7 ways to grow your hostel’s Instagram audience

Want to know how to grow your hostel’s Instagram? As more and more travellers turn to social media for trip inspiration, Instagram is becoming almost as important as your website when it comes to attracting more guests. It’s a pretty powerful platform too – did you know that 1 in 4 millennials have been inspired to book a trip solely down to Instagram travel posts?

However, some recent changes to the platform have made it much harder to grow your account’s followers and reach your target audiences. The good news is you’re not alone – everyone’s feeling the effects – AND we’re here to help.

Here are some tips to help you upgrade your Insta presence and grow your followers:

[ Disclaimer: This post assumes that your Instagram profile is already set up as a business account – if it’s not, don’t worry! Drop us an email and we’ll send you our instructions to switch ]

1. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

Knowing what content your audience likes – and what they don’t – is a great first step to getting your Instagram on the right track and attracting more followers.

Head to your Instagram Insights by clicking the 4-line stats symbol in the top right hand corner of your profile. From this page, select the ‘Content’ tab and you should see a ‘Feed posts’ section. Click ‘see all’ and you can then filter your posts by different variables including ‘Likes’, ‘Reach’ and ‘Impressions’. This should give you a good idea of what content works best on your feed.

Using these insights is most effective if your current followers are already from your key target markets. You can see which cities and countries your current followers are in by going to Insights → Audience tab → Top Locations. What we have noticed with some hostels is that their current audience is skewed towards their own location – for example, a hostel in Paris might have 40% of their followers also in Paris.

If this is the case for you, then one of your objectives should be to grow your audience within your key target markets. This shows why more followers doesn’t necessarily equal more bookings – you need the right followers.

2. FIGURE OUT THE BEST TIME TO POST

You can also use Instagram Insights to find out your most popular days & times to post. In the Insights Audience tab, scroll down until you get to the ‘Followers’ section. Here you can see the average times when your followers are most active on Instagram which is great to use as a guideline for when best to share your content – this will give you a much better chance of being found by travellers searching for your hostel or destination.

3. USE THE RIGHT HASHTAGS

Using relevant, targeted hashtags is vital to get your posts in front of the right people – posts with one hashtag receive an average 12.6% more engagement than posts without.

To start using the most relevant hashtags for you, research what your target audience and fellow hostel competitors are using – it’s not copying as the more people using the hashtags, the more discoverable your destination becomes! Just remember to switch them up for each post, using both topic and location specific hashtags where relevant, as Instagram penalises you if your profile repeatedly uses the same ones.

When (not if!) using Instastories, you can also add hashtags and location stickers to your content which means your post becomes searchable from the main ‘Explore’ page making your profile much easier to find by potential guests.

Bonus Tip: Make sure your hostel has it’s very own branded hashtag. Branded hashtags are a great way of interacting with past, present and potential guests. They will build awareness of your brand and also help you collect user-generated content to reshare. What are you waiting for?

4. INTRODUCE YOUR HOSTEL WITH HIGHLIGHTS

Instagram’s Highlights feature allows you to pull together your past Instastories, categorise them and display them on your profile page below your bio. This is great for showing off your hostel’s personality and giving potential followers who land on your profile a quick glimpse of what you’re all about.

To set your Highlights up, simply click on the plus symbol on your profile to select which Instastories to add. You can have more than one ‘highlight reel’ and split them into categories like ‘Rooms’, ‘Activities’, ‘Happy Hour’ – the more creative and informative the better! Think of them as mini trailers of your hostel’s best bits.

Check out the example on the right from Curiocity Africa’s Instagram page.

5. HOST A COMPETITION

Hosting a competition gives people an exciting reason to interact with your profile – the more people participate, the more potential guests you’ll reach.

Ensure the rules of your competition include following your account (if they don’t already) and tagging their friends. Also, remember to promote the competition through other platforms too – sharing with your Facebook followers and email list will help to boost entries.

6. RUN ADS

As we mentioned earlier, Instagram has made it harder for your posts to be seen by changing its algorithm. While you can increase the chances of your posts being seen by the right people with the tips above, running paid ads is the most powerful (and targeted) way to gain more followers. You have two options with Instagram ads – you can promote a post through the Instagram app or run an ad through Facebook Ads Manager.

Whichever approach you choose to take, start with a small daily budget at first and experiment with tweaking the type of posts and audiences until you start to see the results you want.

7. ENGAGE

Set aside some time each day to engage with your followers (and potential followers!). One of the best ways to reach more people on Instagram is to engage by commenting and liking other user’s posts, responding to comments and reposting content. Millennials expect a personal touch from businesses and are much more likely to book with a brand they have engaged with online.