Lonely Planet: A new start on its online presence
Lonely Planet, originally known as a travel guidebook publisher, aims to inspire and help travelers to experience the world. The company has more than 500 employees and over 350 signed travel authors. It has published a total of 650 themes and sold them in 200 countries around the world. The annual sales volume is 7 million copies, accounting for a quarter of English travel guide sales around the world. There is no doubt that Lonely Planet is one of the world’s most popular travel publisher. However, Brad said in a post:
“Now, Lonely Planet is taking huge strides to reinvent its online offering. This is just the beginning of that journey.”
It is a new start for Lonely Planet to have a public online presence. In this post, I will analysis Lonely Planet’s communication with audiences through online social media like Facebook and website.
1. Cross-platform collaborative and effective
Lonely Planet actively engage with existing and potential followers by sharing regularly. It posts more than 10 messages every day on Facebook and updates articles on the website on daily basis which give people the latest information. The most commonly shared content on Facebook by it is a link pointing to an article on its website with a brief description of the article content.
Every article has a beautiful photo as a cover which first attracts the audience’s attention. And then there is more probability that people would click the article link pointing to its website, go back to Facebook to comment, show their similar experience and ask questions. This is a clever way linking contents on different platforms together and at the same time effectively getting more people involved in communication on Facebook as well as the website.
2. Innovative
As Laura Lindsay, Lonely Planet’s Director of Global Communications, pointed out on one of CIM London’s evening sessions, Lonely Planet is a “content-first business”. The website of Lonely Planet is also full of information and it shows information in multiple ways.
There are image carousels at the top of the website, a list of videos introducing itineraries and a map showing the relative location of top attractions of places people may want to visit.
All these innovative methods show useful information in different dimensions. Image carousel on the homepage attracts people’s first attention and then they are more willing to look through other resources like articles and videos on the website. By publishing videos, information can be shown in a valid and a more relaxing way. Showing a map enables people to discover places in an interactive way.
In my opinion, though it is a new start for a publisher to have a online presence, Lonely Planet does well and it is good at communicating with people by sharing information and interacting with people in an effective and innovative way.
