Pinpoint Pals Travel Instagram
Meet Pinpoint Pals, a space where studying abroad feels less overwhelming and a lot more exciting. While living together in Luxembourg, Sadie Sorensen and I shared a vision to create something we wished we had—a space that helps students feel more prepared, confident, and inspired for the journey we were experiencing ourselves.
Pinpoint Pals brings together real insights, practical tips, and curated recommendations to guide students through life abroad. It’s designed to make the experience more approachable while encouraging others to fully embrace every opportunity along the way.
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Content Pillars
CURATION
Attractive and aesthetically pleasing content
ORGANIZATION
Tips, Tricks, Food, Activities, Places to Stay, all in one place
ATTAINABILITY
Providing itineraries for budget-conscious college students who want to study abroad realistically
INSPIRATION
Reels and recaps to ignite adventure within our audience for potential trip ideas
Value Proposition
“Providing curated and attainable guides to inspire you for your future travels abroad”.
Persona
To create a well-rounded and intentional experience, Sadie and I developed a target audience persona: Brooke Watson. Brooke is a 20-year-old student at UT Austin studying media and communications. She hopes to study abroad but feels overwhelmed by the planning process, especially as the first in her family to take this step.
Outside of academics, Brooke enjoys spending time with friends, scrolling Pinterest, and junk journaling. She has always dreamed of traveling the world, is highly organized, and has a strong eye for aesthetics and curation—making her eager for guidance that is both practical and visually inspiring.
Our Network
After researching a variety of channels, we decided on using Instagram as our primary platform to build the Pinpoint Pals brand. Ultimately, Instagram’s combination of a young demographic, a travel-friendly content format, trend-driven discovery tools, and community-building tools makes it the strongest platform for Pinpoint Pals. Because its primary user base overlaps with the study-abroad demographic, we were able to effectively use the platform to showcase our destinations, highlight travel tips, and inspire followers to go abroad. Instagram’s discoverability tools, which include Reels and Explore, enhance the brand’s ability to reach new audiences interested in travel content.
We also introduced Threads as another channel to share our content and build a community for the Pinpoint Pals network.
Finally, we used Linktree as our base for our free, downloadable itineraries from our travels abroad.
Content Calendar
At this point, we moved forward with creating content and building out a calendar to keep us consistent. After analyzing what was performing well and what was being rejected by our target audience, we were able to polish our calendar and incorporate sustainable posts to keep our brand growing.
This content sample is a post we created after evaluating and supplementing our prior research. We added music, more hashtags, and subtexts on all of our posts to build engagement!
Project Summary
Through developing this project, I learned the importance of breaking down complex experiences into structured, user-friendly steps that reduce uncertainty and cognitive overload. I also learned how to pivot and iteratively refine our content as the project evolved, including integrating music to enhance tone and engagement, strengthening subtext to improve clarity and meaning, and conducting hashtag research to better understand and expand audience reach. Overall, this project deepened my understanding of how empathy, adaptability, and user-centered design can transform an overwhelming process into one that feels accessible and achievable.