#13- Instagram

 I went on Instagram to find accounts for films and documentaries to promote their work. This is because for our portfolio we have to create a social media account on the app Instagram. This site brings many different people from different walks of life together. On this social media site allows people to shar their businesses or personal life. Filmmakers can also use Instagram to share their works to share with wide audiences. Instagram has over two billion monthly users that can interact with post, such as liking, commenting and sharing. So, for filmmakers Instagram is one of the best forms of social media to share their media products.

One film I recently watched has an Instagram to gain more attention for their film. This is a brand new coming of age film and uses it's Instagram account to reach the wide audience that Instagram holds. Social media is so important when it comes to promoting media products because I found out about this film through a small trailer on social media. 

The have posted many pictures and videos to promote the movie on this Instagram account. The picture above is a sample of the account's feed. The top two post are pined videos. Both are trailers, the first one is a trailer for the film available on streaming and the second is the official trailer. The account also features interviews with the cast (not in picture) and clips from the film. There are other post featured with stills from the film and wording that recognizing the awards the film has been nominated for. As well as pictures of the cast at events for the film. 

To discuss the documentary realm it is important to recognize National Geographic. This is a massive American global network that shares knowledge of the environment to wide audiences.  They partner with a lot of documentary filmmakers that show their works on Disney +. 

I found one of the filmmakers through a docuseries they showed clips from on the National Geographic Instagram account. The bottom middle post is a clip from the docuseries "Animals Up Close" that is featured on Disney + in the National Geography section.

There was the hashtag "AnimalsUpClose" under the post on the post from National Geographic. This was how I found out about this documentary and could conduct more research on a specific Instagram for a documentary. It made me realize that hashtags are very important, which I knew before but didn't think about using hashtags for my documentary. Hashtags can be used on post to group all the post related in one area. Accounts that post stills, interviews, clips and other related things can put the hashtag in the caption and the post will be included in a file under the hashtag. So, whoever is looking for something specific, like this documentary, they can search the name and find related post. 

This is very helpful when the documentary doesn't have an official Instagram account. Sadly, which this documentary doesn't have.

On the other hand, the filmmaker of the documentary has his own Instagram account. In his biography has the name of the documentary he host and the streaming site it is featured on. This is an example where he doesn't exactly need an official account for the documentary. This is because there is an organized hashtag for the documentary and he promotes in his biography of his Instagram and with post on his personal account.

In this picture there are post, videos and pictures, promoting his docuseries "Animals Up Close." There are behind the scenes pictures, stills and clips all featured on this account. All of the captions include the hashtag "AnimalsUpClose."

This research allows me to make the next step on creating my Instagram account and figure out how I should plan my post. I will include behind the scenes pictures, clips that will be included, parts of interviews, on location pictures, ad stills. I will use hashtags to my advantage. So, when other people share my project they can use the hashtag to put all related post in one area on Instagram.

In my next blog post I will create the Instagram account for my documentary.