The Good Thing about a Difficult Instagram

Ad Age wants us to know how hard it is to be a brand on Instagram. And they’re right. It’s hard: Instagram has yet to launch any publishing APIs (though, it does have an API for surfacing and curating content ), which means that posting to an Instagram account is strictly manual. No matter how large an organization is, the only way they can share media via Instagram is through a single employee on a mobile device.

This is especially frustrating because a lot of knowledgeable people think that Instagram will soon be – or already is – the biggest force on social media. NYU professor and L2ThinkTank founder Scott Galloway told Ad Age that “the engagement rate on Instagram is 1.5 percent, or fifteen times what it is on Facebook, at 0.1 percent.” Multiply the size of Instagram’s community (200 million users) by the engagement rate, and you have what Galloway calls a “power index” pointing to the superiority of Instagram.

This leaves us with a somewhat difficult to use platform that’s also the reigning king of social media. But, of course, Ad Age is approaching the situation purely from the perspective of being a customerbrand on Instagram. I don’t have any comforting words for the marketing department, but HR should take note: I do think a difficult Instagram might be a good thing for employerbrands.

“Little Data” and the Human Touch

When I first read the Ad Age piece on Instagram, I knew there had to be some cause for optimism buried in the woes of manual Instagram publishing – I’m of the mindset that woes always have upshots. But I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where the good was until I read Will Thomson’s “Little Data, the X-Factor of HR.” 

It’s best to read Thomson’s post for yourself, because it’s a strong and insightful piece – especially for those of us who prefer the “human” part of HR – but I’ll offer a quick summary here for our purposes: according to Thomson, “little data” is the opposite of big data. Whereas big data generally refers to more readily quantified metrics – like headcounts, productivity, losses, etc. – little data is more qualitative.

Little data is the kind of information you only learn about people by having genuinely human relationships with them. Some examples of little data, according to Thomson, include: “People have emotions. People have motivations for looking for a new opportunity. People make mistakes. People are in relationships with other humans. People have addictions. People get sick. People die. People have family.” Your ATS isn’t going to tell you these sorts of things.

It’s good that our software can’t tell us everything. Automation has its benefits for sure – especially in terms of cutting costs and saving time – but to be automatic is to be the opposite of human. And every employee is a human being, which means we’ll need to maintain a bit of the non-automatable human touch if we want to totally understand our talent. Sure, we can use big data to measure productivity, but if we really want to know why someone is productive at work, we’re going to need some insights into their emotions, their thoughts — all that little data.

A Thoroughly Human Brand on Instagram

You can’t automate your brand on Instagram. You can’t schedule content. You can’t just let the software run your account. If you’re trying to showcase an employer brand, that’s exactly the kind of situation you want.

Showing off your employer brand is all about demonstrating how awesome it is to work for you by putting your people front and center. When candidates are trying to figure out whether or not they want to work for you, they don’t care about the big data. They want the little data: How do employees feel? What’s a day in the office like? How do coworkers interact?

Because Instagram requires manual account maintenance, it’s that much easier to use the platform to showcase human beings and bring the little data to your candidates’ eyes. Someone is operating the company’s account, and that someone can put in all the extra effort needed to build robust relationships between the company and the candidates.  Candidates won’t get assaulted by a barrage of automated content: they’ll get some genuine social interaction on social media.

Of course, all is not perfect in the world of Instagram: the lack of a publishing API makes it incredibly hard to track how well your posts are doing, so optimizing your usage is no easy task.

But people aren’t easy, and they’re the key to your employer brand. So maybe, in keeping things messy, Instagram can help you keep your employer brand human.