Instagram Location Stories: The Guide

Instagram location stories are stories that have been posted with a location sticker.

Location stickers are related to real venues: it could be a restaurant, a bar, a hotel, a monument, an arena and much more. Basically anything physical.

Instagram location stories are similar to classic Instagram stories in a sense that you can post pictures, videos, boomerangs and polls. The only difference is that location stories will be added to a reel of stories from people who posted at the same place, with the same location sticker.

By tagging your story with a location, your story will be added to the reel of the venue.

Let’s be honest: On Instagram, most people post stories for one main reason: to tell their followers they are enjoying a fantastic experience—eating at a Michelin-star restaurant, staying at a magnificent hotel in Bali, or skiing in Courchevel.

Having tagged your story with a location sticker, and if your profile is public, you might gain new followers from users that like to check locations.

Furthermore, those new followers should be highly engaged with your content since they specifically searched for the venue you tagged.

Get the vibe of a place

Suppose you are like me and don’t post any story, or you do it on your private Instagram account. In that case, location stories still have a significant advantage: they show you what real people think and do at a venue.

It becomes a way to discover new places and get honest feedback about their vibe.

You could see this feature as “behind the curtain”. If you need advice about a place, since it’s harder and harder to trust reviews on Tripadvisor or even Google Maps, Instagram location stories are a solid alternative to those sites.

You may have read that Gen Z uses Instagram and TikTok more and more to discover new restaurants, bars, and other venues.

It’s real, and one great feature that comes with Instagram location stories is the Instagram map. It helps us do precisely that: discovering new cool places to spend our Friday nights.

Let’s take a real example: you will visit New York in a few days and want to discover cool restaurants in Williamsburg.

What do you do:

1. You open your Instagram map
2. Search for Williamsburg
3. Filter to only display restaurants
4. You get a list of restaurants with posts, reels and stories

As posts and reels can be edited or posted by the restaurant’s owners, it’s much less the case with stories. So you can watch stories and check if the place and the vibe are what you want.

I would trust these location stories much more than Tripadvisor reviews.

As a venue owner or working in the social media team of venues, leveraging location stories can be very beneficial.

1. Through location stories, you can discover celebrities or famous influencers who tagged your place without getting invited.
2. You can see what guests share about your place and understand what they value most.
3. You can know how many stories are posted per day and track changes over time.
4. You can see what stories are being posted from competitors’ places and compare their audience response.
5. Finally, you can use location stories to identify who is visiting your competitors’ places and find relevant creators.

One of the best ways to work with location stories without spending all your day on your phone is to work with a tool like Prousto which will automate everything for you: from collecting stories and visualizing them to getting key figures about your audience.

Our motto: spend less time collecting content and more time learning from it.