As a teacher, you probably spend too much of your time coaxing your students to put down their phones and pay attention to the real world. But, when you travel with your students, using the power of social media can be a great way to connect the group and keep families and friends at home informed of what you’re doing.
Instagram is a great tool for sharing photos and updates, and making everyone feel involved in the trip. Here are 5 easy ways to get the most out of Instagram on your educational experience this summer.
1. Create a public profile
The easiest way to make sure everyone can follow along with your trip is to create a unique, public profile. This can be a profile that you use again and again for future trips, for everything from promotion and recruitment to showing on-tour activities. Signing up is easy and free.
In your final pre-departure meeting, make everyone aware of the profile. Let parents know they can follow along with their kids’ adventures here, and make sure everyone is comfortable with having their photos taken. It’s always important to be respectful of students’ wishes if they prefer not to be featured.
If having a public profile is against your school’s guidelines, or you feel more comfortable with a private profile, that’s okay, too! Just be sure to let everyone know they must request to follow you, and you must accept their request before they any see any photos.
2. Create a unique hashtag
Hashtags are a perfectly easy way to collect content from all of your travelers while on tour. Anyone with a public profile can use your hashtag, and you’ll be able to scroll through all the photos in one convenient location.
When choosing a hashtag, it’s best to use something unique (that no one outside your group would think to use) and easy (so your travelers can remember it and want to use it). A formula like “#SchoolLocationYear” would be great – it is descriptive, easy to remember, and short & sweet! As an example, if you are at Central High School, and planning to travel to France, you could use “#CHSFrance2019”.
As a bonus, when you are recruiting for your next tour, you can direct students to this hashtag to see what fun their peers had on this trip. Never underestimate the power of FOMO (fear of missing out) when recruiting!
3. Be descriptive & helpful
Your friends and family back home will be living vicariously through your posts, so be descriptive! Location tagging is a great way to do this. When you use a location on your post, your followers can view more pictures from that place – be it a restaurant, park, theater, whatever. It’s a fun and easy way to spark some wanderlust in them, and can also help you remember the details of your trip when you look back at your posts.
Some people might be uncomfortable with advertising their live location online. We like to recommend that you add the location later, and either post the photos at the end of the day while you’re relaxing in your hotel, or simply edit the post to add a location once you’ve moved on.
Many local businesses or tourist attractions will also have their own Instagram accounts. Tagging them can be mutually beneficial. By tagging them, you’re providing a detailed account to your followers of the people you’ve met and interacted with on your trip. They can peruse their profile and get to know them a little better, too. It also promotes the local account, and can help drive more visits and business their way. If you had a really nice experience with someone, they will definitely appreciate the free advertising!
Don’t forget to tag @exploricatravel in your posts, too! We love seeing what our groups are up to on tour, and we might even share a few on our own profile.
4. Use the ‘stories’ feature
Instagram stories, the short-term videos and photos that can be shared and viewed for 24 hours, have quickly become an obsession in the social world. Over 500 million people use stories every single day! Stories are a great way to share tons of content that you might not necessarily want or need to keep in your feed. Where Instagram feeds tend to be filled with more curated, thoughtful imagery and content, stories can be more off-the-cuff, real-time examples of what you’re doing.
All of the features of regular posts, like location tagging, hashtags, and tagging other profiles are available in the stories feature. One really great feature is if any of your travelers tag you in their story, you can share it in yours (inception, basically). When someone mentions you in a story, you’ll get a notification in your direct messages (the little arrow in the top right of your feed). Then there’s a quick and easy link that says, “Add this to your story” – and that’s it! Another easy way to gather content.
5. Get the students involved
While traveling you will have dozens of mini content machines with you – your students! They will be snapping everything that happens, and can be a great way to fill the hashtag feed and the “tagged” section of your profile.
Your bus time will be a great opportunity to remind them to tag you. Reiterate the hashtag and profile handle daily so they have no excuse to forget (who are we kidding, they’ll still forget at least once!) To see these tagged photos, go to your profile page in the app. Right above the photos you will see this icon. Any public profile that has tagged you will show up here – and, your followers can see them, too!
The most important thing to remember when using Instagram for your trip is to have fun! It can be a great tool for keeping in touch with loved ones at home, and for connecting with those you are traveling with. However, keep in mind it’s just as important to savor the moments in real life, and not rely too much on your phone screen.
Happy travels, and remember to follow @exploricatravel and bring us along on your adventures!