The Vrije Universiteit Brussel used Instagram as a narrative tool to engage with its audience by allowing the public to share their unique stories. While it has benefits such as authenticity and community building, challenges include a lack of control and difficulty in sourcing quality stories. Future plans aim to enhance content generation and improve candidate introductions through interviews.

2. How to tell your story on
Instagram?
Or how the Vrije Universiteit Brussel used
Instagram as the perfect
story telling tool

4. I’m a storyteller

5. Who’s on Instagram?
INSTAGRAM
Sharing & browsing through pictures on Instragram
is mainly popular amongst youngsters.
21%
Spends more than 1h per day
on Instagram
49% 51%
Mainly young people
(15-19y)
Account and logged in during previous month 17%
Account and not logged in during previous month 7%
I have deleted my account 1%
I never had an account 75%
Percentage of Instagram users per age range

6. We’re on Instagram.
Now what?

12. So why did we start using Instagram?
• It’s where our public is
• Strategy: Image building through story telling
• What do we do? We give the account to our
public and let them tell their unique story.

14. How to build your community?
• Use your ‘subjects’ to gather an interested
community
• Use other channels to spread the word: FB,
TW, website
• Introduce your person of the week in the
newsletter,…
• Advertising on Instagram

15. Is Instagram worth the effort?
No, but yeah, but no, but yeah,…

16. What are the pro’s
• When using Instagram correctly, you can tell a real story
• No advertising or marketing, but honest stories of
everyday people at the university
• Taking you behind the screens, where no man/woman has
gone before (unless you work/study there)
• You can use the delivered content in your content
marketing story
• You create new ambassadors by making people important
for you
• You discover new ambassadors by noticing people who
actively like all of your posts
• Not important in this story, but being on Instagram offers
you the opportunity to advertise on Instagram

17. Succes stories

19. What are the cons?
• You’re out of control and need to trust the
ones owning the account for the week
• There are no exact numbers available about
the reach,… So it’s difficult to report about it
• Finding good stories is time consuming. More
then you might think

20. What are the difficulties we faced?
Uptill now, we didn’t really faced big problems
BUT:
- It’s a good idea to give a list of tips and tricks to
those working with the account in order to avoid
blurry, boring, stupid,… pictures
- When you use people who are abroad, ask them
to log in the week before as it might cause some
problems being abroad
- It’s harder than we thought to convince people
and especially researchers and professors to take
over the account

21. How to make sure all goes well?
• Make some good and clear rules and guidelines
• Have some conversation with the potential
Instagrammer and find out what he/she is going
to do and why he/she is engaged to do it
• Give some ideas to the person about what you
expect to see that week
• Show them some good examples
• Be available in case of “emergency”
• Keep an eye on the account

23. Future plans:
• We’ll keep looking for good stories to tell
• We would like to use the weeks even more in
a specific context in order to generate more
content.
• We would like to introduce our candidates
better by interviewing them.

24. QUESTIONS?

25. Thx for having me
Feel free to contact me on:
nicky.temmerman@vub.ac.be