I am fresh off of Social Media Week Austin, and my head is full of ideas and information to pass along to you friends. I have so many things to share with all of you in the next few weeks. However today I wanted to talk about how vital adding a location to your Instagram post is and how it will help you in the algorithm because we all want help in the algorithm right?
Let's begin with the way people search for information which is as follows:
1. Google
2. YouTube
3. Social Media
When I booked my travel to Austin for social media week, I decided to experiment for the sake of content and education. All of the things that I was going to do with my downtime in Austin was going to be determined by posts I had seen or were sent to me solely on Instagram. I set up the Austin Collection, and anytime I searched and found photos of things I wanted to eat, drink or experience I saved it to the group.
The thing is by now we know that the Instagram Algorithm LOVES it when you are engaged and social in posts. Saving posts and sending posts to other people tells the algorithm that actual photo is interesting, and when said photo starts to get a bunch of saves and sends the algorithm starts boosting that post and account up to potentially appear on the elusive EXPLORE page.
There are plenty of reasons why photos get saved and sent because they are beautiful, the caption speaks to the person reading it, or you know some other petty reason. What will help you so much if you have a stunning image along with a caption that speaks to someone is if you correctly tag the photo. People are now typing into the search bar the locations of places they are traveling to for ideas of things to do when they get there. Haven't you noticed when you'd been out and about that location with high numbers of social media posts attached to them are usually very busy? Location tagging is yet another form of word of mouth advertising.
As a business account, we naturally want as many eyes to find out photos that can, and we should be using every resource available to us to achieve this goal. Case and point location tagging your posts when you are out and about. When I am about to try out a new place I tend to go straight to social media and check the geotag and any hashtags that revolve around an area I am about to visit. I love doing this for two reasons:
1. When I have saved a post and the geotag has the address that automatically opens up in my maps and allows me to navigate to it.
2. I am nosy, and I want to know what it looks like, how others perceive the place, I want to know if the area cares about how others are "advertising" for them and how they are "advertising" themselves. By doing this, I have had my fair share of experiences of walking into a beautiful restaurant or shop and not having the most fantastic food, or experience that 100's of foodies or influencers posts said was terrific.
While I was searching the Austin geotag this renovated airstream came up along with the person talking about how this was one of the most exceptional Air BNB experiences they had. I noticed that the airstream had its hashtag, so I began looking at all of the posts attached to it, and after reading a few more posts I moved over to Air BNB to see if it was available. If you are someplace that you think is amazing or you just took a really dope photo, make sure that you geotag and tag the place in the post. Your audience wants to know what you like, and you never know who is researching, saving and sharing posts for a trip or searching of ideas for new things to do in their town.