How To Use Instagram To Plan Your Next Trip

What Is Instagram?

If you are truly asking this question, we have some work to do! Instagram is one of the biggest upcoming social media platforms.

It has been around for a while now but in the past year as doubled in size. With the amount of images and users available on the platform.

Image based, it is about sharing your best photographs with everyone. Whether they be friends, followers or general public it is all possible.

Why Not Pinterest?

Pinterest was and always has been known as the solution for planning. You have the ability to add pins to your boards for different categories.

For example fashion you can pin to a particular board, decorations for your house in another and of course travel.

For example if I was looking to travel to Bali, Indonesia I would search via the search bar and see what results were returned. There would be aspects such as Places to eat in Bali, where to visit in Bali etc.

This was the usual way to do things… Now we have Instagram!

How To Search?

Once on Instagram there are a variety of ways in which you can search. For myself I do it by place first as we can see what is happening in the local area, however this all differs dependent on your preference.

Search By Place

To search by Place (Location) you search for photographs that have been tagged via a geo map.

You are able to do this by selecting the search button at the bottom of your screen and typing in the location.

For example I used Plettenberg Bay, South Africa.

The results show and you can begin to browse.

Search By Hashtag

Often people wont use the Location aspect when uploading a picture but will put the location as a hashtag.

This is therefore another way to search, as it will show up popular images with this particular hashtag as well as the most recent.

Often places get nicknames for example Plettenberg Bay in South Africa is often titled Plett, so I searched for this first.

Search By People

With the way that Instagram is growing there are plenty of tourist boards and similar companies available on this Social Media Giant.

For example with the same search terms I found a page for Plett Tourism, offering fantastic images that were inspiring and giving me great places to visit whilst in the area.

New Save For Later Feature

Instagram has been constantly evolving to offer more features for its fans.

Since their Stories update to try and compete with the likes of Snapchat, they have since added a new feature called the Save For Later Feature.

The purpose of this is so that if you find an image you really like you can then click the little bookmark on the bottom right of the image in order to save it to view later.

Below is a sample from Sharyn Hodges from Plett, who can be found at the following link:

https://www.instagram.com/sharynhodges/

Share With Friends

Not only can you like images and save them for later you can also share them with friends and family on Instagram.

There are two ways to do this, you can write a message as a comment and then put @ and their name or you can just put @ and their name then the message after which will send it as a private DM (message) to the person you mentioned.

A great way to tell them where you think you should visit.

Our Instagram

Naturally our social pages are set up to link to our Blog, however we do try and post as regularly as possible.

Our Instagram page is rather new and therefore we are still working on content, but please do follow us and show your support.

You can find us at:

https://www.instagram.com/braai_brothers/

Summary

Of course there are the usual ways by a quick search on Google of where to visit whilst in a location, but often it isn’t as up to date as Social Media with certain aspects.

For example in Plettenberg Bay there is currently an event called Plett Rage. We would not have heard of if was wasn’t for the recent posts on Instagram.

Pinterest is another method of searching but we prefer Instagram!