Instagram — yet another social media for legal news and commentary

Do we really need to add Instagram to your list of social media to use for sharing legal news, insight, and commentary? God knows it’s hard enough getting lawyers to use, let alone use well, the media we all ready have — blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

But a few developments this week opened my eyes to the possibilities of using the photo and video-sharing app, Instagram, for enagement, nurturing relationships, and building word of mouth.

First was Sunday when I asked my daughter, Molly (@mollyokeefe), what I might be missing in the topics I planned to dicuss with the team at the Texas State Bar Association. Molly who’s worked in social media at LexBlog, Bing, and now Nordstroms, is a nice resource on questions like that.

Her response was Instagram. Really? How would a bar association and its bar journal use Instagram beyond sharing pictures of the team having fun? How could it be used to engage readers with legal news and commentary.

Molly explained that pictures regarding legal events with a paragraph or two of commentary with accompanying tags gets stories seen. Understand she has context I don’t, that being that so many of her friends and business peers using Instagram.

Here’s a couple Instagram posts Molly shared, with accompanying news on Eric Garner’s choking and a resulting protest, from Mashable and the Seattle Times. Scrolling down on the app you’d see plenty of engagement via comments, liking, and sharing.

Second, I read yesterday that the number of people using Instagram has surpassed the number using Twitter. Amazing.

The New York Times’ Vindu Goel (@vindugoel) reports Instagram now has 300 million monthly active users, up 50 percent in just nine months. Twitter has 284 million monthly active users and its growth has been relatively flat.

Goel shares that Instagram’s rapid growth is hardly surprising. Images and pictures engage us.

Visual posts, and especially video, have become the hottest growth area in social networking. Facebook has been changing its news feed over the past year to better showcase video content, and Twitter is focusing more on building up its Vine short-video service. Advertisers are also demanding more video options, and online services are hustling to meet that demand.

Instagram users are highly engaged with the service, with users interacting with posts at 18 times the rate they do with Facebook posts, according to a report issued last month by the research firm L2.

Third, Jessi Hempel (@jessiwrites) of Wired observed, based on news shared on the Bay Area storm this week, that Instagram is becoming a powerful news service.

Don’t believe me? Go ahead. Try it. Pull up your app and hit the magnifying glass on the bottom left. That’s the explore tab. Now search for rain in San Francisco, or better yet, try searching for the hashtag #Hellastorm. There’s a photo of cars driving down a road so flooded their wheels are invisible beneath the water. There’s a photo of a sign on the door of Santa Rosa Junior College, announcing it’s closing at noon. And there’s the one I just posted of my friend Carla throwing sandbags into the back of her station wagon to stop the water currently gushing into her garage.

Embedded in the captions, many of which are dense with information, is the kind of local news I’ve seen before—in tweets. The puddle at 9th and Irving went up to mid-calf. This section of Highway 1 in Pacifica near Manor Drive is flooded. Instagram has become a visual version of the real-time news stream that Twitter invented. And with 300 million monthly active users, it’s beating out the little blue bird to become the dominant mass messaging platform.

Hempel’s with Goel that Instagram owes its growing role as a news service to the rise of photos as a form of communication. “They’re faster to take and often easier to decode.”

Instagram has looked at itself as a news service for quite a while. Cofounder Mike Krieger (@mikeyk) told Hempel a lot of the photos people post are of breaking news, ala Hurricane Sandy in New York City in 2012. We “saw” people getting ready for the storm, their experiences during the storm, and the aftermath. Personal photos made the news more human.

Lawyers and law firms are not looking at an either this social medium or that one, let alone a mandate to use Instagram.

Instagram just offers another medium to use in sharing legal news, information, and commentary. A powerful one too in getting word spread. Despite the younger demographic using Instagram, items posted will spread quickly with Instagram’s growth and level of user engagement.

We are often prejudiced that this or that social medium could never be used for serious legal news and building relationships professionally. Legal professionals, me included, blew off Twitter in the early days. Same with Facebook.

I’d suggest keeping an open mind on Instagram.