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Instagram can be a useful platform for journalists who want to reach a different audience and approach their stories in a more visual way.

In this post on the Online Journalism Blog, Paul Bradshaw, who runs the MA in Multiplatform and Mobile Journalism at Birmingham City University, provides some insights on how the platform can be used to cover elections.

The takeaways are based on an experiment from Sam Gould, a student on the MA Online Journalism course, who used Instagram to report on the West Midlands mayoral elections earlier this year.

Having a template for Instagram posts not only ensures consistency, Gould found, but it also helps your audience recognise your news brand in their feed.

He also advises uses Instagram's carousel feature to tease soundbites from interviews, whether to share quotes from a political figure on different topics, or show the opinions of multiple interviewees on the same topic.

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Written by
Jessica Graf

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