New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg is no stranger to social media. He’s been known to hold conversations with parody accounts of himself on Twitter. And late yesterday evening, he opened up an Instagram account, following President Barack Obama to become the second big name politician in two days to join the image sharing service.
The account, nycmayorsoffice, was set to private for most of today, and had only one follower, grambo2000. As it turns out, grambo2000 is Graham Buck, the office’s speechwriter who also happens to be in charge of testing the account.
“As we do with all our social media platforms, we were testing it out first,” said Julie Wood, a press liaison at the mayor’s office, on a phone call with the Daily Dot. “Graham manages a lot of our media and he’s the one who set it up.”
The office made the account public today. Since then, it has gained 41 new followers.
Wood said they will start using it regularly in a couple of weeks or so.
“Have you seen our Flickr page?” Wood asked. “It’ll probably be a lot of the same type of things.”
Wood said it wasn’t likely that Bloomberg himself would be adding photos to the platform “but it’s possible.”
As noted by Jezebel founder Anna Holmes, Bloomberg joined Instagram just two days after Barack Obama did. Did the President’s embrace of the platform sway the mayor at all?
“We didn’t get inspired by Obama,” said Wood. “But the way he uses social media is great. We will be following him on Instagram.”
So far, the account has only posted one photo, taken on New Year’s Eve in Times Square: A picture of Bloomberg standing with Lady Gaga, who appears to be wearing a giant, glittering placemat on her head.
