Empowerment may be the key element in the rise of social media. Giving everybody a right to speak up, almost every platform is created for people to share their thoughts, emotions or opinions. Creating your own channels can give you a perspective opportunity to spread your voice across a much larger audience. This being the true power of social media plays a significant role in affecting society, and even though some people choose not to use those platforms to be socially active or contributive, a lot of influencers use all ways to bring positive changes through Facebook, Twitter, etc. And Instagram turned out to be the top-choice network for ones who want to be heard and listened to, that's why there's a wide variety of services for maintaining one's account promotion (like instajet.io, for example).
#InstaPride
In June 2015 Miley Cyrus, a famous pop star, launched hashtag #InstaPride, which she used for her promoting her charity project ‘The Happy Hippie Foundation’. The main theme of her movement was described as rallying minorities (LGBTQ, homeless people and many others) in confronting inequality and fighting for their rights. And through the hashtag and her wide audience she helped raising the problem of queer community in the world.
Cyrus was working with Instagram for fourteen days directly on her campaign to raise awareness with the topics of gender identity, LGBTQ, transgenders and many more. So, #InstaPride was also used with thousands of people, who were encouraged to share their own experience and stories.
Surely Cyrus may not be everyone's cup of tea in music, it's the right thing for her to use status and resources for pointing out problems about which there's silence. And there are lots of cases Miley worked on speaking out about vulnerable, oppressed ones; for instance, when she took Jesse Helt, a homeless person, to the MTV VMAs in 2014. At that time Cyrus' account had almost 25 million followers, an enormous audience to share messages with.
And, considering Miley's fans views and how the Instagram itself works, there's no surprise that #InstaPride was an extreme success.
Gramming for Good
Being a rapidly-developing platform, Instagram has gained a lot of attention from marketers, who are interested in using it as a platform for earning. They are concerned that it is a powerful field for creating charity projects and non-profitable organizations, even if many wouldn't agree with that, still are not sure of social media's reliability.
The founder of Grammar for Good, Dan Cohen, is raising awareness with such projects in socially conscious users, openly supporting charities and non-profits and encouraging others to do so as well.
“We connect nonprofit organizations who are looking to tell their story through their Instagram feed, with Instagram photographers who want to offer their services and give back to a cause they are passionate about.”
Rephrasing, Gramming for Good is acting like a sort-of conduct between users and organizations, creating opportunities for collaborations and making connections between the audience and non-profits.
Parking Spot Shaming
Speaking about smaller, but not lesser, problems that are tied with the realms of "social good", there was a discussion of Los Angeles' issue with parking spots. Mobile make-up artist and LA resident, Andria Farrel, was fed up for a long time with incompetent drivers' selfishness, which is no way to be accepted. Her idea was to launch a profile where she'd share her thoughts about shameless drivers occupying too much space or blocking the way out for others.
ParkingSpotShaming - which was the name of the account - was posting pictures of bad drivers, but hiding their registration numbers under emojis. Farrel's publications, sometimes full of pure rage, found a quick response with her fellow drivers feeling the same problem. Fistly Andria took all pictures only by herself, but at some point opened an opportunity for subscribers to share their own - no doubt there were a lot of ones who wanted to speak out with rage about that car that blocked the road or took two parking spots at once.
Nowadays ParkingSpotShaming has around 8 300 followers.
Yet this example differs from previous, it sure it also shows that Instagram can be used as a platform for social good, for instance, in a more entertaining way, getting people around one big annoying phenomena. So not only marketers, charities can find their own crowd to speak out in front of. Main focus on a graphic aspect is surely playing along with catching users' attention. We're not talking only about photos, but also videos; IceBucketChallenge, for example, was a big hit at its time, managing to communicate with the audience visually. And visual communication is that thing that makes Instagram so valuable in our modern world because of how great this platform uses it.
Are there any questions left?
Please contact our technical support via thewebsiteor emailinfo@instajet.io.We will be happy to help!