Top Tools for Your Travel Instagram

When you’re running a travel Instagram, you need to constantly work to increase your Instagram followers. And it’s more than just posting cool pictures of your latest adventures climbing up another mountain, or informing your followers about the different bars they can party in when they travel to Barcelona. Whatever your travel Instagram focus, whichever countries you’re traveling to, you need to use the right tools to make it the largest it can be. That’s what will get sponsors interested in you, and what will get more people visiting your main business website if you’re a blogger or selling travel-related products.

Posting regularly, and having a consistent aesthetic, is all well and good if you want Instagram success. But using the right tools is what really makes a difference in today’s competitive Instagram business world–so if you want to learn more, read on.

1 VSCO

Everyone knows that having great pictures on Instagram is one of the most important ways to get more followers. After all, this platform started out as a way of sharing cool pictures and transformed into one of the most effective ways for businesses to connect with their customers. As a travel blogger, this is especially true: anytime you post, you’re inviting your followers to experience the world anew, to see places they couldn’t even dream of existing. So even if you’re a professional photographer, and know which Instagram filters work best for you, that isn’t enough.

That’s where VSCO, the photo-editing app, comes in. According to the App Store, this 4.3 out of 5 star-rated app has basic editing tools, advanced settings, and filters of its own. Available at only $19.99 a year, this will heighten the quality of your images at a super-reasonable cost.

2 Hootsuite Analytics

In addition to having great photos on your Instagram profile, you need to understand what your followers want to see in the first place. And even if you’ve started by seeing what content your competitors are posting, and created buyer personas for customers, there’s nothing as effective as analytics. If you’ve got a Business for Instagram profile, you already have the Insights feature for free. But if you want to learn even more about what posts are successful, and who your followers are, you need even more information. That’s where the Hootsuite Analytics tool comes in.

According to a review of the Hootsuite Pro tool in PC Mag, “The analytics tool provides metrics, reports, and visual streams for multiple profiles of all of the leading social networks and online presences that an SMB might need to track.” Considering that more than 13 percent of the Earth’s population is on Instagram, you can get a lot of information about your followers once you’ve implemented this tool.

3 Buffer

Another big player in the social media game, alongside Hootsuite, is Buffer. And there’s a reason why–Buffer has one of the best tools out there, the Buffer Social Media Management Platform, which is a platform you can use to manage all of your social media platforms in one go. Especially if you’re re-branding, or doing a new campaign, this makes it easier to stay organized. If you were posting a lot this holiday season, then you understand just how important it is to have content consistent across platforms, and scheduled. By making this entire process easier, this app allows you to focus on the actual content you’re putting out there, instead of figuring out how to send out into the world platform by platform.

60 percent of online adults have Instagram, so why not reach out to more of them by streamlining the content you’re putting out there? As a travel Instagrammer, you’re busy traveling a lot of the time, too, so anything that saves time helps.

4 Instagram Stories

Finally, you need to be using Instagram Stories. Even if you’re replying to all the comments that show up on your posts, following back followers, and DMing people to find out what kind of content they want on your Instagram, it’s not enough if you aren’t using the Instagram Stories feature. Especially if many of your followers are millennials and Gen Zers, they crave this feature: it’s one of their favorite ways to catch up with brands and celebrities.

Instagram Stories now has 400-million daily users, so it’s time to use this feature if you aren’t already!

These are some of the best tools you can use to get more people following your travel Instagram. What other strategies have you used to improve your online presence?