How to Create a New Location on Instagram

Instagram Locations are a fantastic way to increase exposure for your business (more on this later).

If you’ve used Instagram you’ve more than likely seen images or videos tagged with specific locations.

Here’s one from Hans Zimmer in Melbourne last night, some of the musicians took a backstage photo and added a #hashtag and a location (Rod Laver Arena) to the post.

Instagram offers an aggregate view of all posts that have this location tagged (similar to #hashtags).

Locations offer a way for your business to get an aggregate view of people taking photos.

They offer an advantage over #hashtags. Why? Often you won’t have a #hashtag that you tell customers to use, so they won’t know about it and therefore they won’t use it.

If they don’t use your #hashtag then you can’t even track down the image, or even see it. Locations solve this problem.

Another advantage with a location is that you’ll start showing in Nearby Locations in both Instagram & Facebook.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years you’ve probably heard that Instagram was acquired by Facebook.

They’ve slowly migrated all locations on Instagram to Facebook Places (or locations that can be checked into on Facebook).

This means that in order to create a Location on Instagram, you actually have to use the Facebook Mobile app.

To get started, just open up the Facebook mobile app and start creating a status update. You’ll need to click Check in as if you were Checking into a location.

When you try to Check in, Facebook will start showing you nearby locations that already exist. Since we’re trying to create a new one you need to click the x to close the suggestions.

Once you’ve closed the suggestions, Facebook will allow you to type in your own Custom Check in name. Do that, then click the blue box to proceed.

Category is an important part of the Location. You’re given the option to choose “Home” as a category, if you do that then the Location will not show on Instagram.

You need to include the Location in a proper category and the location must also be public.

You’ll be required to fill our some final details which are dependant on which category you chose for the Location.

Once done, just click complete and you’re done!

You must use this new location on Facebook at least once before it’ll show on Instagram.

There’s speculation that it may need to be used a number of times by different people before you will be able to use it (possibly to prevent users creating spammy locations etc). Feel free to discuss in the comments what has worked for you.

You should now be able to select your Location inside Instagram 😎