Interior Is the 'National Geographic' of Instagram

 Like seemingly everyone else these days, the U.S. Interior Department is on Instagram.

At first glance, a federal agency might not seem like one to have a robust presence on the photo-sharing app. But the Interior Department, which manages the country's federal lands, has access to photos posted by employees and volunteers on 435 Facebook accounts for national parks, wildlife refuges, and public lands. And those photos have proved to be popular with the #naturelovers of Instagram.

The posts look like they belong on National Geographic's account. There are shots of sweeping landscapes, like the Grand Canyon or the Smoky Mountains, and roaming wildlife, like bison at Yellowstone or gray foxes at Zion. Or, more recently, a video of two baby bears wrestling. The posts garner tens of thousands of likes and hundreds of comments from users.

Rebecca Matulka, Interior's senior digital-media strategist who runs the account, says she sometimes notices users comment on a photo thinking it's from National Geographic, and then they correct themselves.

"That is pretty amazing that they think our photos are up with that quality," she said.

Interior signed up on Instagram in 2012, when Tim Fullerton, then the department's director of digital strategy, said he recognized the social network's potential for reaching people.

"We just knew Instagram was exploding and people of all demographics were using it. We knew it was not going to take us a lot of resources to do it," Fullerton says. "No one is going to come to the Interior Department directly, we have to reach out to them on their channels."

The account coincided with President Obama's request to increase domestic and international tourism as part of a larger initiative aimed at bringing in 100 million international visitors to the United States by the end of 2021. Instagram served as the vehicle to promote federal lands, Fullerton said.

Three years later, the account has 622,000 followers, far exceeding the number of followers on the department's Twitter account, its next most popular social network. While the Interior is not the only department on Instagram—the State, Energy, and Commerce departments are there, too—it has the most followers.

Photos originate from one of three places: Interior employees on the ground at the lands, parks, and refuges; a National Park Foundation-sponsored photo contest, which has a database of more than 60,000 images; and user-submitted content. Matulka says she combs through photos for "at least an hour" for the account, posting two a day and one on weekends.

"You have to find essentially 700 photos in a year," Matulka says. "More than two a day is going to be too much to handle. When we have fun little gems that we can tie to key days, we post a little bit more."

The account has attracted users from outside the United States, Fullerton says, with users commenting in different languages.

"We're seeing that we're transcending U.S. borders much more frequently," he says.