logo to the current one, we asked them to do the same and the result was beautiful as you can see in the image below from @paulodelvalle, a Brazilian community member. At least until 2019, that picture was still adorning the walls of the office of Instagram in Menlo Park, California.

Thanks to all these efforts I was able to show how by focusing on our community we could generate brand loyalty which made me speak in different conferences and more than a few times with the press!