Roughly half the parents who follow your venue on Instagram will scroll past your posts without tapping the heart. They see them. They stay quiet.
That figure comes from Ofcom. In 2026, its research on how adults in the UK use the internet showed that just 49% of adult social media users posted, shared, or commented, compared to 61% in 2024 (Ofcom). This time, Ofcom has used a different methodology from before; we would consider this difference a trend rather than a definite decrease in usage. However, if you operate a soft play centre, a farm park, or a pick-your-own farm, this trend is one to watch out for. Your audience hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s been getting silent, and a silent audience won’t take your posts to those families you have not yet reached.
In this guide, I will explain what Instagram really favors, why it’s difficult to get past the first hour on Instagram for family destinations, and how purchasing real Instagram likes can fit into your plan with quality content.
Parents are scrolling more and posting less
Ofcom also asked people whether they worried their posts might come back to bite them. From 43% to 49%, there was an increase in the number who said yes. There were those who had already stopped posting, while others preferred to post stuff that vanishes such as Stories rather than stuff that remains on their grid.
Here’s how that plays out on your floor. It’s a wet Tuesday. A dad films his daughter flying down your big slide and puts it on his Story. By Wednesday lunchtime it’s gone. He had a great morning; he’ll probably be back before half-term, and he still won’t leave a single comment on the toddler-zone post you spent twenty minutes lighting. Plenty of parents are also wary of sharing their children’s faces alongside a tagged location, and you can hardly blame them.
None of this means families are staying home. VisitBritain counted roughly 928 million tourism day visits in England in 2025, with people spending £53 per trip on average (VisitBritain). The demand is real. What you need is to be the venue a parent finds on Thursday night, phone in hand, trying to rescue the weekend.
What does Instagram reward in a post’s first hour?
Instagram is more open about this than you might expect. Feed signals include the popularity of a post in that ranking process, according to Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, who has released an explanation about ranking, and one of the signals includes popularity, i.e. how many users have liked the post and how quickly the likes, comments, saves, and shares are happening (Instagram). In the case of Explore, these signals are very heavily weighted compared to Feed and Stories.
This translates into two points for you. Not only is speed as important as volume, but the more quickly a post racks up likes, the more powerful the message sent, even if the post gains the same total number over the course of a week. And Explore is where strangers find you. Your 2,000 followers already know where you are. The family twenty minutes down the road who’ve never heard of your farm park will only meet you through Explore, a Reels recommendation, or a friend forwarding your post, which, going by Ofcom’s numbers, happens less than it used to.
Why family venues find the first hour so hard
Family venues have a tougher time here than most small businesses, and almost all of it comes down to timing.
Your followers are busiest at exactly the moment you’d want them looking. The school run, tea, bath and bedtime swallow the windows when parents might otherwise be on their phones.
Your posts also go off quickly. A post about this weekend’s pumpkin picking that only gains traction on Monday has missed its moment, and so has a half-term announcement that reaches families after they’ve booked somewhere else.
Then there’s size. A village farm park might have a few thousand followers, most of them within 30 miles, so there’s no big base to lift a post on its own. And the people who love you most are often the least likely to say so in public. Your regulars adore the place. They’re just not commenting.
Stack all that together and you get the problem every small venue recognises: a lovely Reel seen by 60 people, mostly regulars, that goes no further.
Where real likes fit, and where they don’t
Bought likes can give a good post a head start. That’s all they do. Used carefully, they send the early signal a strong post needs to reach people outside your follower list. They won’t rescue a weak post, and on their own they won’t fill a single space in your car park.
The kind of likes you buy matters a great deal. In 2018, Instagram began stripping out likes, follows, and comments generated by third-party apps designed to inflate popularity, and it asked affected users to change their passwords, because many of those apps worked by taking over people’s logins (Instagram).
It will be viewed as a violation of its policies by Instagram, so the use of the service involves some risks and is up to you whether to use it or not. There are two types of services that you’d better stay away from – those that ask for your password and those that offer you tens of thousands of likes overnight from clearly fake accounts.
Should you still consider it, choose a provider offering guaranteed real Instagram likes from active accounts without requiring anything but your username and delivering them gradually. Stormlikes is one example. It works from your username alone and says it will top up any likes that drop away within 30 days. Your login stays private, and the numbers still look believable to the parents reading them.
Four rules we’d give any venue
- Only boost posts that already earn it. Pick your best Reel of the week, the one your regulars would share if they were the sharing type. Never every post, and never a flat one.
- Stay near your usual numbers. If your posts normally get 30 likes, one sitting at 3,000 will look strange to every parent who scrolls past. Double or triple your normal and it just looks like a post that landed well.
- Never buy comments or reviews. Nothing ambiguous about this. Ever since 6 April 2025, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act forbids false reviews and hidden incentivized reviews, and the Competition and Markets Authority may penalize a business up to 10% of its worldwide revenue. Every review you get on Google or Tripadvisor has to be from a genuine visitor. A ‘like’ makes you more visible; a review is what parents use to make their booking decision.
- Judge it by what happens next. Saves, shares, profile visits, website taps and bookings show whether a post worked. If reach climbs and nobody taps through, your content or your offer needs work, and piling on more likes won’t change that.
What this looks like, venue by venue
Most family venues have one or two moments a year worth backing. Here’s where we’d put the effort, based on when parents usually plan their days out.If we had to pick one row to get right, it’d be the last. Families of children with additional needs tend to plan carefully, and when they find a venue that works for them, they pass it around their own groups. A calm, honest walkthrough of a quiet session can travel a long way once the right handful of parents see it.
A worked example: the lambing Reel
This one is made up, so swap our numbers for yours.
Say your farm park’s posts usually get about 35 likes. Your team films a 20-second Reel of a three-year-old bottle-feeding a lamb, with written permission from the child’s parent, and starts on the lamb’s face instead of your logo. It goes live at 7.30 pm on a Thursday. The caption answers what parents actually want to know: session times, price per child, whether booking is needed, and whether there’s a café for the grown-ups.
A small number of likes are ordered to be delivered in an hour, doubling the number of likes you usually receive. Your Reel is pinned to your profile and posted to your story, where a link to the booking page is added. You respond to all the comments on the post that night. A week later, you look at the insights section and see three figures: the number of accounts that weren’t following you, the number that saved it, and the number who clicked the link. If those moved, you know what kind of content to back next time. If they didn’t, you’ve still learnt something, and it cost a few pounds instead of a month of guesswork.
Start with the post, then give it a push
Parents are still hunting for days out. They’re just telling the internet about them less often, which leaves a lot of smaller family venues sitting on great content that new families never see. Early popularity is rewarded on Instagram, especially on Explore, and a few additional likes for your most interesting posts can give you an edge through that critical first hour. The smaller, the better. Do not tell anyone your password. Never do a fake review. And measure the whole thing in bookings, not in the number under the heart.
Roughly half the parents who follow your venue on Instagram will scroll past your posts without tapping the heart. They see them. They stay quiet.
That figure comes from Ofcom. In 2026, its research on how adults in the UK use the internet showed that just 49% of adult social media users posted, shared, or commented, compared to 61% in 2024 (Ofcom). This time, Ofcom has used a different methodology from before; we would consider this difference a trend rather than a definite decrease in usage. However, if you operate a soft play centre, a farm park, or a pick-your-own farm, this trend is one to watch out for. Your audience hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s been getting silent, and a silent audience won’t take your posts to those families you have not yet reached.
In this guide, I will explain what Instagram really favors, why it’s difficult to get past the first hour on Instagram for family destinations, and how purchasing real Instagram likes can fit into your plan with quality content.
Parents are scrolling more and posting less
Ofcom also asked people whether they worried their posts might come back to bite them. From 43% to 49%, there was an increase in the number who said yes. There were those who had already stopped posting, while others preferred to post stuff that vanishes such as Stories rather than stuff that remains on their grid.
Here’s how that plays out on your floor. It’s a wet Tuesday. A dad films his daughter flying down your big slide and puts it on his Story. By Wednesday lunchtime it’s gone. He had a great morning; he’ll probably be back before half-term, and he still won’t leave a single comment on the toddler-zone post you spent twenty minutes lighting. Plenty of parents are also wary of sharing their children’s faces alongside a tagged location, and you can hardly blame them.
None of this means families are staying home. VisitBritain counted roughly 928 million tourism day visits in England in 2025, with people spending £53 per trip on average (VisitBritain). The demand is real. What you need is to be the venue a parent finds on Thursday night, phone in hand, trying to rescue the weekend.
What does Instagram reward in a post’s first hour?
Instagram is more open about this than you might expect. Feed signals include the popularity of a post in that ranking process, according to Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, who has released an explanation about ranking, and one of the signals includes popularity, i.e. how many users have liked the post and how quickly the likes, comments, saves, and shares are happening (Instagram). In the case of Explore, these signals are very heavily weighted compared to Feed and Stories.
This translates into two points for you. Not only is speed as important as volume, but the more quickly a post racks up likes, the more powerful the message sent, even if the post gains the same total number over the course of a week. And Explore is where strangers find you. Your 2,000 followers already know where you are. The family twenty minutes down the road who’ve never heard of your farm park will only meet you through Explore, a Reels recommendation, or a friend forwarding your post, which, going by Ofcom’s numbers, happens less than it used to.
Why family venues find the first hour so hard
Family venues have a tougher time here than most small businesses, and almost all of it comes down to timing.
Your followers are busiest at exactly the moment you’d want them looking. The school run, tea, bath and bedtime swallow the windows when parents might otherwise be on their phones.
Your posts also go off quickly. A post about this weekend’s pumpkin picking that only gains traction on Monday has missed its moment, and so has a half-term announcement that reaches families after they’ve booked somewhere else.
Then there’s size. A village farm park might have a few thousand followers, most of them within 30 miles, so there’s no big base to lift a post on its own. And the people who love you most are often the least likely to say so in public. Your regulars adore the place. They’re just not commenting.
Stack all that together and you get the problem every small venue recognises: a lovely Reel seen by 60 people, mostly regulars, that goes no further.
Where real likes fit, and where they don’t
Bought likes can give a good post a head start. That’s all they do. Used carefully, they send the early signal a strong post needs to reach people outside your follower list. They won’t rescue a weak post, and on their own they won’t fill a single space in your car park.
The kind of likes you buy matters a great deal. In 2018, Instagram began stripping out likes, follows, and comments generated by third-party apps designed to inflate popularity, and it asked affected users to change their passwords, because many of those apps worked by taking over people’s logins (Instagram).
It will be viewed as a violation of its policies by Instagram, so the use of the service involves some risks and is up to you whether to use it or not. There are two types of services that you’d better stay away from – those that ask for your password and those that offer you tens of thousands of likes overnight from clearly fake accounts.
Should you still consider it, choose a provider offering guaranteed real Instagram likes from active accounts without requiring anything but your username and delivering them gradually. Stormlikes is one example. It works from your username alone and says it will top up any likes that drop away within 30 days. Your login stays private, and the numbers still look believable to the parents reading them.
Four rules we’d give any venue
What this looks like, venue by venue
Most family venues have one or two moments a year worth backing. Here’s where we’d put the effort, based on when parents usually plan their days out.If we had to pick one row to get right, it’d be the last. Families of children with additional needs tend to plan carefully, and when they find a venue that works for them, they pass it around their own groups. A calm, honest walkthrough of a quiet session can travel a long way once the right handful of parents see it.
A worked example: the lambing Reel
This one is made up, so swap our numbers for yours.
Say your farm park’s posts usually get about 35 likes. Your team films a 20-second Reel of a three-year-old bottle-feeding a lamb, with written permission from the child’s parent, and starts on the lamb’s face instead of your logo. It goes live at 7.30 pm on a Thursday. The caption answers what parents actually want to know: session times, price per child, whether booking is needed, and whether there’s a café for the grown-ups.
A small number of likes are ordered to be delivered in an hour, doubling the number of likes you usually receive. Your Reel is pinned to your profile and posted to your story, where a link to the booking page is added. You respond to all the comments on the post that night. A week later, you look at the insights section and see three figures: the number of accounts that weren’t following you, the number that saved it, and the number who clicked the link. If those moved, you know what kind of content to back next time. If they didn’t, you’ve still learnt something, and it cost a few pounds instead of a month of guesswork.
Start with the post, then give it a push
Parents are still hunting for days out. They’re just telling the internet about them less often, which leaves a lot of smaller family venues sitting on great content that new families never see. Early popularity is rewarded on Instagram, especially on Explore, and a few additional likes for your most interesting posts can give you an edge through that critical first hour. The smaller, the better. Do not tell anyone your password. Never do a fake review. And measure the whole thing in bookings, not in the number under the heart.
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