Today, social media take a more and more important place in our lives. We spend between 30min and 1hour per day on social networks, and that number is only getting bigger. Now, let’s talk about it on a professional level, and more precisely in the tourism sector.
We see trending evolution all the time in the digital world, especially in traveler behaviour online, which changes every season with the arrival of booking platforms such as AirBNB, booking.com, Homeliday and even Tripadvisor favouring short stays with extravagant commissions between 3 and 17%, leaving no space for the smaller companies.
That is why developing corporate social media within the next year will allow to bypass these giants, because, yes, you can start booking via Facebook with incentives inviting people to book directly through your web site!
But how, you say?
1/ ACQUISITION !
First, build a target community. Use common interests between your potential clients and your activity. In our case, we do holiday rental, we target persons who like to travel and going on holiday, in a more or less big age group, on Facebook.
Publish whatever you want, but high quality posting favours sharing which again leads to increased visibility and community size. Publish:
– Your rentals
– Areas where they are located
– Events which could interest your clients
– The human factor must be present – people believe more and more that they are talking to programmed robots.
On Instagram, hashtags are your new best friend – make a list of those directly related to your activity.
3 useful tips to create your community:
1- Use # to get in touch with other communities
– Use the # you listed
– Comment and like posts you find relevant
2- Follow influential accounts and become close to them.
– Influencers (those who have value in your sector)
– Personal accounts: only if their content directly and exclusively concerns your sector..
– Like, comment and share..
3- Follow influencers’ followers so that they will follow you back.
– Their account needs to be active and updated regularly
– Followback principle
– Comment/like, get in touch with them
The community will steadily grow and become relavant, more and more people will see your posts and your services and understand how good you are!
2/ CONVERSION !
Building a community is good, but you can’t have it sleeping! This is where traffic comes in…
To complete your posts, don’t hesitate to:
– Use « # »
– Do offers
– Add links to your web site
– Promote premium services (all inclusive, for example…)
– Games, competitions
Of course, the services you promote have to be exclusive to your web site and not available through big platform bookings.
Regarding Facebook sponsoring, the more you target your community, the more relevant it gets and each click will cost your less (depending on your ads and which country you advertise in …)
It is possible to copy your ads on Instagram, however I don’t really recommend it as I find it rather irrelevant at this stage, but hopefully it will become more efficient soon.
3/ Loyalty
You have to satisfy your clients by offering unbeatable service: be human and be behind your clients at all times, because when you go on holiday, you tend to leave your brain behind!
As a conclusion: build your community today to anticipate tomorrow, and communicate directly to YOUR clients and not those of the giants!
