Posting carousels is like an Instagram cheat code in 2026

What is a Carousel on Instagram?

First things first: in Instagram terms a carousel is a single post containing multiple images or videos. They appear on the Grid, and you view the different images by swiping right.

Since mid-2023 you can add music to your carousel natively in Instagram, and doing so is absolutely crucial to success - it pushes the post into a different algorithm, ensuring it will be viewed much more widely than a single-image, music-free, regular Grid post.

Why are CaRousels so important?

The short answer is: reach.

Instagram’s algorithm has always prioritised video Reels over static images. For organisations, this often meant spending hours producing video content, or risking really low engagement and poor distribution with an image post. Reels are also less accessible than images, because there’s no built in alt-text feature for video on Instagram.

Over the last couple of years, there’s been a shift in the algorithm - Carousels now provide the reach and visibility of a Reel with the simplicity and accessibility of an image post. They bridge the gap. Your key messages can now reach massive audiences with less time, less production, and frankly fewer complications.

The proof is in the analytics

I run our institutional Instagram account - @UoYLibrary - which is a really significant part of our communication with students. I have a million and one other duties as Faculty Engagement Manager so as I noticed carousels getting more views I started to prioritise them over video content because they took so much less time to produce, not least because they can often be made using existing images I already have available to me, rather than needing to shoot new content.

The impact has been remarkable, The extraordinary thing is, even the less successful posts that don’t get the Likes and engagement I’m hoping for are getting consistently high reach and views. Meanwhile the successful ones are outstripping Reels - always the most popular format, historically - in all metrics.

2025 engagement

• Saves: 3 of the top 5 most-saved posts were Carousels (including 1st)

• Shares: 4 of the top 5 most-shared posts were Carousels (including 1st)

• Likes: all 5 of the top 5 most-liked posts were Carousels

2025 reach and views

• In 2024 our top five posts had a combined Reach of 32,095 people: only 1 of these was a Carousel

• In 2025 our top five posts had a combined Reach of 40,228 people (a 25% increase) and 3 of them are Carousels

The most dramatic increase year on year is from Views - unsurprisingly, as if someone views three images as part of a Carousel, that counts as 3 views compared with just 1 for someone watching a Reel or viewing a single image post.

• 2024: Our top 10 posts achieved a combined 70,099 views

• 2025: Our top 10 posts achieved a combined 211,337 views

This represents a 201% year-on-year increase in total views. That top 10 breaks down as follows - several of these are collabs with other accounts, which is hugely important for Reach and Views too.

@UoYLibrary’s 10 most viewed posts across 2025: screenshot from Meta Insights

A tale of two posts

Our most successful post (that we originated, rather than were invited onto as a collaborator) in 2025 - by most metrics, albeit not Likes - was this Carousel to celebrate the library’s birthday. It reached over 9,000 people, was viewed over 23,000 times, and had over 750 Likes as well as large numbers of Saves, Shares, and new Follows.

The most viewed post originated by @UoYLibrary in 2025

For me though, a better example of the power of the Carousel is our least successful post of 2025. In fact in terms of engagement, it is, I think, the least successful post I personally have put on the library Instagram account in its entire history (full disclosure I looked back through six years’ worth of posts before giving up)… It got 17 Likes.

@UoYLibrary’s least Liked post of 2025

Despite this total failure on my part to pitch the Podcasting Studio in such a way as to get Likes (previously when I’ve done a Reel on this it’s had much more Likes, and the TikTok version did really well too - so it’s the framing, rather than the subject matter, that’s the issue with the post above), the Carousel of it all meant it has still reached nearly 900 people and had nearly 4.5k views.

To put that in context, the post reached more people (and got 106% more views) in a week than the podcasting studio webpage did in the whole of 2025 - and that includes a spike in the webpage views caused by the Instagram post… There’s nothing wrong with the webpage - it’s just that our target audience don’t really web-search, but they scroll-search social media all day. So all in all: the habits of undergraduates x the reach of the Carousel = even an unsuccessful Insta post getting key messages out really well compared with other mediums.

Get posting

I’ll write another post soon about what works and doesn’t work with Carousels but for now I hope you’re convinced that, going into 202,6 if you’re running an organisational account it’s time to plan some Carousels. In fact I wouldn’t post any individual images this year - why throttle your own reach, when a Carousel would go so much further? Get your message out to the widest audience possible, and take advantage of the cheat code while it lasts!

It might not be Imposter Syndrome... We need to talk about Trespasser Syndrome

Back in 2014 I wrote on this blog that Imposter Syndrome ran through librarianship like a vein. Writing now in 2025, I consider that a misdiagnosis.

Imposter Syndrome is defined as a psychological condition, characterised, as Miriam-Webster has it, by ‘persistent doubt concerning one's abilities or accomplishments accompanied by the fear of being exposed as a fraud despite evidence of one's ongoing success.’

The insidious thing about Imposter Syndrome is it individualises suffering. It’s not something being done to you; it’s something you ‘have’, a personal flaw that comes from within. And because the concept of Imposter Syndrome is so wide-spread, it’s easy not to question that the blame is yours.

It reminds me of the concept of ‘resilience’ as it is applied in Higher Education - the onus is on us as staff to simply become strong enough (or numb enough) to deal with any amount of stress or disruption, rather than on the institutions to try and reduce the imposition of harsher and harsher conditions.

Back in 2014, and indeed now, I was surrounded by brilliant colleagues in the profession who doubted themselves, who thought they were only ever a slip away from the big reveal that they Didn’t Belong Here, despite the evidence to the contrary. It was their ‘condition’ which meant they couldn’t see the truth of their excellence. Right?

Then in 2020, I read a brilliant article on In the Library With the Lead Pipe (consistently the most readable and through-provoking peer-reviewed journal I’ve come across), by Nicola Andrews, entitled It’s Not Imposter Syndrome: Resisting Self-Doubt as Normal For Library Workers.

I’d recommend reading the whole thing but this is the paragraph that really stuck with me:

“As a Māori, takatāpui, immigrant, person of colour, and first-generation scholar, I know that libraries and academia were not constructed for my benefit; and that systems of colonization, white supremacy, misogyny, and hatred continue to operate within them and wider society. The lack of belonging I felt did not stem from a lack of self-esteem, but from the knowledge that libraries and academia as institutions never intended I belong.”

— Nicola Andrews

I feel embarrassed now, that someone needed to point this out to me. I had credited my own lack of Imposter Syndrome as basically being down to a) the sense of self instilled in my by my parents and b) the fact I’d chosen the right profession for me. But of course, it has infinitely more to do with privilege: with the fact that as a white middle-class male my profession and my industry - librarianship and higher education - didn’t treat me like an imposter.

If you’re an ethnically minoritised member of staff in a University and you feel doubt concerning your abilities and whether you truly belong, I’d wager that there’s a good chance it is not the apparently capricious ‘condition’ of Imposter Syndrome - I’d wager you’ve been made to feel like an imposter. If you’re female, or from a working class background, or disabled, or are part of any other underrepresented group, and you feel like an imposter, there’s a good chance you’ve been treated like an imposter. This comes from without, not from within. And that’s not Imposter Syndrome.

(Sidenote: if you’re a white middle class man who feels doubt concerning your abilities and whether you truly belong, it’s not impossible you’ve been promoted beyond your abilities. That’s not Imposter Syndrome either, that’s actually being an imposter…)

How many cases of Imposter Syndrome are actually misdiagnosed? This matters because the term becomes pernicious when it is widely used for groups it was never intended to describe. As Dr Raquel Martin notes, the original 1970s study ‘focused on high-achieving, middle to upper-class European American women, observing how they attributed success to luck rather than their own abilities… the concept was never designed to capture the experiences of marginalised groups like black people, who face additional systemic barriers.’

Trespasser Syndrome

I’ve been working with a brilliant colleague at York, Raj Mann, on a project centred on inclusion and belonging in the library, and I’m indebted to her for introducing me to the term ‘Trespasser Syndrome’. If you’ve read this far and you agree with most or all of what I’ve said above, you’re probably already nodding your head in recognition at how much this new framing improves upon the old framing. It’s not that Imposter Syndrome doesn’t exist - it’s that in so many cases, it is misapplied: in fact the person is made to feel like they’re trespassing in a space simply not intended for them.

I believe the term ‘Trespasser Syndrome’ was coined by Dr Arin N. Reeves, in 2022. I’d recommend reading all of her article Is It Imposter Syndrome or Is It Trespasser Syndrome? - here’s a key quote:

“People from underrepresented groups are not afraid that they are imposters; they are afraid that the majority groups won’t see them for who they are and won’t welcome them if they do see them. These fears are not the fears of imposters; they are the fears of trespassers.

A trespasser is someone who enters spaces they are not supposed to be, where they do not belong. A trespasser isn’t afraid of being discovered for who they really are; they are afraid of being treated like they don’t belong where they are.”

— Dr Arin N. Reeves

What we do about it?

Language and nuance matter, so let’s stop misapplying the term Imposter Syndrome to situations where individuals and groups are being treated like imposters. It’s never good perpetuate harmful language, whether intentionally or not. Reeves advises us to ‘Use “imposter syndrome” when it’s relevant. Differentiate it from “trespasser syndrome” to honor the realities of succeeding in spite of not belonging.’

More than that though, we need to interrogate examples of Imposter Syndrome. If someone you work with says they have it, or describes its symptoms, we need to do more than nod and smile and say ‘I know how you feel’ - we need to work out why they’ve been made to feel like an imposter, and whether we can do anything to change that. How can we create environments that support under underrepresented groups, and dismantle the systems which tell people they don’t belong?

I’ll leave the last word on this to someone much more qualified to talk about it than me. Raj has in fact organised the first ever Trespasser’s Conference as part of her role at YCEDE (the Yorkshire Consortium for Equity in Doctoral Education) and during her keynote address she said this:

“For those of you here today who support racially minoritised staff and students, ask yourselves: have I provided people with the tools they need to be able to thrive in the space? If not, what else do I need to be doing? Instead of helping underrepresented groups to walk past the metaphorical ‘no entry or ‘no trespassing signs,’ instead pull down the sign before they get there, have a comfortable seat ready for them: don’t just applaud the courage and grit on getting there.”

— Raj Mann

Rebuilding the library community in a post-Twitter world

I had an amazing experience at the end of last month. I was invited to Dublin to keynote the LIR annual seminar on mine and my wife’s 20th wedding anniversary! We took the tip together, the weather was beautiful, and the conference was great. I learned so much from the other speakers, and everyone who asked questions and shared their own experiences.

It was a hybrid event, with around 100 staff from Irish academic libraries split across in-person and online. The venue was fabulous - the picture in the header of this post is of the view of the Liffey through the window of the room I was speaking in.

I was asked to talk about rebuilding our online communities now that Twitter / X has stopped being an option for so many of us. Although the committee wanted me to touch on this from a library point of view, the main focused they asked for was actually the librarian perspective - where do we, as library staff and info pros, rebuild our networks? It’s a great topic, and here are my slides (slightly amended from the event, to work better without me talking over the top).

Below is not a transcript of my talk by any means, just a few notes on the key themes.

Part 1: The State of X

It gives me no pleasure to be spending so much time hauling Twitter over the coals, because the site has been a hugely positive influence on my my life. I joined after the New Professionals Conference way back in 2012 and suddenly I became plugged in to this network of progressive, interesting library people - I absolutely relished being able to be part of that wider conversation. It gave me incredible opportunities (the original catalyst for my keynote at the LIANZA Conference in New Zealand was a tweet from the LIANZA account about how bad the fonts were on the Library Marketing Toolkit website!), helped me get jobs, introduced me to friends, and allowed me launch a freelance career.

More importantly than any of that though, Twitter was the place that enabled me to view the world through other people’s eyes. As a cis-het white male (and you can now add middle-aged to that list) it’s vital to get an insight into how other people experience life and the world and libraries and more, or you end up in a boring, uninformed bubble with potentially damaging knock-on effects for those around you. They say you get more and more right-wing as you get older, but I’ve found the exact opposite to be true (and I was pretty left-wing to begin with): my brilliant Twitter network was vital in that.

Twitter was great because we made it great, and now it’s terrible because some terrible people have come along and set up shop there. So I get the ‘why should we have to leave?’ argument. Individuals can make up their own minds but I think from an institutional point of view, being there is a real risk, reputationally. As it says in slide 9, hate speech is up, disinformation is up, transphobia is up, misogyny is up, bots are up - and actual active (human) users are down. Even beyond the ethical arguments against X, it has ceased to function effectively as a communication tool for libraries - the algorithm rewards conflict and suppresses links, and even when you do ‘good’ tweets (like the ones in slide 8) they don’t get any reach. It’s time to go. Which leads us to the question which titles the next part.

Part 2: Where next for academic libraries?

In academic libraries we have various audiences we’re trying to reach, including not limited to undergraduate students, postgrads, researchers and academics, professional services staff, members of the public, the rest of the Higher Education industry. Of those, I firmly believe Instagram has the student side really well covered, especially if you throw in TikTok too. It’s the public and the University staff we find harder to reach now X is no longer viable.

The public remains a really tricky issue, but I believe Bluesky is really beginning to fill the Twitter-vacuum for academics and researchers. It has a relatively low number of total users (around 35 million at the time of writing; updating count here) compared with the giant social networks, but despite that it is has now overtaken X as the place where most new scholarly research is shared. The academic community is moving over there in large numbers, which is really great news for us in libraries.

My argument in the talk is that having somewhere online to follow our academic community to is great, but leading them there is even better. I’ve really proactively tried to help catalyse a shift to the platform for researchers at my own institution, writing several guides to the platform aimed at University staff and creating a University of York Starter Pack for colleagues to easily connect with each other on the new platform, among other things.

Overall I’d advocate for using Bluesky specifically for researcher-facing messages at the moment (I’m not seeing evidence of large numbers of taught students on the platform) and letting Instagram take care of your student-facing comms. It’s working really well for us, and we now have a larger and more active network for the Uni of York library on Bluesky than we ever did on Twitter, after only a few months.

Part 3: Reconnecting as Information Professionals

No one is obliged to be in an online professional network, of course. There are people who are entirely off social media and benefiting from that choice. If you do want that connection with the wider profession though, with what do we replace Twitter?

The answer depends on what specifically we need from our network. Before we ask where shall we go, we need to ask what we want to DO when we get there. I asked the audience to talk to each other about the various options on slide 31, as well as adding their own…

I’ve been forced to revise my view that LinkedIn is basically awful, because actually it isn’t - the library and HE professionals part of it has been really helpful to me, especially since I left Twitter a year and a half ago. I’ve also noticed that the total views for posts on there is higher than it is on this website - numbers in the slides - so it’s a good way to disseminate and get feedback on ideas. (Here’s my LinkedIn profile if you’re interested.)

Bluesky has for me killed two (Twitter) bird with one stone - it has become a venue to rebuild my library’s academic network, and my own librarian / info pro network. As always, I’d recommend it: if you’ve not given it a go, check out some of the guidance and maybe dip your toe in.

The key thing is, you can choose whatever platform you like as long as you’re part of the conversations you want to be having. It was really so great to be part of this particular conversation in Dublin, so massive thanks again to LIR for inviting me!

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If you’re interested there’s a video of the full talk here. It’s a recording from Teams so the audio is slightly in and out and the picture is a bit grainy! But I appreciate the LIR committee making this available, thank you.

The end of the SLA

I found out yesterday that the Special Libraries Association is dissolving, citing "shifting industry dynamics, changing professional needs, and financial realities." I've always found the SLA to be an engaged, supporting, uplifting organisation and I'll be really sad to see it go.

I was involved in the SLA Leadership & Management division, and SLA Europe, for several years in the 2010s, serving on a couple of committees and attending / presenting at events. It started with winning one of the 2011 Early Career Conference Awards - I know a whole cluster of people who won an ECCA in that era and we all talk about in the same tones of mild wonder...

The prize is an all expenses paid trip to the SLA Annual Conference in North America - to attend any event as a new professional is great, but for those of us in the UK the scale of US library conferences is just epic, which added another layer of excitement.

There were 3,500 people at SLA2011 in Philadelphia, and there were so many highlights for me. The conference venue was bigger than most airports I've been in. There were usually 5 or 6 sessions of interest running simultaneously. Being in a gang with the other three ECCA winners (Samuel Wiggins, Natalia Madjarevic + Chris Cooper) who were affiliated with different divisions was such a lot of fun: the pic in the header of this blogpost is taken from a visit to the ‘Rocky montage steps’ with them all. I saw a Mary Ellen Bates presentation I still cite a line from in my marketing workshops to this day...

The thing that really struck me though was how welcoming everyone was, and how they treated us all as equals. I was in the Leadership & Management Division, but I was 5 years into librarianship and was neither a leader nor a manager. All these high-powered boss level librarians simply treated me like one of their own, and my mentor Dee Magnoni was just so, so encouraging. It's such a big deal when you're young and new to the profession to have senior people believe in you.

The whole conference, and the SLA and SLA-Europe in general, were incredibly energising and felt like a real privilege to be a part of. I had to pull out of doing a TED-talk style presentation as part of the closing session at SLA2014 in Vancouver because my daughter was ill, and I wish I'd been able to take that opportunity, not least just to get to another SLA conference!

Sincere thanks to all the SLAers I've met along the way (loads of whom I'm glad to say I'm still in touch with), and I hope the community can continue or be reinvented elsewhere.

It's okay to say 'um' and 'uh' when you're presenting...

When we’re presenting we can easily get caught up in worrying about what we shouldn’t be doing. That white noise of ‘I’m doing X too much’ or ‘I’m pretty sure I read that Y is bad’ gets in the way of our ability to relax, find our words and communicate. And in fact a quick Google tells us there are loads of posts from presentation skills / public speaking experts, warning us how important it is not to use ‘fillers’.

A small selection of articles on the evils of fillers

Filler words - um, erm, like, sort-of, basically - are all words we use often in conversation, but we worry about using them when presenting at an event, addressing a meeting or doing any other sort of public speaking. The interesting thing (to me!) is that filler words are not all bad, and I disagree with the perceived wisdom here.

I believe that outside of the ‘corporate pitch’ world a lot of public speaking advice seems to centre on, it is actually possible to be TOO slick as a presenter. Rough edges have their merits. We don’t want to sound polished to the point of being corporate or blandly robotic, and fillers can make us sound more human - but the key thing is, some of them are more problematic than others. I divide filler words into two groups: sounds, and meanings.

Sound-based fillers

Sounds (um, ah, er, erm etc) serve two important purposes when we're presenting:

1. they give us time to gather our thoughts and construct the next part of our sentence into articulate prose

2. they signal to the listener that the current thought is still in progress and there's more to come

In conversation, these sounds prevent interruptions, and in presentations, they help keep the audience and speaker in sync - this is no small thing. If you find yourself umming and ahing don't worry too much about it! There's value to it, as long as it's not happening several times a sentence.

Meaning-based fillers

Words & phrases such as 'like', 'sort of', and 'basically' are more concerning because they convey specific concepts, which subtly weaken our message.

• 'like' and 'sort' of make statements sound uncertain

• overusing 'basically' can make everything seem overly simplified or reductive

• while 'you know what I mean' can be genuinely useful for encouraging the audience to reflect and look for more nuance in whatever you just said, 'you know' loses any value when overused.

How to reduce filler words

The best way to identify your own filler words is to record yourself public speaking. I use the voice-record feature on my phone to record my conference presentation: I give myself a complete free pass at the time (no self-critiquing during the talk!), and listen back to it on the way home from the event to find ways to improve. You quickly find out which fillers you overuse, and then can work out whether they're relatively harmless 'sounds' words, or potentially undermining 'meaning' words...

There's also some fascinating research on the role body language plays in all this, which deserves a whole future post of its own - I’ve got lost down a bit of a rabbit-hole reading up on this! So for now I'll just address a question I often get asked in Presentation Skills workshops: is it okay if I gesture a lot? And the answer is yes: gesturing is a good thing! If you need to wave your arms about, wave your arms about. It helps you form thoughts and can help the audience interpret your words correctly.

That being said, body-language isn't nearly as important as is often believed. Please be reassured that the idea that '90% of communication is non-verbal' is a complete myth, based on misinterpretations of a 1960s study.

It's your words that really matter.