With over 1.62 billion monthly users, Instagram (IG) is one of the most popular social media platforms, especially among brands and businesses of all shapes and sizes. With a range of exciting features such as Instagram Story and Story Highlights, Instagram has completely transformed the way businesses market themselves on social media.
For the travel community on Instagram specifically, Instagram has become a powerful and successful visual platform. It allows users to create stimulating and engaging visuals that give viewers a clear understanding of why it is necessary to build community on Instagram for travel agency.
Building a strong community on Instagram is one of the best ways to make lasting relationships with and among your target audience in the travel niche. It’s this relationship, and the numerous benefits they bring that make it necessary for businesses to invest in community-building efforts.
In this post, we will dive deep into the details of Instagram marketing, the benefits of Instagram community building, and how to build community on Instagram for travel agency.
Why are Instagram Marketing and Community Building Important for Travel Agencies?
Over the last few years, Instagram has evolved phenomenally from just being a social platform for sharing pictures to an incredibly useful platform for business purposes, including the travel industry.
There are several ways Instagram marketing and community building can help the travel agency business. Some of these are discussed below:
1. Improved Customer Engagement
Social media platforms such as Instagram are one of the best ways to build and maintain relationships with users and customers.
They allow us to share as well as get feedback from our audience and build a strong community through likes, shares, or comments, engage them with interesting travel content, inform them about special travel offers, and more.
Statistics also suggest that Instagram is one social media platform that works for customer engagement better than any other platform. As per the numbers, Instagram has 58% more engagement per follower than Facebook.
2. Brand Strengthening
Instagram marketing and community building can work wonders for brand awareness.
The platform allows you to showcase your brand’s personality through live events and Instagram Stories. Further, you can also consider using influencers to build your brand.
A popular influencer can bring your brand’s sales to a new level through increased online marketing ROI and access to a target audience you wouldn’t usually reach.
When you partner with well-known influencers to market your product, they can publicize your brand to a huge number of their followers with just a few posts.
3. Improved Search Engine Rankings
The integration of SEO and Instagram makes perfect sense.
A social media SEO plan designed for your Instagram page can prove instrumental for your travel agency website. It can help optimize content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Further, it also helps in strengthening customer relationships and enhancing your ability to connect with customers where they are most active.
A platform like Instagram allows you to post more customer experiences and update quality services, thus saving customers time searching for necessary information and answering questions.
Ways To Build Community on Instagram for Travel Agency
Today, Instagram has established itself as a robust platform for communities to exist and grow, which is one of the key reasons behind its phenomenal growth in the last few years.
When working on your Instagram travel, you need to see the platform as a place to build, cultivate, and build community on Instagram for Travel Agency.
There are several ways you can build community on Instagram for travel agency, including the below:
1. Cultivate Your Community
If you aim to create something that your users, followers, and others wish to be a part of, make sure to work on your niche and target audience. Keep your tone consistent to attract more customers or clients.
Here are some of the ideas to help you build and cultivate a strong, active Instagram community for your travel business:
- Do a thorough search and follow community hashtags related to your niche. For instance, #travelcontent, #travelmarketing, etc.
- Show your community how much you value and appreciate them by answering each Instagram comment, giving them a shout-out, offering exclusive discounts, and more.
- Engage with the audience and display genuine interest in your followers as soon as possible. Users keep looking at other similar businesses, and it is important to get a first-mover advantage to make a good impression.
2. Partner up with the Best Travel Bloggers and Influencers
Since bloggers and influencers have a good following on social media platforms, partnering with them is an excellent way to reap benefits, as it will allow your travel agency to get exposure to their accounts and also reach the right audience for your particular niche.
It is a great marketing technique that will save you both resources and time and help you reach those who are really interested in buying your products to help you build community on Instagram for Travel Agency.
3. Post Useful Photos
Instagram gives an excellent opportunity to practice creativity in promoting your travel brand.
Users on Instagram love well-curated feeds, and therefore, it is important to invest enough time and effort in ensuring that you post relevant travel-related photos your market can relate to while promoting campaigns.
4. Use the Right Hashtags to Distinguish Yourself
Yet another way to build a community on your travel agency’s Instagram is to use targeted hashtags on every IG post that you share concerning your offerings, value proposition, the locations you have mentioned, and so forth.
These hashtags work as an effective medium of building a community you intend to be a part of and will also regularly update you in the circle of those who are interested.
5. Use Relevant Geo-Locations
Apart from using the right set of hashtags, you must also use relevant geo-location with your IG posts for the specific locations you are targeting.
This helps you to make your posts readily available to the people who show interest in these places and look them up in the Discover section on Instagram. Besides, geo-locations can also help to search the place in question by browsing through the pictures available.
Best Practices To Grow Your Travel Agency’s Instagram Community
In this section, we will discuss some of the best practices to further help you grow your travel agency’s Instagram community:
1. Maintain a Consistent Instagram Feed of High-Quality Visuals
When it comes to Instagram marketing, visuals play the most important role. A poorly designed graphic or a badly photographed image won’t help in any way.
What you need here are high-quality images and videos that stand out and help you instantly attract your audience. Make sure to use colors and filters intelligently so your images look great and also give a consistent look and feel to your entire Instagram page.
2. Pay Attention to Your Timing
While the Instagram algorithm keeps changing, the thing that remains consistent is the priority of engagement. This makes it important to post at the right times when your audience is active, which can help you boost visibility and engagement.
The goal here should be to post your content at the right time when users are most active, and the chances of them engaging with the content are high.
3. Tell Visually Appealing Stories
For your travel brand to leave a long-lasting impact, the most important thing is to make a memorable impression, and storytelling can be very effective in making this happen.
For travel businesses specifically, Instagram is the perfect platform to create interesting, captivating, and intriguing visual stories about your brand.
For best results, make sure to start creating visuals that communicate and tell engaging stories about your brand history, your customer journeys or stories, or your brand impact.
4. Use a Lot of Games, Contests & Challenges
One of the other Instagram marketing and community-building best practices to generate high engagement is using interesting games, contests, and challenges as they help encourage audience participation.
Including a reward with your contests and games increases the chances of your audience being more involved since they see an opportunity to get exciting prizes from brands they follow.
Here, you could either run giveaway contests that involve users liking, commenting, sharing, or tagging their friends in the comments or simply create interesting/fun quizzes and trivia games to get your audience to comment.
5. Use of Instagram’s Features
Instagram has a lot of features such as discussion forums, broadcast channels, participation groups, and more that need to be explored more to take maximum advantage of the platform for your travel brand.
For instance, broadcast list/channels on Instagram is an excellent messaging tool that allows creators to engage directly with their large follower base. You can use broadcast channels to help keep your users/ followers updated and share behind-the-scenes moments using photos, video, text, voice notes, polls, and more.
The Bottomline
If you’re in the process of building your travel agency, a great way to communicate with your target audience is through Instagram. With exciting feeds full of inspirational imagery, it’s a great place for both hobby travelers and businesses to capture the attention of others.
In this post, we have shared how you can grow your business and build community on Instagram for Travel Agency by putting in the right strategy and tips on how to build a strong following and create one of the best travel agency Instagram pages.
If you are looking for guidance on how to build a community on your travel agency’s Instagram, check out our comprehensive and easy-to-understand user and navigation guides on Predis.ai. The platform offers a range of interactive templates, along with a creative editor, that will make quick changes to your landscapes.
Apart from this, with Predis.ai, you can also create the best content and enhance your travel Instagram posts using AI and other design resources.
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