A peek into OYO Room's Instagram strategy

Recently we crossed the milestone of hitting 10K followers on Instagram. OYO first joined Instagram in April 2015. We realized that in order to be connected to the users today & utilize the popularity of one of the most powerful social media network, it is not only important to be active on the app but also have a strong strategy in place.

Instagram offers a wonderful opportunity to businesses that are looking to reach their target audience with engaging visual content.

At OYO, we aspire to bring our brand to the audience, one little square at a time. With the app recording more than 75 million users daily- the potential here is vast.

As per reports, more than 45 percent Instagram users rank the platform in their top 10 channels used for product discovery. Furthermore, 45.6 percent of users are expected to recall a brand marketing themselves on Instagram over TV ads and other old-style media.

Our community in Instagram is one of the most active ones compared to other platforms. In fact, we met a lot of interesting and passionate people who collaborated with us, shared with us their content and showed active participation.

Telling stories through pictures is an art form, and for any brand in today’s age, it is important to be able to weave a conversation over a drawn-out period of time. To capture the attention of the customers, creation of content should not just be likable but also shareable for your TA. On OYO’s Instagram account we post interesting photos- not just of our properties, but beautiful landscapes & monuments too. Our content bucket comes from travelers, photographers, our own properties, UGC generated content and other seasonal content.

Content calendars help plan, organize and schedule every single piece of content you publish online. Brands often make the mistake of posting too much content. You don’t need to post 5 pictures every day. The feed speed is still laid back on the app, and you don’t want to force yourself into the noise too often.  Without a proper content calendar in place, complete capitalization of efforts becomes tough to achieve. If the brand is posting the right images, consumers soak up the marketing message without any hardcore sales pitch. The use of geotagging and the right hashtags cannot be emphasized enough. We ensure that besides having our own hashtags #OYOgram & #OYOexplorer, our posts also have the popular travel related hashtags.

OYO also actively associates with different Instagram groups in India to organize InstaMeets, which is a great way of engaging with the community.  Mohit Challa from Instagram Ahmedabad says, “Being associated with OYO Rooms has been a great experience. Their team has a friendly start-up spirit yet very organized and professional about the way they do things. I have enjoyed working with them and look forward to future engagements. We believe in experimenting and trying new things. We recently tried Panorama- and the response was overwhelming."

Vizag as shared by Soumya

OYOgraphy is a photography contest initiated by OYO that aims to showcase photographs of places that would inspire people to travel more. We use Instagram as a platform for conducting the same. We were delighted to see the concept of #OYOgraphy being embraced by the community first time around. The number of mentions on #OYOgraphy we got were 608, which includes our 21 posts.

At OYO, we are a bunch of young enthusiastic people, who aren’t afraid to try new things. We are constantly experimenting with creatives and grids.

We aspire to continue focusing on growth and build our community on Instagram. We are still new to Instagram. Hence, in the coming days, there will be a lot of OYOmeetups, OYOgraphy, weekend campaigns, theme based events and so on which will be exciting and creatively enriching. We are also open to partnerships and will continue to interact with brands as well as independent pages on Instagram. While we do all of this our underpinnings will remain on content and engaging through it.

The creative for Valentine which was posted on 14th Feb 2016

The article is written by Siddharth Jain, Content and Engagement initiative for OYO Rooms.