Instagram, being one of the most popular mediums of social interactions, is how we get some of our first impressions. Instagram is amazing! You could say I'm addicted to the 'gram, but I really find this simple concept revolutionary. Posting and sharing photos to your followers or friends is a great way to stay connected with distant friends/family and is an awesome platform for communications and publications. Sometimes we forget that Instagram is nothing more than just a tiny square on our phones and we get so absorbed in what people are posting that we forget the actuality of what Instagram is, a photo sharing platform. I personally have three rules I try to follow when using Instagram so I can remember the reality of what I'm doing and looking at.
1. Post what you want.
Not what will get you likes. I personally believe that your Instagram should be a platform that displays the different ways you express yourself. Don’t only post cute selfies and poppin' bikini pics because you will get the likes, but do you only want likes? What happened to posting views and sunsets or pets? You should post things of you doing what you love whether it’s dancing, art, or traveling, even just a nice picture of you and your friends is worth sharing. The amount of photos I had deleted or contemplated posting because of how many likes I thought they’d get had me not sharing photos that I love and kept my feed kind of bland and tasteless. Whether its 300 likes or two, remember that they don’t actually matter.
2. The ratio is the silent killer.
People always want to have more followers than who they are following for that self-explanatory popular/desired factor, but in reality, it does not matter. There are people who control the amount of accounts they can follow to make sure the ratio is still alive and well, and I have no shame in admitting that I was one of them. I used to track my ratio like every day and now I save so much more time of my life actually doing things.
3. Like every selfie you see.
I say this because posting a selfie isn’t easy. It takes an amount of courage to pick one out of the 30 selfies you probably took to be like “This is the one! I took a good one!” Today's vision of beauty is so specific that its hard for some people to find that confidence to love themselves the way they are, and when they publicly display contentment and comfort, cheer them on!
