Visit Scotland | Alba
Article published 13/10/2023

Deep dive on Instagram

To stay ahead and maintain our presence on social media, our team are constantly analysing the performance of past posts.

We test new ideas and try out trends to cut through the noise, and we position our content effectively to a global audience.

Organic social media influences the start of the consumer journey. These are social media posts that people encounter by themselves on the strength of their own popularity.

We did not pay anyone to push these posts to more users.

Because of the role of organic social media, we focus our content at this stage on destination awareness that is relevant and seasonal. This helps the content to stand out.

This news item will focus on our Instagram activities. There are many strategic and tactical ways you can use Instagram to leverage your posts to be seen by more people.

In this article:

For July, out of our top ten posts for reach, seven of the posts were Instagram carousels.

Each one with a leading image to engage the audience instantly, and the rest to tell a story or showcase something that might be lesser known.

People can like or comment on these kinds of posts.

It’s not only great images that will catch their eye in the feeds, it might also inspire them to visit one of the locations. This is reflected in the number of users that save our Instagram carousel posts.

In July, we had over 10,000 saves across our Instagram posts. Our most popular one was the North East 250 carousel, with over 2000 saves.

We were able to talk about road trips, which is a popular topic on Instagram. Importantly, we linked it to local businesses that were on this route.

This encouraged visitors to slow down and enjoy the local offering of this area. Simultaneously, it also encouraging those businesses to engage with the post.

Stories

Stories are another great place to engage your audience, but to also make your business more discoverable on social.

They're mainly shown to your existing audience unless you use a hashtag or a location sticker tap. A sticker tap is a location tag, a hashtag, or a tag mentioning another Instagram account.

People who click on these will also see all other publicly available content, helping make your content more discoverable.

When you @mention someone, they can share this on their stories which will then be shown to their audience too.

Our Instagram story about food with over 1,000 stick taps

Our Instagram story about food and drink with over 1,000 sticker taps

In July, we used Stories to promote local business, using them to inspire people to consider visiting these places.

But we also used them to appeal to our audience who have differing levels of knowledge about these locations in Scotland.

In each story we used the location sticker, to tell people where this is, but also to reach non-followers.

We also used the @mention sticker to highlight businesses showcased. This not only directed people to the business, but it also allowed the business to share this and reach a new audience. 

Stories are only live for 24 hours, but can be very effective. For one of our food and drink stories there were over 1,000 sticker taps to the locations and business featured.

Top tips for posting on Instagram

It's always useful to keep the following in mind:

  • use carousel posts to strategically place images
  • try to always use location and hashtag stickers in stories to bring in a new audience
  • use the @mention sticker to mention other businesses

It's also good to collaborate with other businesses local to you. By tagging each other you can promote your business to each other’s audience.

Example case study

Imagine you are an accommodation business.

In a story, you could show your business, tag nearby places to eat or things to do, and mention these are nearby while using the location sticker.

The businesses tagged could then share this story on their channel, showcasing your business to their audience. This not only improves your relationship with local businesses. It also further promotes your accommodation.

By showing what is on offer in the local area, you tell a story to your audience and help them visualise what a visit would look like for them.

Related links

Our marketing calendar

Discover how you can align with our marketing activity throughout the year to get the greatest reach.