Social Media System for Tourism Marketing Success

Course Content

5:11

Hello. In case we haven't met, I'm Susan Briggs from the Tourism Network and it's really great that you've decided to sign up for this online course. It's quite short but it is quite intense. I hope you've got a notebook ready to make some notes because there are quite a lot of actions within it. And I also hope that as I go through it it will stimulate some ideas for posts that you can quickly scribble down now.

So it's all about being much more systematic with social media and the whole idea of this is that you avoid some of the overwhelm that you might have been feeling. It's about creating a simple, repeatable system so that it feels much more purposeful and enables you to create content that really does help you to achieve your business aims. I know that for some people they feel like they're posting on social media without any real aim behind it and that can feel like a waste of time. Excuse me. It's also, about integrating social media with all your other marketing.

And this is perhaps the most important thing that you'll learn. It's about doing one thing, one post, and then using it in many different ways to help you save time, reduce overwhelm, and just be much much more effective. And as we go through I'm going to give you some ideas for really good strategic content and explain also how it works. So lots of lots of angles for you to consider there and the main thing here is to help you reduce overwhelm. Now what I think is often happening is that we start to post and we're thinking okay I need to think of something to write about.

It's always something to do, it's like a chore sometimes and that can make it feel very disjointed. Perhaps you're feeling a bit confused about what you need to be doing. It just doesn't feel like there's any sense of purpose. It just feels like a waste of time. So, what I'm hoping will come out of this course is that from now on, you will have very clear steps of or actions and they all fit within a specific process.

So we're changing our mindset right now. It's not about posting on social media, it's about taking control of your income and doing the things that matter and that actually make a difference. So I hope that will help you feel more focused and I hope as we go through this you'll see exactly what I mean. It's based on everything I've learned over the last thirty five years and I use social media but I use it as part of the whole overall marketing mix and I also want to stress to you that whether you're using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, whatever you're using, the principles are the same and whatever platform you want to use, it will work if you apply this systematic approach. I do find, however, for tourism businesses, Facebook performs best for delivering visitors and bookings.

Now that's not going to be the case for absolutely everyone, but for most traditional tourism businesses, that is certainly the case. But what I'm talking about will apply to any social media platform. What's really important is you have to be consistent and you need to be using considered content, which is what I'm going to talk to you about. Just as one example, I set out on an experiment. I had an old account called Yorkshire Treasures.

It had 3,000 followers, but I hadn't actually used it for about six years. I just left that account dormant, and I decided to very deliberately build it up and see what I could achieve in a given time so I could really talk about what works. Built that quite well. Last year reached 40,000,000 people, which meant that I had very high engagement as a proportion of followers. And that's really what makes the difference.

You don't need to have millions of followers, you don't need to have thousands of followers, but you do need high engagement to make social media work. I'm going to talk to you about how you do that. So from now on no more standalone social media. Your visitors get their information and their inspiration from many different sources. Word-of-mouth is of course the one that we all rely on much of the time but there are many other social media is really word-of-mouth but you could say on steroids it's really beefed up, your website is important, you might be still using print in some way and just leaflets or posters, perhaps you're managing to get articles, and media coverage through PR without actually paying for it and perhaps you're using mailings.

Ideally, you would be doing all of these things, perhaps not the print. What we're going to be looking at is how your social media fits in with all these other activities so it's not just a standalone activity anymore. In the next section I'll talk to you very quickly about how to reach some more potential visitors before we start to look at your business aims and what you need to actually do to post more effectively.

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