Instagram can be kind of daunting to understand with its many different features. Besides the Instagram feed, which is the grid of 3 square images per row that appears on your profile, there’s Instagram Stories, Instagram LIVE and IGTV.

Let’s start with the Instagram feed. Did you know that besides posting a photo or video clip directly into your Instagram feed, there are 4 different types of posts that you can create? Can you name them? There are 2 for photos: carousel and layout, and 2 for video: Boomerang and Hyperlapse.

Next there’s Instagram Stories, which is essentially a slide show of visual content and 15 second video clips that disappear in 24 hours. If you have archiving turned on for your Stories, they can be turned into highlights that appear below your bio on your instagram profile.

Instagram LIVE allows you to live broadcast for up to an hour. Immediately after streaming you will have an opportunity to save the Instagram LIVE to your camera roll or to rebroadcast it one more time within a 24 hour period. It’s important to save your Instagram LIVE right after broadcasting because unlike Facebook LIVE videos, Instagram LIVE videos do not stay on Instagram.

And then there’s IGTV. Anyone with an Instagram account can create an IGTV channel where they can upload video content that is up to 1 hour in length.

My 1 Piece Advice for Beginners

If I could offer one piece of advice to beginners on Instagram, it would be to start off posting only once a day. If you must post twice a day, space them far apart, i.e. about 5-6 hours apart. Otherwise if you have several photos from an event or vacation, you could create a carousel post with up to 10 photos in 1 post or a collage of several photos and images together using Instagram’s layout app.

There are a couple of reasons I’d recommend only posting once a day. If you’ve ever been on Instagram and scrolled through your feed, I’m sure that you can imagine what it would be like if your feed started getting flooded with posts coming from one single Instagram account. Pretty soon you’d feel as though you were being spammed by this one account. Don’t be the person that does that.

It’s not to say that you can’t post several times a day, but research has shown that if you post more than once a day you will get less engagement on your posts, in other words, you will get less likes and comments on each of your posts. This makes sense since you are dividing the attention of your followers by posting more than once a day.

It would not be a good idea to start posting more than once a day until you develop a dedicated following that loves your content so much that they can’t get enough of it, and wouldn’t mind seeing several posts a day.

If you have lots to share and post to Instagram- use Instagram Stories. Feel free to go crazy there because with Instagram Stories, people who want to know what you are up to will go look at your Instagram Story. And you won’t be hogging up other people’s Instagram feeds.

I’m excited to announce that I JUST created a Facebook group Instagram Demystified where I’ll be sharing tips on how to use Instagram.