Social

For those who don't know me, you should know that I am an engineer as well as a travel blogger- which at times is a very dangerous combination. When I try out something new to help my brand grow, I put together a test and log everything so I can get to the real reason for why something works. (We then write about it in our Blog Your Trip series to share it with you).

Over the past year I've been conducting many successful Instagram tests, and they've been picking up in popularity thanks to this social network's continued rise in prominence.

As I've had some time to reflect on our most recent tests (find the one on Instagram hash-tags and the one on gaining targeted Instagram followers here), I need to tweak some of the recommendations I wrote about in those posts to form our game plan moving forward.

So, before reading any further, I highly recommend you read through both of those first. Finished? Good, let's recap.

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It is a sad day in the world of social media and social media advertising when brand credibility and effectiveness is measured by the number of followers you have and not the type of niche website content you publish and who it is going to.

This phenomenon is especially true on Instagram because the service is so locked down that you really can only measure two things when sharing your account: the number of followers you have and the number of likes you receive on any given photo (which is highly dependent on the amount of followers you have in the first place).

In not being able to effectively measure who makes up your blog traffic, there is a veritable arms race to get more Instagram followers and likes at any cost.

For many years we stayed away from Instagram for reasons similar to this, but it wasn't until we really put social media as a primary focus with our sites that we decided to open an account.  That was in 2013, and over the subsequent year-and-a-half we grew to a decently sized 1,800 followers with a long period of stagnated growth.  We knew we had to take a step back and find out what we were missing, and a test for our Blog Your Trip series was born.

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As a part of our #myRTW campaign on social media we are publishing weekly destination features from our travels.  Between ourselves and our staff we have covered 75 countries around the world, so we have no shortage of content to put out there for everyone to see.

Now that we have completed fifteen twenty twenty-five weeks of #myRTW updates from around the world, we wanted to take a look at the countries featured on Facebook to see if any significant performers came about.

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I was a late adopter of Instagram. Where I spent years amassing a large following on the other social media networks through social advertising, my foray into this network did not begin until September 2014 when I finally purchased my first smartphone.

By most standards I consider my growth on Instagram to be rapid. In just 100-days I had a following of 500 and an engagement rate of 5-10% depending on the update (which does not happen as much on other social networks). The next month after that my following grew by a further 50%.

I attribute this growth and engagement to three main travel Instagram strategies:

1. Asking my community on other social networks to follow us on Instagram.
2. Having frequent, predictable updates.
3. Participating in popular hashtags.

In this article I want to ignore the first two topics, and instead focus on the third: participation in popular Instagram tags. This is something many of the top Instagrammers have noted as being one of the keys to their success, and I made it my quest to figure out why that is.

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