How to Start an Instagram Account for Teens

Type: Self-directed
Age: Middle school
Optimal size: 20+
Estimated cost: $1 - $25
Planning time: 5+ hours
Frequency: Daily

Learning outcomes

● Think flexibly

● Engage in personal expression

● Demonstrate technology use that is safe, ethical and responsible

● Leverage digital tools to broaden their perspective

● Build and manage their online identity

● Manage personal information to protect privacy and security

● Express themselves on a variety of platforms

Instructions

• Get Permission- Ask your supervisor or director if you can create a separate account for your teen patrons. Your library might have a social media policy so you don't want to break policy.
  • Make a Case-Your supervisor/director might claim that the library has a Facebook or Instagram account so there's no need for a separate account. You can make the case that teens are not on Facebook so you are not reaching your demographic. Many teens are on Instagram, Tik Tok, and Snapchat but Instagram is the best platform for programming. Make the case that teens are less inhibited when there are no adults watching and judging. Many of my teen patrons are LGBTQ+ but haven't come out and they use their social media to be themselves free of judgement from adults and parents. Make the case that teens want a place for themselves away from their parents or younger siblings. Make the case that it is essential for virtual programming. On Instagram, you can communicate with your teens, take registration, provide reader's advisory, and collect attendance. It will be difficult to distinguish teens from adult patrons if you use a shared account.
• Start Your Account
  • Choose a name that is short and easy to remember. You will probably ask teens to tag you in the future. (Tagging is used to alert you when teens mentioned your account. You use tagging when you want to be alerted when teens complete an activity.) A short and easy name is also easy to read and type in your publicity. My teen account is named zbteens. Our high school/district's mascot is the ZeeBee or ZB and it's something that is familiar to our entire district. ZBteens is short, easy to say, and something teens will remember.
  • Add Profile Info. Write a short description, what tag your teens should use if they need to tag you, a picture, and a link. 
    • We use Linktr.ee which is free and convenient. Link tree allows you to send patrons to a list of important links. Our link tree includes Libby, how to get a library card, and our programs that are on other websites such as Youtube or Google.

• Link Accounts. If you have a personal account, you can add your teens' account.  This way, youcanseemlessly switch between accounts. 
  • After you've created an account, click "Log Into Existing Account," and follow to instructions.

• Get Followers. Getting followers will be difficult especially since you can't ask your teens to follow you face-to-face. Use your current correspondent means to ask teens to follow your new account. For example, if you currently email your teens or correspondthroughFacebook, tell them about your new account and ask them to follow you. 
  • If you are not currently in communication with your teens, utilize yourlibrary'seNewsletter, website, online program calendar, or mailed newsletter.
    • Ask your eNews or mail newsletter editor to include your new IG (Instagram) account in the next mailing. Add your new account info to your library website's teen page or add your new account username to your online program calendar.
  • If your library has a FB (Facebook) or IG account, tell parents to tell their teens to follow your new IG account for programs and activities. 
  • Followers are IMPORTANT to teens. When they follow you, follow them back. Watch their feed and "like" it-tap the heart icon. Comment on some of their posts. Many of my seniors are posting their college choices. I say congrats and wish them luck. One of my teens announced that she is going to my alma mater and she's even living in the dorm I lived in! We had a nice little exchange.  This is comparable to engaging face-to-face and is not creepy in anyway. Just remember to post as your library account and not your personal account.
  • Host Giveaways. Tell teens to like and tag a friend to get entered into the contest. When they tag a friend, their friend sees your account and hopefully follows you.
• IG Feed vs. an Instagstory
  • IG Feed-The feed is the same as FB feed. When you post something to the feed- program info; pictures; etc, it shows up in your followers' feed. When they scroll, they will see your feed post.
    • To encourage engagement, ask a question and tell teens to answer in the comment box below.
    • Your feed lasts forever but your Instastory only lasts 24 hours.

zbteens feed

• Instastory-An instastory is a series of slides and or videos. At my library, our instastories receive far more engagement than our feed so we use it more often. 

zbteens recent story

• Useinstastories to create polls. Polls are great to play Never Have I Ever; Would You Rather; or my library's recent dream prom program. Teens were asked to choose their perfect dress, hair, date, etc.
  • You can get "attendance" or engagement stats by swiping up on the slide that contains the poll. 

• Slider-The slider is another great way for teens to interact with your stories (instastories). We use the slider for reader's advisory. We put pictures of book covers and ask teens to use the slider to say how much they like the cover.

• 
  Question-The question can be used many different ways. We recently hosted Divination Week where I did tarot readings. I used the question box to ask teens if they wanted a three card or one card reading. We use the question box for reader's advisory games. We ask teens their favorite color, astrological sign, favorite TV show, etc and we give book recommendation. You can use the question box for teens to ask you questions about the library, program suggestions, venting session, etc.
• Quiz-You can create quizzes in your story.
• Live-You can go live and do a craft, booktalks,bookrecs, etc. 
  • Followers who are currently on IG can go to your live feed and IG sends alerts to your followers when you go live.
  • Teens can engage with you by asking questions. We've used live during our short story contest. We went live with tips to increase their chance of winning.
  • Two people can go live at the same time. You can your co-worker can talk at the same time and you don't have to be in the same room.
  • You can invite authors to do a IG live. We recently hosted authors. You can have the author on the screen and you can moderate while also on the screen.

• DMs (Direct Messaging)-If we need their home address or if we require registration for Zoom, we ask teens to DM us. We communicatethroughDMs if there's info that we want to be kept private.
  • You can create DM Groups. We use DM Groups to communicate with our book club. I ask them if they've finished the book, which book they want to read next, and we coordinate our next book club meeting for Zoom. 
  • You can also host a book club in DM groups. You can pose a question to the group and they can answer where everyone in the group can see.

• Programs on IG-I mentioned several types of programs that can be conducted over IG. Recently, I found some great teen library accounts that are doing some innovating programs over IG. Please visit these links to see these libraries and I encourage you to follow them.
• If you have a FB account for teens and you are adding an IG account, you can link your accounts. This way, whatever you post to IG will automatically go to FB saving you time to post to FB separately.
• Highlights-If you did a craft or posted something informational in your stories, you can save them for teens to look at later in your highlights. Tap the + sign, choose the slides you want in your highlight, then give it a title and a picture.
• Volunteer Hours-Teens still need community service hours. You can have them record and send you book reviews, they can do an art or craft tutorial, or they can takeover your IG for the day. 
• Use IG to gather information-Use polls or the question feature to ask your teens what types of programs they want you to do over IG.

• How to Track Attendance-IG keeps an archive of your activity. It will tell you how many people saw your feed and stories and how much engagement you received. Use those stats as your attendance stats. 
  • You can also see your reach among several demographics, the day and the hour when followers are on the most, how many followers you gained, etc. Take time to explore the insights tab to get more information on your posts.

Evaluation

• Just like in-house programming, it can be a challenge to get teens to engage remotely. We've done several programs where we've received no participation. We looked at our programs that receive the most engagement and made changes.
  • For example, my most popular IG programs are programs where teens take a poll. They don't do the crafts we post, they don't post pics of them in their prom dresses or what they are eating, they rarely do the art and writing activities and they don't do our digital escape rooms that we spend hours making. But they will do a poll all day. So we turned our programs into polls. Rather than have them draw their own bedroom, we had them design a bedroom using the poll feature. My co-worker and I drew the room based on the poll results and they then used the poll feature again the vote on which drawing was better-I lost BTW. 
  • You have to see how your teens are using IG. You might have an engaged group that does your cooking tutorials and your Kahoot trivia games and your photography contests but you might not have a lot of engagement. Simply adapt. 
• We offer a weekly raffle as an incentive to participate so we limit raffle entries to teens in grades 6-12th grade. We often get other people participating in our contests, polls, etc. They are parents of our teens, adult patrons, and librarians from other libraries. Be aware that others are watching your posts and stories because you might have to distinguish viewers when it's time to collect stats.