As the campaign season heats up, President Obama is taking one more step to connect with the iOS culture – by joining Instagram.
The wildly popular photo filtering app is already on its way to becoming a consummate social network, as users’ photos are displayed on a news-feed-type stream complete with commenting and “liking” abilities. With Instagram, Obama, who already has the reputation of a tech-savvy president, looks to reach a social media-using crowd that is distinct, but not altogether different than the crowd he reaches via Twitter and Facebook.
Here’s what the Instagram team had to say about it on their official blog:
We’re excited to welcome President Barack Obama to Instagram! We look forward to seeing how President Obama uses Instagram to give folks a visual sense of what happens in the everyday life of the President of the United States. In addition to sharing photos through the @barackobama Instagram account, the Obama 2012 staff is asking supporters to share their photos from the campaign trail with the tag #obama2012.
And this is the first photo uploaded to the Obama Instagram account:
Obama has already tackled the Twitter and Facebook landscapes, amassing over 11.7 million followers and 24.3 million likes respectively. And last year, the President spread his social reach even more by opening up a Foursquare account in August and joining Tumblr in October.
Like all of those social accounts, Obama’s campaign staff will be the ones actually uploading the content. But the Instagram account with give Obama fans, political junkies, or simply interested citizens a somewhat inside look into the campaign trail.