Hi there
First time poster!
I have just taken over the as MCO on my squadron. I am most likely going to start a Squadron Instagram Page!
I have been trying to find the most popular Squadron run accounts so I can see what sort of things they post etc. The most popular i have found are:
@723_wigan_atc
@124sqn
350squadron
Any others that people are aware of? Any other Instagram advice would be gratefully received!!
TIA
Instagram is pretty good at suggesting others to follow. It will recommend similar and also tell you who the profiles you like like.
So if you start off just picking ATC units, you’ll quickly get plenty of suggestions of other ATC units.
As above, there’s no set format as such.
Keep it exciting and you can’t go wrong. However, I find Facebook to be the most popular social media tool. Most of our instagram follows are other sqns, so it doesn’t really have an impact on recruitment.
I’d link the Facebook and Instagram pages so posts appear on both platforms.
We’ve done this, but I find it too limited - no scheduled posts, only one photo…
Facebook is good for scheduling posts, but as I say, Instagram is limited anyway regarding recruitment so we stick to Facebook more.
I get a reasonable amount of interaction from young people on my sqn’s instagram. I find it’s mainly the parents on Facebook these days 
Is that currently cadets, other cadets and friends of cadets, or is it interested recruits?
Admitedly mainly current cadets, and probably other cadets.
That’s what I’ve found. You can’t really share things on Instagram and the way it works will generally stop random young people seeing it.
Imho it’s of little to no value to recruitment.
It can be a lot of work if you have parents who say they don’t want their child on social media, we have a handful and you have to make sure they aren’t in photo’s. All the cadets are happy for us to take pics so we can put video clips together for the parents to see what they are paying for and to see the cadets having fun. We use the Sqn camera and we don’t put posts up until another staff member has gone through them too. We mainly used a closed insta account to show off the cadets accomplishments to other sqn’s
This is a good point. It can be frustrating at times.
We take 2 sets of photographs. One with the child involved which their parents can have if they wish and then one which can be used for social media.