If you have an elderly loved one that wants to be able to stay in contact with the people they love and care about, whether it’s because they don’t live close to these people anymore or they’re in an assisted living facility and want to be able to keep in touch, it can sometimes be hard for them to learn how to use this kind of technology on their own. But with the right guidance, your elderly loved one can learn how to use all kinds of social media apps.
To help you see how you can assist them with this, here are three tips for helping your elderly loved one learn to use Instagram to keep in touch with others.
Help Them With The Set Up
The first thing that you’ll have to help your loved one do is set up their Instagram account.
To do this, make sure they have the app downloaded to their device and have an email address they can use to sign up with. When they create their account, make sure you help them write down what their password is so that they don’t get locked out of their account. You can then help them choose their username, set a profile picture, and select the right account setting for their privacy. These are things they likely won’t be changing as they use Instagram, so helping them a lot with this part will usually be fine.
Introduce Them To The Different Kinds Of Posts
The next thing you should do is teach your loved one how to post things to their own account. They will likely want others to be able to keep up with them and what they’re doing just as they are hoping to keep up with their friends and family members.
In most cases, teaching them how to post to their feed and their stories will be sufficient. But when you are explaining how to do these things, make sure you just give them the basis at first, as you don’t want to overwhelm them with information that isn’t going to be useful or relevant to them.
Show Them How To Follow Their Chosen Accounts
The final thing you’ll want to teach your elderly loved one about using Instagram is how to follow accounts and interact with those accounts.
You can help them find accounts that they want to follow based on their interests or things they enjoy. You can also help them learn how to search for people or topics to follow more accounts in the future. And finally, teach them how to like posts, comment on posts, and tag people in the comments they make. These things will all make staying in touch via Instagram much easier.
If social media doesn’t come easy to a senior citizen you know but you see how they could benefit from these apps, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you teach them how to use Instagram.
