Instagram tips & tricks for B&Bs
You’ve mastered Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and are now looking for a new social media channel to connect with your guests on. Perhaps you’ve had your eye on Instagram but are unsure of how to get started. Well, we’ve compiled some of our best Instagram tips and tricks and ideas to get you off on the right foot.
- Do you take a lot of photos of your property on your smartphone?
- Do you enjoy sharing photos or videos with guests and writing captions to go with them?
- Are you already sharing photos on Facebook?
- Do you have time to manage and engage with a new audience on another account?
- Do you know how to tag other brands and use hashtags?
- Are you comfortable not being able to share links?
If you’ve answered yes to those six questions above, then Instagram can be an easy addition to your social networks without a major learning curve or too much extra effort.
Account basics
Account name (yellow), profile photo (blue), bio (purple), and link (green).
Be sure to set up your account as a business account instead of personal so you have access to business insights – a new tool through Instagram that’s only available to businesses. Insights, like its counterpart on Facebook, shows impressions, reach, website clicks (from the link in your bio), and follower activity like the average times your followers are on Instagram.
Photo credit: Instagram
Photos + descriptions
Photos should tell a story or share an experience with users. Don’t just share a photo of the beach view from one of your rooms – ask one of your staff members to look out at the view and share that experience with your Instagram followers. Use filters to add vibrant colors and contrast to your images but be cautious of oversaturating your photos or making them too unrealistic. After you’ve found a few filters or styles you like, try to stick with them to keep your photos looking consistent and branded. You may also want to experiment with videos as well, just keep them under 15 seconds to keep people’s attention on them. Instagram automatically loops videos so people can watch them again if they missed the beginning or just want to watch it again.
Hashtags
Use three to five but make sure they’re valuable to your message and target audience. Don’t make it look spammy by adding a bunch of hashtags at the end to try and show up in search for anything and everything, that’s not a winning strategy for your property and people may flag you as irrelevant.
Engage
Engage with other users by liking things, responding to comments on your posts or commenting on others’ photos of your property. Engagement etiquette is about the same as it is on Facebook where people want you to respond or invite them to engage with your brand through questions. You can also engage by regramming or sharing others’ photos taken at your property. Either use a regram app or tag the original poster in the post to provide credit:
