During my brief few months working for Home Exchange, I developed an Instagram Story strategy to encourage members to read articles shared on the blog and tell us their travel experiences as home exchangers. Community is a huge part of being a home exchanger, so many of these Instagram Stories revolve around content members shared with us, or encouraging members to communicate freely with us and their fellow members.
Icons for the Instagram Stories saved as highlights
Schedule for Instagram Posts and Stories that aligned with the blog
When featuring a member's story of their travel experiences it was done in a series of 3 - Sharing the story via link to blog, providing a direct link to homes in that area, and a final Story image to encourage followers to share their own story with us to be featured.
Examples of the Instagram Story slides that were created to share stories from members.
Another push was to have members share their travel tips for different regions, each Instagram Story started with an introductory image of the destination with a direct link to homes in that area. It was then followed by 3 Destination Tips (seen below) and concluded with the slide for members to submit their Destination Tips with us.
Destination Tips
We worked with numerous travel bloggers and encouraged them to share their experiences and to host takeovers of the Instagram account. This was the strategy developed for sharing the takeovers.
An example of the blogger takeover for the Instagram Story
Community engagement was really important for the blog and Instagram to be successful, to maintain such, I developed mini polls to run each Monday as something unique and fun to create conversations around travel and experiences.
Some final slides for an Instagram Story to share a blog article of the Top Destinations of 2019 and encouraging members to share their tips and stories with us.