Social Media System for Tourism Marketing Success

Course Content

9:14

This is where we start to step things up a little and where we really become more systematic in order to make your marketing more effective. It's all about integrating your social media into all of your other marketing. By that I don't mean simply putting your social media posts onto your website. It's a little bit more than that as I'll explain. So if you are using social media, not just as a standalone activity, you are able to make it much more powerful and to reach more people and to help them to really understand your business so that they like it more, they trust it more and they want to come again and again.

So what we're trying to do here is use social media to do multiple things. So social media can generate traffic to your web sites. Your website can also encourage people to follow you on social media because remember some people will come to your website to get a little bit of information And then they're not quite ready to make a booking or to visit, but they will perhaps follow you on social media. And that helps then to persuade them eventually to book or visit. And you can use a two tier approach of either writing a social media post and then turning that into a blog and then putting that onto your website.

Or you might have written a blog which you turn into a social media post, which you then are able to share with more people. And then you could even go further by using that same blog or that same social media post and including it in a mailing. So as you can see already, one idea, one piece of content gets repurposed, reused in multiple ways. One thing I would say, and I made this mistake for many years actually, for the first couple of years I had my Facebook account, I was also writing a daily or nearly daily blog and then what I was doing was I was writing, a couple of lines on Facebook and linking to my blog and it took me quite a while to realize, of course, that if I did that, first of all, I took people away from Facebook. I sent them to my website and the algorithm wants people to stay on the platform.

So I was I was reducing my impact that way. But secondly, I was not getting a lot of engagement even though lots of people were clicking through to read the blog because they would go and read the blog but they wouldn't then go back to Facebook to comment or share it. What I now do is I write the blog, first of all, on social media and then I would reposition it and make that piece of content, that that post, into a blog on a website. So I'm doing it the other way around because if I write it so there's a piece of content on Facebook, which is often quite meaty with a decent photo and a fair amount of information that enables people to comment and to share right there. So think about where you're doing these things.

Social media posts have another use, something that you might not have been thinking about. So if you are going to think a little bit more in a more detailed way about your social media content in future, you could then also use this to update your Google business profile. If you don't have a Google business profile already, if you haven't claimed your listing, you need to do that right now because, they're becoming increasingly important for AI searches and for search engine optimization and then also for driving more traffic eventually to your website. So, Google business profiles are not difficult to set up but what happens then is often people set them up and then they leave them. This is something that you need to keep updating and an easy way of doing that is taking some of your most popular posts on social media and then using some of that content or images to update your Google business profile so you're not rewriting, you're not doing something from scratch, you're just repurposing it.

And then another way that you can use your social media is to encourage people to sign up to your mailing list, which I really hope you already have a mailing list because they're really, really powerful way of reaching regular visitors and getting them to come back again and again. And you also need to guard against the fact that one day you might for some reason use your social media account or the algorithm could change a great deal, it's good to have that backup of your mailing list as well. And your mailing list is something that will develop over time but what you can do in order to make sure you've got the right kind of content there is reuse some of your social media posts in your mailings because not everyone will see every mailing. Every social media post, it helps you to reinforce those messages. And your mailings will be integrated into all of your marketing as your social media will be, your mailings can encourage more direct bookings, can get people to repeat book or repeat visit and they can encourage people to share or follow you on social media.

So as I think you've seen there you do one thing, you write one piece of content for social media, you reposition it, sorry, repurpose it in many different ways and that's how this becomes much more powerful, more effective. So you are taking one social media post, multiple users. It could be, creating, turning that into a blog, a website update, your Google business profile, mailing and maybe you'll be using that also to those, that content to entice journalists to come along and reminding people to recommend you to get the word-of-mouth recommendations as well, so very powerful. Now I would suggest that the other thing that you do before we move on to looking at your business aims and how to use social media to achieve those aims is you start to think about your content bank. So I've explained what you need to do to get a little bit more engagement and I've explained how you can reuse whatever you're doing.

So we have to think now about your content. When I say content, I mean a post. I mean something you've written. It could be a photo. It could be photo and something you've written.

It could be a video. It's whatever you feel comfortable using. But I find it useful to have a content bank. So that means that at any time I'm ready to, scribble down any ideas. Sometimes I scribble down ideas for photos.

Sometimes as I'm wandering around, I take photos. I'm taking a note of things like reviews for clients, what people are saying. Does that trigger an idea? Or is it something someone says that I could be using some way? When people ask questions, they're frequently asked questions.

Does that give me an idea for some kind of post? So you are constantly being inspired. You're constantly picking up new ideas. This is not about sitting at your desk and suddenly saying, I need to do some social media today. It's having a whole bank of content and I will just jot down some outlines.

At this stage and in this way when you're working on your content bank, you're not doing any planning, you're just in brainstorm mode. So you're just scribbling, you're just coming up with random ideas and sometimes I'll write something down that I don't even understand a day later. It was just a fleeting idea that won't work and I'll have other ideas I put down and the next day it looks great. Later you'll be sorting through these according to your business aims, time of year, types of posts you're going to do in your content pillars, all of that I will explain as we go through this session but right now you are not doing any sorting, you're not doing any planning, you're just scribbling down ideas and I don't mean just in this moment, I mean as you go about your daily life. I use, a notebook, so I can physically write in it, that's just how I like to be, but I also use notes, up on my phone and I sync that with my laptop so I'm getting those notes there.

So however you want to do it, but have a place where you are constantly writing down ideas. It will be much easier to then write the right kind of content later, But right now you're not doing anything with that content. You're just adding to it because we need to make this more strategic and that's what we'll start to look at next.

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