SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Get reeled into bookstagram
Award-wining bookstagrammer Julia Mitchell explores the advantages of creating content on Instagram in 2022
Julia Mitchell
In aworld of TikTok dances and BookTok videos (for the uninitiated, that’s the term used for the book community on TikTok), you might be wondering what place Instagram has in the influencer space, and for book publishing in general. Instagram as a platform has been around since 2010, and has become one of pillars of modern day social media. Although the internet landscape has changed rapidly ever since then, the platform is agile, continuing to adapt and maintain relevancy twelve years on.
It’s impossible to write about Instagram in the present day without mentioning TikTok, which has vastly impacted the content that we now share everywhere online. While Instagram has been successful in hosting video content for some time in the form of Stories (and a later, less successful attempt with IGTV), photos were still king of the Instagram feed before TikTok became popular in 2020. While we were all stuck at home during the Covid-19 pandemic, TikTok creators started to fill their time with fun dances and skits reminiscent of early YouTube in the 2010s. TikTok quickly became one of the most prominent social media platforms to date, with around 1 billion users worldwide, and has changed what consumers want to see online. Instagram has begun to lean into this, and in fact they have directly stated that they are shifting their focus onto video, saying that they’re ‘no longer just a photo editing app’, and confirming that their main video offering in 2022 is Reels.