If you’re thinking about sharing your travel photos on Instagram, you may not know where to start. How do you build up an audience? Are there any rules to follow? What images should you share? We’ve put together a guide to starting a travel-focused Instagram feed, to help you to fi
nally share your travel snaps with the world.
Decide on a niche
Before you begin, take some time to decide upon your niche. There’s no reason why you can’t simply share all of your travel content, but if you have a tight niche, you are more likely to build up an engaged audience. Your niche could be as broad as ‘solo woman travelling the world’ or you could narrow it in to cover specific regions of the world or content focused around a particular type of travel.
Choose a username
Before you begin sharing your travel photos, you need to decide on a username. Type your ideas into the search bar to ensure that no one is already using your moniker or anything similar. Think about your niche when choosing your name, but also keep your username broad enough that you can cover different content if you change the way that you travel.
Download a planning app
You don’t want to post more than one photo a day on your Instagram feed, even if you have lots more to share. Use a planning app such as UNUM or Planoly to upload and organise your favourite photos. These apps allow you to move your photographs around to create a beautifully curated feed that looks appealing to potential followers.
Research your hashtags
You can upload up to 30 hashtags on each Instagram post, which make your content available to a wider audience. Do some research to discover the best hashtags to use for your content, considering your niche, your destination and general travel tags. Use a mix of large, medium and small hashtags to strengthen the chanc
es of your photos being seen.
Don’t forget location tags
When you upload your photos, you can use a location tag to let your followers know exactly where the photo was taken. This can be great for your visibility on Instagram, as users can also search for content via location tags. You’ll generally have the option of using your exact location or simply tagging the country or city where you are.
Don’t contribute to over-tourism
While it can be tempting to share the exact location where you took a photo, such as a restaurant, a landmark or a viewpoint, always stop to think about the impact. Several countries, cities and landmarks are currently experiencing over-tourism, which is being fuelled by people sharing locations on Instagram. If you are worried about directing too many visitors to a vulnerable place, be vaguer with your location tags.
Stand out from the crowd
If you want to attract an audience on Instagram, you have to do something to stand out from the crowd. The
re are many, many travel accounts on the app, and chances are that there are already plenty of people covering your niche. Visit different places to everyone else, getting off the beaten track and share photographs of different views or lesser-known landmarks. You could also try a unique style of photography, organising your photos by colour or shooting from different angles to everyone else.
Take advantage of Instagram’s Stories Feature
Instagram isn’t all about the main feed, you can also share content on the Stories feature and save this as Highlights on your feed. For anyone wishing to share travel content, this is a great way to share live content of your travels, sharing videos and photographs of your experiences each day. You can then create a Highlight for each place you visit, allowing future followers the chance to go back over your adventures.
Emma Lavelle is a UK based writer and photographer and has her own blog Field and Nest.
