If your college has limited social media resources, where should you start sharing your content? Instagram or Pinterest?

1. Instagram or Pinterest: where should your
college start sharing visual content?
Instagram or Pinterest: Where
should your college start
sharing visual content?
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2. Instagram or Pinterest: where should your
college start sharing visual content?
Overview
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2.
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Instant Advantages
Different Uses and Targets
Reasons to combine Instagram and Pinterest
Source: Higher Education Marketing – Instagram or Pinterest: whre should your college start sharing visual content
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3. Instagram or Pinterest: where should your
college start sharing visual content?
Instant Advantages
From the perspective of digital marketing for higher ed, both
Pinterest and Instagram enable users to:
Share visual content easily
2. Enhance branding efforts
1.
Source: Higher Education Marketing – Instagram or Pinterest: whre should your college start sharing visual content
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4. Instagram or Pinterest: where should your
college start sharing visual content?
Instant Advantages – Share visual content
easily

Both Pinterest and Instagram allow users to easily share
pictures on other social media platforms (mainly, Facebook
and Twitter).

Pinterest even allows you to share short videos.

Both Pinterest and Instagram allow users to like and
comment on pictures as well as to create contests.
Source: Higher Education Marketing – Instagram or Pinterest: whre should your college start sharing visual content
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5. Instagram or Pinterest: where should your
college start sharing visual content?
Instant Advantages – Enhance branding efforts
Both Pinterest and Instagram help colleges and universities
make their visual identity stand out.
Beyond logos and colors, both can help colleges and
universities convey their values and mission, and give a direct
“feel” of:
 the school
 its faculty
 its students
Source: Higher Education Marketing – Instagram or Pinterest: whre should your college start sharing visual content
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6. Instagram or Pinterest: where should your
college start sharing visual content?
Different Uses and Targets
One of the main differences that set these two platforms apart
is:
 the demographic of their main users.
 Pinterest is used more by women than men, and main
its user demographic ranges from 24-35 years-old.
 Instagram users are split almost evenly by gender,
and its main user demographic ranges from 18-27
years-old.
Source: Higher Education Marketing – Instagram or Pinterest: whre should your college start sharing visual content
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7. Instagram or Pinterest: where should your
college start sharing visual content?
Different Uses and Targets
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The user demographics for both of these platforms can
definitely give you insight on who uses them.
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But the real insight comes with how they are used.
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Depending on the sort of visual content you want to share,
you may decide to lean on one platform more than the other,
or use both platforms, but with different goals.
Source: Higher Education Marketing – Instagram or Pinterest: whre should your college start sharing visual content
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8. Instagram or Pinterest: where should your
college start sharing visual content?
Different Uses - Pinterest
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With its easy to use boards and pinning system, Pinterest is
a great tool to curate visual content and classify photos and
videos according to themes.

Colleges and universities have been creating all kinds of
boards to reinforce their branding.

For example, there have been inspiration boards for
students, college’s values and mission, football team photos,
etc.
Source: Higher Education Marketing – Instagram or Pinterest: whre should your college start sharing visual content
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9. Instagram or Pinterest: where should your
college start sharing visual content?
Different Uses - Instagram
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Instagram allows you or your school’s photographer to make
picture composition and effects that will make your content
unique and give you control over the message of the image.

University of Florida uses Instagram to show a behind-thescenes look at the college events, etc.
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It is more resource-intensive than Pinterest as it usually
requires some coordination between a photographer and the
person in charge of social media at the college.
Source: Higher Education Marketing – Instagram or Pinterest: whre should your college start sharing visual content
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10. Instagram or Pinterest: where should your
college start sharing visual content?
Reasons to combine Instagram and Pinterest
Content creation and curation go hand-in-hand.
Here is why:
 Instagram is a great tool to find student-generated
content about your school.
 With the help of hashtags, you can find photos
created about your college or university.
 With so many of your students using the application,
it is important to create an account to keep listening
to the organic conversations happening around your
school (rather than just those created by your school).
Source: Higher Education Marketing – Instagram or Pinterest: whre should your college start sharing visual content
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11. Instagram or Pinterest: where should your
college start sharing visual content?
Reasons to combine Instagram and Pinterest
 The content created on Instagram can then be pinned on
Pinterest and shared on other platforms.
 From an SEO perspective, using both platforms is great
for search engines.
For even more info on Instagram and Pinterest, see our blog
post…
Source: Higher Education Marketing – Instagram or Pinterest: whre should your college start sharing visual content
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12. Instagram or Pinterest: where should your
college start sharing visual content?
Questions?
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