Getting Started with a Travel Instagram Account
Capturing special moments of your travels is one of the best ways of saving memories of your trip. Thanks to Instagram, it’s even easier to capture those incredible moments - helping you create your own personal travel diary.
I used to do a lot of paper scrapbooking for years to document our family’s travels. But over time with sharing on my Instagram account, I’ve found that is a better way for me to share our adventures right now.
Whether you want to share your travel inspiration with the world, or you want to keep those special moments just for you, there are a lot of great reasons to start a travel Instagram. But how do you get started, and how do you make it look great?
Take a look at some of the following tips for getting started with a travel Instagram account.
Decide who you want to share it with
Starting a travel Instagram account can be a lot of fun, and it’s completely up to you with who you share it. Keeping it private means you can keep it for yourself or your friends and family while making it public will mean anyone can see your photos, which can help you grow a following if that’s what you want to do.
Even if you decide to keep things private at first, you can always make your account public at a later date.
Choose some of your best photos to get you started
After setting up your Instagram account, you can start posting some photos! Choose some of your favorites to get you started and to help you start building your grid. They can be a selection of somewhere you’ve been to recently, or you could choose to show some of your favorite travel memories instead.
How you select your photos is up to you, but many people tend to post travel photos in a sequence for each destination, forming a travel diary that documents the highlights of their trip - this can be a great way to organize your photos.
Learn how to make your photos stand out
The great thing about Instagram is that it gives you the chance to get creative with your photos. With a camera on your phone, you can easily take some incredible shots. The right lighting and angles can make a big difference to the look of your photos, but you can also use some cool editing tricks to really make your photos stand out.
There are a lot of amazing photo editing apps that make editing photos a breeze. Instagram also has some of the basic editing features that allow you to adjust the exposure and contrast of your photos, as well as other edits. Using a few simple edits can really make your photos look great and be a lot of fun.
Perfect your captions
Captions are especially useful for travel posts. They can help you describe a place and what you did there, which can help you remember in years to come. They also help provide recommendations to others who may be looking for things to do in a certain location.
I personally like to include travel tips so that the post can be useful to someone who will be visiting the same destination. But you can just share what you did that day or highlight a favorite thing about the activity in the photo.
You can use hashtags to generate some interest in your posts, just make sure they’re relevant to travel. There are a lot of useful travel hashtags you can use to help grow your account. I like to use one hashtag for each destination I visit. For example, I’ll use #thistraveltribeseattle for all of the things we do on our upcoming Seattle vacation. It’s a great way for people to be able to click the hashtag and see all of your photos about a destination in one place.
Experiment with different types of content
Instagram started off as a photo sharing platform, but today it has grown to much more than that. Now you can share videos, create live streams, short videos (Reels), and more - helping you to showcase lots of great travel content. Honestly, I miss the simple days prior to ads and all of the other offerings but they can be fun too!
It can be useful to share some hints and tips about your travels, as people look more and more to Instagram for recommendations. You could share tips on looking after your health when traveling or provide some useful advice on traveling with children. Whatever your niche is, own it!
Using stories can be a great way to share travel content, especially as you can create highlights for each destination. You can learn how to add multiple photos to Instagram story to help you showcase some great travel tips. Stories are a very popular type of Instagram content, and can really help your followers get an insight into your adventures.
Engage with others
If you want to grow your Instagram following, then it’s important to engage with others. Honestly, finding the time to spend on Instagram can be a challenge. You could set a timer for whatever time you want to give to Instagram that day while actively engaging with others. Don’t just get sucked in to scrolling.
Find people with similar interests to follow and engage with their content. Liking and commenting on photos, as well as interacting with stories will help you develop a community through your account, and helps you discover new things too!
Creating a travel Instagram is a fun and enjoyable way to share all of your travel memories. No matter where your adventures take you, using Instagram can help you look back at your favorite photos and reminisce all about your amazing adventures.