For Portugal Instagrammer Manuel Pita (@sejkko), Instagram is about more than just posting beautiful content—it's about connecting with people. The desire to bring together Instagrammers across Europe in the picturesque city of Lisbon, Portugal, led to an InstaMeet of great scale for the eighth Worldwide InstaMeet. "There is a special brand of creativity in Instagram that carries an European signature, both in terms of aesthetics and concept," says Manuel. "With all this came the desire to explore the connections between Europe and other strong Instagram communities in the US, Asia and Latin America." Manuel's idea was to host simultaneous events at Lisbon's Ponte 25 de Abril and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge in the US to symbolize the European community's connection with the rest of the world. He got in touch with San Francisco community organizers Brock Sanders (@mrbrock21) and Jim Barcelona (@barce) via Instagram Direct and set "a beautiful project" in motion. The result was the #TwinBridgesMeet: two large groups of Instagrammers gathering to take photos and videos on Instagram more than 9,109 kilometers (5,660 miles) apart.
Want to organize an InstaMeet in your city? Here are Manuel's tips for getting started: Be motivated by a passion for supporting the community, find the right balance between giving structure and allowing self-organization by the people participating and pick a special feature or a theme as the highlight of the InstaMeet. The organizers—José Lourenço (@joselourenco), Gabriela Mateus (@gmateus) and Manuel also walked away from #TwinBridgesMeet with a new tip for themselves, "For the next event, we would encourage people to wear a name tag. This will make it easy for Instagrammers to interact." For more tips, visit blog.instagram.com and for more photos and videos from the Lisbon InstaMeet, browse the #TwinBridgesMeet hashtag. Photo by @eljackson