How to Crush Your First 100 Days on Instagram!
Many, many, many people have Instagram accounts and the travel scene is growing at an enormous rate, so how can you set yourself apart? Especially when you are a brand new account. Would you like to establish your account in the travel community? Are you hoping to grow your number of followers? Do you hope to improve engagement on your posts? Finally, is it possible to work with brands as a new and extremely micro travel account?
If you answered yes to one, some or all of these questions then you are EXACTLY like we were just 100 days ago. Here check out our first post…
After 100 days we have built travel content through 80 posts, amassed over 4,000 followers, consistently receive 400-500+ likes and 100+ comments, and have begun collaboration campaigns with several different brands.
If you’d like to quickly grow your brand new Instagram account or your existing account hasn’t had much success, then scroll through the rest of this article to find 5 simple and efficient steps to maximize growth as a beginner travel account on Instagram.
1. Building Content
Without aesthetically pleasing, travel relevant and insightful content, it will be a challenge to grow as a new account. Hopefully you have a phone, camera, or computer overflowing with travel photographs like we did. If not, well, it will be more difficult but don’t give up yet! Post often as a beginner account. We put up 2-3 posts a day in our first few weeks. Why? Simply to build our content to give visitors something to look at when they stumbled upon our page. We then switched to posting pretty consistently once a day and now sometimes even every other day. Decide on your style and filter settings early and stick with the same one. People love consistency on your page and will continue to scroll and view your posts when there is a theme. Also, don’t underestimate the importance of a thought-provoking and engaging caption. People come for the photos, but they will stay for your content.
2. Engaging with Other Accounts
If you don’t pay close attention to anything else that we are saying, which is fine we just appreciate you are here on our blog honestly, then pay attention to the following.
ENGAGE, ENGAGE, ENGAGE.
This seems like such a simple concept, but we cannot express the importance of this enough. Most people are on social media to engage with others. People will engage with your posts, but they need to be drawn to your account’s page first. How? Engage with others posts. Hop around to similar travel accounts and give their posts some likes and comments. There is no quicker way we have found to get someone to visit your page then to comment on 1 or more of their posts. We must pause quickly to inform you that a thumbs up or heart emoji is not engaging. Read their caption and give a sincere response that shows you care about their content. Not only will engaging with other accounts create visits to your page, but it will create followers and friendships if you are consistently engaging with their posts. This seems simple, and it is, but there is no better way to organically grow your own following than to engage with other members of the community.
3. Loops
There are a ton of mixed opinions floating around the Instagram world about loops. Some love them and see them as extremely valuable. Some hate them and refuse to participate in them. Honestly, we see both sides of this debate.
Let’s take a few steps back in case you are currently thinking “what the hell is a loop”? A loop is a place where many accounts come together with an agreement to follow each other. There are tons of them out there and some are better than others, but all follow that same basic concept.
Reasons they are awesome: Gain followers, grow quickly, meet new people.
Reasons they aren’t so awesome: Some unfollow, not organic growth, may affect engagement rate.
So, why do we do them? We strongly believe that the positives outweigh the negatives, and we think we have found a special formula that causes them to work a bit better for us. After participating in a loop we typically gain about 100 new followers. Now the challenge is taking those new followers and turning them into accounts we will engage with. This will avoid many from unfollowing us and will actually grow our engagement rate. We do this simply by engaging in the days following the loop. We try to visit many of their accounts and like and comment in a meaningful way. In turn they visit our page to engage and a friendship is born!
4. Engagement Groups
This is another hot topic in the Instagram world. Some people use them and others do not. We have had great experiences with our engagement groups and have actually formed some wonderful relationships with other travel accounts as a result. An engagement group is exactly what it sounds like: a group of similar accounts that all agree to engage (like and comment) on each other's posts. We have known accounts that are active in 10+ different engagement groups, but we wouldn’t recommend creating this much work for yourself. We have found that 3 groups is a pretty comfortable amount to participate in. These groups really help your posts increase likes, improve comments and maximize your reach. In addition to these positives, we have also received so many tips, tricks and advice from members of our engagement groups. As a very young account these are so helpful to avoiding mistakes that other accounts have made. So, how do you join them? Simply ask others if they are in any that you can join. Feel free to ask us!
5. Interact with Brands
One of the biggest hopes and dreams of many beginning travel bloggers is to turn their account into a business or side hustle of some kind. We share this same goal. Luckily for all of us small accounts out there, brands are interested in working with you!!! If you have quality content, decent engagement and a respectable following then brands will begin to take notice. We have been approached by dozens and dozens of brands about potential partnerships. Some of them interested us, but many we said no thank you because it wasn’t a good fit for us. Some brands will give you discounts, provide you with a commission code, hook you up with free products and eventually may even pay you to post for them.
There are a few things that you should have if you hope to get involved with working with brands. First, create an email for your travel account. This creates a professional setting to communicate with the brands instead of encouraging them to slide into your DMs like your online fling. Second, draft an introductory letter with basic information about yourself and your online platform. This can be used to introduce yourself to brands that you have hopes of working with. Just as some brands will reach out to you via email you can also do the same. Last, begin working on a media kit. If you don’t know what a media kit is (we didn’t either) Google it or feel free to ask us. There are some online templates you can use and we would be happy to share ours with you. Some companies, especially hotels, will ask to see your media kit before giving discounts, free products or services, or beginning a paid-to-post relationship.
Hopefully this provides a nudge in the right direction and can help you to have a successful first 100 days. Or if you are trying to reignite your account this can lead to a great next 100 days. We would love to engage with you and be a part of your journey. Please find us on Instagram (@theaveadventurers) and allow us to be a part of your growth!