How to Instagram Your Vacation Without Totally Alienating Your Followers

How to Instagram Your Vacation Without Totally Alienating Your Followers

During this trip, I just wanted to be myself without being over indulgent. I love taking pictures or pretty much everything. I love the voyeurism of Instagram and the narcissism and self obsession of selfies. People create visual stories with real personality and engagement on Instagram.

While I love all these things. What’s ultimately remarkable is just how people elect to capture the world in pictures and images all around them.

Posting images of yourself on vacation is like impression management and offers a direct window into your time lapse world but it is a habit that is continually criticized by those who deem it a self obsessed activity.

People paint a particular picture of themselves and they uses it to prompt the kind of reaction they seek, be it for envy, curiosity, revenge or whatever reason. People who have that narcissistic self obsessed motivation, they want to provoke jealously or convince themselves of something. They want people to wish they were with them or were them or to make them spitting mad.

New Instagram Filters

Some good news for snap happy fans of the Instagram App: Now there are three new photo filters are arriving soon, and Instagram plans to keep adding more such filters in the near future. So if your out travelling the Instagram picture train has new filters to keep it happy.

Istagram has gone for long periods of time without adding new filters,  it added five new ones in December after a two-year break. Now Instagram intends to add new filters “more regularly going forward,” which should be music to the ears of its users who don’t like having to outsource their filtering to other image apps, indeed two of Instagram’s new filters are now its most popular which is good news for travellers.

Using Instagram on Vacations

People are really excited about their vacations but for the rest of the world, it’s just not that interesting, its like watching a wedding video, most people want the highlights, not the full game. It’s like the idea that you have to sit through someone else’s vacation. Every meal, every step and you’re not really experiencing it with them at all are you.

How to Instagram Your Vacation Without Totally Alienating Your Followers

How to Instagram Your Vacation Without Totally Alienating Your Followers

Through Instagram, we stayed connected to home. We kept our cell phones on airplane mode, but cutting off our cell service wasn’t necessarily limiting our social media activity. Almost every cafe and restaurant supplied us with good WiFi, so whenever we made a food stop or went back to the hotel room , we’d cycle through our photos, selecting and uploading the good ones to Instagram.

Upon returning home I realized I’d taken over 300 photos on the vacation, some which were of the same image just shot at different angles. I only posted 20 on Instagram, a solid ten percent, the requisite Eiffel Tower photos and other essential vacation pics and so forth.

Social Media Travel Etiquette

So what’s the best social media travel etiquette using Instagram? I still don’t know. The real answer is a mix of “who cares?” and “doesn’t really matter.” But the end game should ideally be sincere: You’re in a cool and beautiful place. You’re happy. Pretty simple, while some people will certainly find the ‘gram flexing obnoxious and obsessive, others want more and more from you.

How was I supposed to effectively stunt on Instagram without appearing obnoxious? Its certainly not easy.

Instagram on Apple Watch

Soon of course Instagram is coming to Apple Watch, the Apple Watch Instagram app is designed to make Instagram even more intimate and in the moment. Whether you are out on a morning walk or enjoying a cup of coffee with friends, with a quick glance you can see the world as it happens and interact with the photos that matter to you.

Its probably just as well that I couldn’t use this on the trip. So now you know how to Instagram your vacation without totally alienating your followers is not necessarily the easiest thing.

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