Social Media System for Tourism Marketing Success

Course Content

7:35

We'll shortly move on to look at how we can make your social media more systematic and effective, but I think it's useful perhaps to start with some of the basics on how you can reach more potential visitors using social media. So essentially, you need to have high engagement. High engagement means that people have actually had a chance to do something on your posts or with your posts. So we are trying to encourage followers to comment or share so that the people who are either following them or are friends with them see your posts. I'll explain this in a moment.

You'll start to see it as we go through this session. So you're trying to attract new followers and if you're trying to do that then one easy way of doing it is to comment on bigger accounts preferably early because that's when more people see it. So if you have a 100 followers and you'd like to get more you might go to my Facebook account Yorkshire Treasures and when I post something interesting you comment on it because when you make a comment other people see that you have made that comment and they might think oh yeah that's something interesting I would like to follow that person or you might share one of my posts and add in your own comment or introduction as you share it to show why it's interesting to you, as well as creating your own direct posts. So when you can create posts which are in turn also shareable, then both your followers and your non followers have a chance to see those posts and that helps to extend reach. I've got an example of how that's really worked for me later in the session.

So you might ask what makes a post shareable? Many, many different things, but some of the examples are how to information, something which is a bit more of a perhaps local knowledge or a tip, some kind of behind the scenes information, information on news or local events that are coming up, things that people want to share with others to say, to show themselves being helpful or to spread the word. Something is unusual or quirky, makes it very shareable because people are intrigued by it. And you'll also find if something is really beautiful, they will share it. If it's just an average, because there's so much beauty, around us and, you know, an average view, people perhaps might not share that, or if something is quite cute.

Now you might find that people are more likely to share your posts if you put your kittens in every picture, but you have to question whether it is relevant to your business. So you could do that just to wake up the algorithm a little, but do be careful about sharing things that are not really directly relevant to your business. We need to kind of keep our topics and keep consistency of content because that's one of the things that really makes a difference. So if you're really wanting to see some good growth, then you need to encourage your followers to do something to get that engagement. So they have to like, comment or share your posts.

That then determines who else sees it. Now if you haven't been getting any good engagement, if you get very few likes or comments, then even if you've got a thousand followers, that thousand followers are not seeing your posts. Because the way that these algorithms work is they show the posts that look like they're going to be the most successful, the most interesting. They're not showing everyone everything all the time because they would be just totally overwhelmed. So engagement is really, really important.

So from now on, you're thinking about not just here's a post, it's how can I get people to like this, to comment on it, or to share? And by the way, just liking something doesn't help as much as someone commenting or sharing. So, the other question that we just need to deal with right now is which social media should you be using? And I would say focus on one social media platform and really get very good at that before you try and move on to another. If you're feeling overwhelmed and it could well be because you're using several different channels and you're trying to do them all, It's really tricky to do that, it's exhausting.

The one way around it might be that you've combined your Facebook and your Instagram, you've linked rather your Facebook and Instagram, accounts and if you're doing that just be wary that they are different. And as time goes by, they're becoming more and more different, and so you do need to adapt your messages within those posts. For example, Instagram still uses hashtags, not to a great degree as they did in the past. And if you're using, combining those posts and your Instagram post appears on Facebook as well with hashtags people know you've linked the post, it looks lazy and it looks a bit odd to suddenly see hashtags on Facebook. So think about one social media channel and if you think about it whichever platform that you decide there are millions of people on there you don't need to be everywhere you just need to be doing one thing really well before maybe you move on And so it's all about choosing the platform that your visitors are on or your potential visitors are on and where you also feel comfortable posting.

So if there's something that you hate don't do it unless you really, really do know that that's where your visitors are. So in general, I would say focusing on Facebook and or Instagram is the way forward and as I've already said Facebook is more powerful for tourism businesses generally. So what really counts is consistency. And when I say consistency, I mean it about I mean it's two different ways. One is posting at regular intervals, setting something which then becomes a habit so that people know they can rely on you and shows that you are not just sort of suddenly posting and then you stop.

That also helps, people to see more of your post because the algorithm rewards consistency and consistency of content. So if you're always talking about your local area, always talking about your business, Instagram or Facebook, whichever channel you're using, knows that that's your topic, and they know which sort of people are more likely to like your topic. So they will show your post to people that not following you at the moment. If you suddenly start to post about something completely different or you suddenly start to talk about your cats, then that's not so consistent and that could be a problem for you in the future. And, if you are using technology as one of your excuses for not doing more or just thinking no I can't do Facebook, I can't do Instagram, I can't do whatever.

There are so many online solutions. There is so much online advice available. I don't think that should be an excuse anymore because these platforms are very, very easy to use. So let's stop using that as a, as a next use. And let's just get on with the actual content that we need to be using.

In the next section we're going to look at how to integrate your marketing to make your social media more powerful, more effective and much easier.

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