How To Use Social Media To Promote Tours
Boost your tour and activity business with these social media hacks for tour operators.💪
In today’s tech-oriented world, using social media to promote your business goes a long way. Especially when you know that your competition is devoting all their energy and resources on social media marketing, publishing new content, making new videos, content curating, etc.
It’s not just that your competition is online — your potential customers are online. Everyone is online.
Start with Facebook.
But what about Facebook News Feed changes? Yes. We’ll get to that in a minute.
Then build your way up to Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, and Google+.
Have in mind the audience you want to reach. For example, if you’re targeting the Chinese market, you might want to cross out all the above mentioned, and focus on WeChat and Weibo.
Why is social media important?
Every business, especially the one that deals with people, should maintain great communication with their customers. That’s how you build customer relationships.
- How to Save Time — Social Media Marketing Strategy for Tour Operators
- The Best Social Media Channels to Promote Tours and Activities
- Tour Providers’ Social Media Goals — Connecting With Travelers
Depending on how you handle this communication, you can learn a lot from your customers as well as offer better service and tailor your product to fit your customers’ needs.
Communicating also means listening.
Listening means to hear what your customers have to say.
What are their needs, what’s causing them headaches, and what can you do to help them? How can you provide the best service?
Second, by being active on social media you have better reach and you can promote your tours and business online through various social media channels. Better reach means you can land more clients, more people are going to hear about your business.
Also, don’t forget the benefits of Google indexing your social media accounts. You know what they say…
If you’re not on Google…
Again, for the Asian market, it’s wise to switch to Bing and Baido.
Anyway, in regards to social media, something is always changing. So your number one task should be to keep up with social media trends.
Use Google Trends, Facebook Trending topics, and popular hashtags.
💡Tips and Tricks — How To Make The Most of Your Social Media
- Automate as much as possible.
- Post regularly.
- Use Feedly to find relevant content to share (Content curating).
- Set aside time to review and respond to comments.
- Make people pause and read your content.
- Focus on highly shareable content.
- Repost popular posts.
- Use hashtags.
- Grow your following.
- Always end with a call to action.
In the light of Facebook News Feed changes it’s becoming harder to grow organic reach.
The thing is, posts from business pages, publishers, and brands will be scored differently.
What’s about to become an important factor is for people to engage with your content. Content that people don’t engage with or react to, will, unfortunately, stay buried somewhere in the Explore Feed.
Spark up a conversation, get people interested in the content you serve, and make them leave comments.
Encourage people to share your content and to leave positive reviews.
Of course, at times, you’ll need to help yourself with 💰paid Facebook ads to get the right reach at the right time.
Don’t forget to build and organic traction before promoting your posts and boosting them.
When content curating📚, don’t just post your content nor content from other pages. Make a strategy and combine. A bit of everything. You need content that’s both entertaining and relevant to your audience.
For example, combine promotional posts, educational, and entertaining.
However, keep in mind that Facebook favors content from within. That means a Facebook video will get more reach than for example a YouTube link with the same content.
So why not create interesting and amusing Facebook videos? 🎬🎞🎥
Whatever you do, don’t resort to baiting people to engage with your content❗ by promising them coupons or freebies.
How to get in fron of the right audience?
Focus on Facebook groups, Messenger, and Facebook ads.
Did you know that there are 313 million monthly active users on Twitter? What a better way for people to get to know your tour operator business!
With more than 500 million Tweets sent every day, Twitter is the place to be when it comes to business.
However, you will still need to find your niche and target your audience. For lead generation, use the Advanced Search feature.
Now, for the good news — have 280-character limit instead of 140! Use it wisely. It’s always about sharing good quality content.
If 280 characters aren’t enough for you, you can post images or screenshots instead (you can upload up to four photos per Tweet). Just try not to overuse this strategy.
Twitter is fast-paced — this is both good news and bad. Posting at the right time makes all the difference. According to some, the best time to post on Twitter is between 12 PM and 6 PM. But of course, use Twitter Analytics to track how different schedules for optimal engagement.
And yes, you will have to post more regularly here than on Facebook. This also means you can experiment with different content and retweet.
Show and tell people what kind of tours you’re offering.
Pin important Tweets.
Work with Twitter lists.
Use the right #travel #touroperator #tourguide hashtags.
Remember what we talked about automating social media? Good.
Find a social media scheduling tool that works best for you for instance, like Buffer, Sprout Social or Hootsuite.
There are two ways you can come about this — use the regular Instagram profile or Instagram for business.
If you’re already using Instagram, should you switch to Instagram business profile?
By switching to an Instagram business profile you get analytics — about your followers and post engagement. You’ll have inside information about likes, saved posts, impressions and reach, and comments.
With Instagram Business, you are allowed to include direct links to your posts.
The best thing about is that you can promote your posts as ads and expand your advertising opportunities.
On the other hand, a personal Instagram profile is easier to handle and less complex.🤔
👉If you want to focus on Instagram being your main marketing channel, then an Instagram business profile is the right choice for you. That’s the only way you are going to be able to promote your tours on Instagram.
Now, what you’ll surely need, business profile or not, is a good image editing app.📱
Especially if your a small travel agency or a tour operator, pictures speak more than a thousand words. And yes, they have to be perfect.👌
While you’re at it, try to post photos that create a nice flow. Because we all know beauty sells.
Know that to get more followers on Instagram, you must actively engage. Like and comment, follow people from your niche and similar profiles.
100,000 articles are published on LinkedIn daily. It used in 200 countries worldwide.
Wow.
You might think of LinkedIn as this boring business network, ☝️but guess what, it’s actually a hidden gem when it comes to making it big in the entrepreneurial world.
Up to 50% of LinkedIn members have decision-making authority for their companies, so why not use this to your advantage? After all, LinkedIn was designed professional networking.
Start of by 1) creating a free LinkedIn company page
2) create a company page follow button to attract more followers.
3) engage your colleagues
4) Publish and share relevant content regarding your tour operator business, company news, new blog posts, etc.
5) promote your business with sponsored content
Grow your following by creating a LinkedIn group.
Here’s a great example: Tour and Activity Operators Online and Growing. It’s THE place to be for tour operators to discuss best online practices and emerging trends.
Why LinkedIn is good for you?
It’s free and effective.
It also gives you much-needed exposure to people hunting for quality products and services.
