Show the world your home town with the #feetonmyhometown Instagram Challenge
One person’s foreign land is another person’s home town. Join me for the month of October in showing the world your city, village, town, island or hamlet through the #feetonmyhometown Instagram Challenge!
What’s an Instagram Challenge?
Instagram Challenges are just little photo challenges that run for a defined period of time (365 days, a month, a week…) on a specific theme, often with prompts for each day. They’re great to encourage Instagram-ers to take and post more photos, which gives our creativity a shot in the arm, and opens up even more diverse opportunities for conversations to happen.
This October, I’m going to be running a month-long, daily Instagram Challenge specifically on the theme of our home towns. I’d love you to join me in showing the rest of the world aspects of the place you know best…where you live.
There’s so much around us in our day to day lives that is fascinating to other people. Your home town is someone else’s foreign land.
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land. – G.K.Chesterton
How does the #feetonmyhometown challenge work?
At the bottom of this post you’ll find the prompts for each day of October. The idea is that on each day you post a photo from your home town that somehow relates to that prompt, and in doing so you’ll be showing the rest of the Instagram world interesting aspects of where you live.
Plus you add hashtags so that other people taking part can find your photos to like and comment on. Perhaps you’ll even find some great new accounts to follow.
What are the hashtags?
So we can all find each other’s photos, we’ll add hashtags to each photo. First, tag them with #feetonmyhometown, then also add #feeton[nameofyourtown]. So, for instance, I’ll be using the #feetonmelbourne tag.
I’d love there to eventually be a huge library of photos and information that we can all access via the hashtags when we’re planning travel, or just to check out interesting aspects of our own home towns.
What are the rules?
I’m not big on rules. Join in when and how you want.
Post a photo for each prompt every day in October, or just jump in and out as you like. Go back and tag old relevant photos if you have some. Take all the photos for the month in one day walking around your town, or take them day-by-day. You don’t need to follow the prompts in order if you don’t want to, but I will only be featuring that day’s prompt photos for the feature post.
Show us your local suburb or area, or your whole city. ‘Home town’ is a very fluid concept. It could be somewhere you have just arrived in, or somewhere you’ve lived in forever. It could even be somewhere you used to live, or somewhere you would like to live – your future self’s home town.
In addition to #feetonmelbourne, I’ll also be posting #feetonyork and #feetonmalvern…yes, I’ll be posting three times a day, to include the city I work in, the Western Australian town I grew up in, and the area within Melbourne I know best.
My Instagram account is private, can I still take part?
Absolutely! You can post photos for your own followers to see the best of your home town. Even though the wider Instagram community will not be able to see your photos, add the #feetonmyhometown tags anyway, so that if your followers want to see other home town photos, they can use the tag to find other public Instagram-ers taking part.
Of course, if I’m not following you, I won’t be able to see your photos, but that’s totally fine if you would prefer to remain private!
What’s a feature post?
At the end of each day, I’ll look through all the #feetonmyhometown photos for that day’s prompt and if there’s multiple photos posted fresh that day, I’ll feature a collage of my favourites, with tags back your (public) Instagram account. It’s a great opportunity to promote your Instagram account to new followers.
I’ll wait until after 12 noon on the following day to do a feature post, to allow for all the international time zone differences.
What do I need to do to join in the #feetonmyhometown Instagram Challenge?
1. Copy and save this list of daily prompts to somewhere on your phone so you can easily refer to it each day, or if you would prefer, I can send you an email reminder each day with the prompt for that day. Sign up for email reminders using this link.
Or, if you would rather focus on prompts one week at a time, I’ll post weekly reminders on Instagram. This is the one for week 1:
2. Follow my Instagram account (@feetonforeignlands) so that you stay right up to date with all the details of the #feetonmyhometown Challenge and to see the feature posts and the weekly reminders.
3. Copy and save this image to post it to your Instagram account before 1 October. Add the #feetonmyhometown hashtag to that post so that we can all find each other.
4. Take (or dig out) photos of your home town for each of the prompts.
5. Post an appropriate photo to your Instagram account each day with the tags: #feetonmyhometown and #feeton[nameofyourtown]
Simple!
I’m looking forward to a 31 day tour of home towns right around the world. Vicarious Instagram travel is such a treat!
So, who’s on board? Which home town will your feet (and camera) be on?
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