How Combin Can Help Travel Photographers Flourish on Instagram

We Wander Everywhere is a travel blog run by an international couple, Marta Bucholc and Gabriele Ferrazzi. Marta, a digital art director from Poland, and Gabriele, an IT consultant from Italy, share the same love for exploring the world, as they do for each other.

Both passionate about visiting new places and capturing their peculiarities, it wasn’t long until they started to share their experience on Instagram, the biggest visual platform. 12K users already follow the couple’s journey, and more are joining every day.

We caught up with Marta to learn about how We Wander Everywhere built a loyal community and how Combin helps them find and engage new audience, at home and on the go.

What’s the idea behind We Wander Everywhere?

We are globally minded people that have met and connected with each other despite being from different countries. We found our calling in travelling and sharing what we saw and learned. And it goes beyond the beauty of architecture and landscapes! Behind every photo, there is a moment, a conversation, a person with their story, it’s important to include all these to show a bigger picture. Our goal is not just posting, it’s sharing the experience, the feeling, the knowledge. Real sharing requires putting a bit of your soul into it.

Your approach seems very natural and relaxed. Do you care about Instagram marketing trends or rapid growth at all?

Following your heart is so much more important than having a huge following. For us, there is really no anxiety about reaching a certain number or looking a certain way. What for? We believe that being authentic and doing what feels right is exactly what attracts like-minded folk and keeps them interested.

What we encounter during our trips is not always peachy and easy to swallow. Poverty, famine, abandoned children… Such things may put off many, but we are certain that they need to be covered. Luckily, there are also those who are eager to see the world in the round, acknowledge its problems, support a conversation about them. These people are our audience. There is an audience for everyone — just do you.

We sometimes post grid images and inspiring quotations about traveling or photography. They never get the same attention as our regular posts, but we are not aiming to just get likes. We want to create a nice profile that tells a story of us, of how we feel, of what we think.

How long have you been using Combin for and what results did it already bring?

We have been using Combin for two months, it helped us move from 10K to 12K followers.

I find it to be honest, or as they say, organic growth, I’m very happy with what we’ve accomplished over this period. Again, I never wanted to multiply our following five times over a month’s time, to have 50K followers that don’t really care about you, don’t engage with you. What’s the fun?

Did you have to adapt your growth strategy to Combin?

The strategy remained the same, Combin just gave us proper, time-saving tools to apply it.

We usually post every couple of days — every day would be perfect, but such schedule is hard to maintain with a full-time job.

Since we are a mixed couple, we use hashtags in English to attract international audience, then hashtags in Italian and Polish to directly target people from our countries. 
We also always add hashtags that describe what’s portrayed on the photo and specify the place where it was taken.

Then we search the posts that were published under these hashtags and look through followers of the accounts similar to ours. We follow, like and comment them to get noticed.

Could you give us details on how you incorporate the strategy into Combin on the regular?

The first step is running a hashtag search. These are the basic tags we’d search by:

#travel #myvacationhistory #travelphoto #traveltheworld #travelingphotography #lovetraveling #traveladdict #ontheroad #roadtrip #adventure #photography #makemoments #neverstopexploring #kayaktravelpro #podrozniczka #polkawpodrozy #globepeople #polishgirltravelling #viaggiaredasoli

We’d also initiate a search by followers of our account’s competitors — the accounts with similar content and the same or bigger following.

The second step is search results filtration. Combin has a handy set of filters that hide profiles and posts of celebrities, shops, our ex-followings, accounts we already follow and accounts that already follow ours.

The third step is interaction. We follow, like last posts and leave comments containing simple, but personalized message, taking into consideration the language used in bio or caption.

The fourth step is unfollowing all who didn’t follow our account back. I do it at the end of the week and repeat the cycle from the first step.

How would you sum up your experience with Combin?

Loved it! Combin is exactly the tool I was looking for. Unlike other Instagram growth boosting bots, Combin gives you a real control over the automated actions — it’s you who chooses who to follow and what to like. It saves a great deal of time by automating the exact actions I would do to find and engage new audience on my own.

Maybe it’s not as fast and immediate to bring a whole lot of new followers as other automated services, but for me it’s about a real organic growth and Combin gives me just that. Besides, it’s cheaper than other Instagram growth tools I’ve tried.

Do you have any advice for fellow-travel photographers that could want to follow your steps and start growing their following with Combin?

I recommend taking time to personalize the comments, it yields the best results. Silent liking and following or basic comments do bring attention, of course, but it’s no match to what an individual approach can give. So my first advice is putting a little effort into making potential followers feel special.

My second advice is being safe. Don’t just create an Instagram account and jump into following and liking as many users and posts as possible. After consulting with multiple social media managers, I learned that Instagram algorithm is now ruthlessly punishing “young” accounts with suspiciously high activity. All Instagram accounts have unique activity limits, it’s important to stay in your lane, otherwise you’ll get banned.

Combin has three modes to regulate the intensity of the interaction tasks performance: Safe, Optimal and Risky. I advise new users starting on the Safe or Optimal mode, and switching to the Risky only when the account is a couple of years old and has consistent high activity level.

Keep these in mind, be consistent, and your Instagram will definitely flourish!