Just a few decades ago, hotels and other tourism companies had to rely on travel agents, advertisements in travel guides and magazines, or TV and radio ads to reach potential guests. Now, the internet has largely taken over as the primary way that people plan and book their vacations.
Travel book sites and your company’s own website are important tools for spreading awareness of your hotel, vacation rental, or other tourism company. But there’s another important tool you should be using; social media.
Whether you’re already using social media or not, keep reading to learn a few tips you need to know to improve your strategy and ensure that your accounts are helping to boost bookings, rather than standing in the way of them — and how Vibrant Management can help.
Give Your Property a Personality
Whether your property or company utilizes a single social media platform or several, one of the most important things to practice is to create a personality for yourself. This “personality” will help to guide what you post, how you post, what your images look like, and more.
Think of the personality as a style guide. This style guide will help you ensure that every post you make properly matches your property or company’s brand. The language and style of writing you use in your social media post should match what you use on your website, marketing, and other materials. The same goes for any colors or fonts used to create banners or posts for social media.
Using a personality is a simple way to make your content cohesive across different social media platforms, as well as cohesive with your website and other business materials. At Vibrant Management, we offer marketing and brand development services that can help you create a cohesive brand that you can use across your website, social media platforms, and more.
Utilize a Blog to Provide Social Media Content
If your business isn’t already utilizing a blog, now is the time to change that. A blog serves a variety of purposes for businesses, especially for those in the tourism industry.
On their own, blog articles are a great way to educate your web visitors about your company and the surrounding area. You can write articles that help them to plan their vacation, better understand what you have to offer, and inspire them to book a trip. Your blog posts can also be used to implement SEO tactics on your website; websites with blogs have 434 percent more pages indexed by search engines than websites without one.
A blog can also provide great social media content to share across your platforms. You can share your blog posts on social media to help drive traffic to your website. Great blog posts that your followers find useful or interesting are also more likely to be shared, which can help to increase your following on the platform as well.
Keep in mind that a blog only works effectively if it’s well-written and if SEO strategies are properly implemented. If you’re thinking about adding a blog to your website or want to implement other marketing strategies, Vibrant Management can help!
Choose Images That Inspire Travel-Envy
Facebook posts that include a photo receive an average of 37 percent more engagement than those without. And if your property or travel company wants to take advantage of Instagram — a platform with more than 1 billion users who spend an average of 30 minutes on the platform each day — you’ll need to share images.
But simply posting pictures of your property, shots from a tour, or other images of your business in action isn’t enough. The images you post need to fit into that personality we mentioned and be share-worthy pics that inspire travel envy in your followers.
Editing and filters can help you create images with a similar feel and color to them. Aim to share professional photos or those that are high-quality to present your company or property in the best light. Images of other guests enjoying their vacation or that showcase your property or company’s best or most unique features are a great way to inspire your social media followers to want to learn more about you and potentially book a trip of their own.
Encourage Reviews
If you own a travel company, hotel, or vacation rental, you already know how important reviews are. But reviews on travel sites like TripAdvisor or Yelp aren’t the only ones you need to think about.
Facebook also allows followers to post reviews of businesses. The social media platform is now the third most-visited website in the world. With 95 percent of travelers reading an average of 7 reviews before booking a vacation, it’s important to make sure that you encourage reviews from your guests on all popular sites, including Facebook.
Leveraging Social Media for Your Tourism Company
Whether you own a hotel or vacation rental or a different tourism company, social media can be an excellent tool for increasing your client base and encouraging bookings. But simply creating an account on popular platforms isn’t enough. You also need to know the right strategies for posting content and increasing your following. From choosing the right images to creating a cohesive personality across various platforms and your website, these tips can help you improve your use of social media.
Ready to take your marketing to the next level? Vibrant Management can help. From marketing and SEO to brand and web development, we can help your business improve its digital presence, boost your community, and increase bookings. Check out our other projects to see how we’ve helped them grow.
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