Instagram - 5 lessons learned

Instagram, Youtube, Tiktok, Facebook etc. Almost everyone of us is using Social Media in a certain way. We share our lives with family, friends and sometimes strangers hoping that someone clicks "like" on a post we have just shared. And we get inspired by others - by their stories, tips & tricks, recepies, style and loads of other things. But how come that others have so many followers and others do not (or not really)?

We ourselves went on a world trip four years ago in 2017 - vanliving and backpacking for 10 months. We saw amazing nature, visited beautiful places, experienced some cool adventures met great people and took & shared, what I think, quite some nice pictures. We (well, I) thought just by sharing the pictures on instagram and coming up with suiting hastags would do the trick to get people interested in and inspired by our worldtrip. Little did we know haha. The only people interested in our stories were family and friends. And thanks that at least they were interested!

Now, that we re-do the travelling in Europe and because of our plan to emmigrate in 2021, I decided to dig deeper into the world of instagram and even though I know a lot about online marketing in general, I have learned so many new things in the last couple of days only about instagram. The goal with our insta/blog and vlog is not to become big traveller vloggers/bloggers, but I hope and believe that we can inspire others that there is always a plan b in life. That you can take a different road that will lead you as well to a happy (maybe different than planned) life. And that you should try to keep smiling and having fun. We want to make people smile.

Here are the first 5 biggest instagram lessons I have learned so far:

1. #Hashtags I was not aware of the face that hastags do matter soooooo much! Before I post a picture now, I actually think of what I will use and inform myself about the 'hashtags to use'. They are different than what I had in mind.

2. Find like-minded people You can find so many others on instagram that do almost the same like you and that have the same interests, life phylosophy and plans (here goes your USP ...). That itself is already very inspiring and fun I have to say.

3. Interaction

Even a small group of followers and accounts/people you follow gives you the possibility to interact. You get to know new people and as you share the same interest you always have something to talk about.

4. Think before you post

That is what I learned already with the hastags. I do not post random (or drunk haha) pictures anymore ... even though there is still the risk that what you find interesting is still not interesting for the outside world. It stays a gamble in a way.

5. Stay yourself

Even though I am getting to know the right hashtags now I try to show our story without copying too much (I mean, you do get inspiration from the good accounts). So I hope people will like our story and us :)