TripAdvisor Goes Social
Should your brand hop on the bandwagon? By Alex Archibald & Kate Bray
TripAdvisor’s influence on the travel industry cannot be understated. It has upwards of 7 million listings, including hotels, restaurants, travel tours, and airlines and a recent study by comScore found that 60% of people booking travel online used TripAdvisor while planning and booking their vacation.
Their newly revamped web and mobile platforms inject a social aspect into the brand. TripAdvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer called this new social-focused platform “a one size fits all solution” to travel planning and allows TripAdvisor members, brands, publishers, and travel influencers to share photos, reviews, trip advice, articles, and more on feeds and profiles in the social feed model we’re all accustomed to.
Having just gone public this month, it is still too early to determine what kind of engagement and return your brand will see with a platform-specific content strategy, however, you’ll want to maintain a presence — and keep an eye — on this travel-booking giant.
What’s Different?
TripAdvisor has added a social feed capability to their already established review and booking platform. This allows users to explore a feed of curated posts (links, videos, trips, and more) based on accounts that they choose to follow. Brands, influencers, and regular users alike can use the platform to share their owned content along with their best travel tips, reviews, and recommendations on their own profile and have it pushed to their followers’ feeds.
When searching for a specific destination, the feed will narrow to show content only about that specific location. This is particularly helpful when planning a trip. Otherwise, the feed will aggregate the latest and greatest content from the accounts followed by the user in a central place. From the feed, users can comment, like, and re-share content from the users they follow.
One of the most interesting new options includes their Trip feature. Brands can create an interactive travel guide to a destination that displays the user’s recommendations on an interactive map. While exploring the map, users are met with previews of photos, reviews, and comments written by the creator, serving as an opportunity for the user to make their own specific recommendations about a destination. E.g. ‘Be sure to try the eclairs here!’
What Does it Mean For Your Brand?
The “world’s first travel feed” offers a new way for travel and tourism brands to reach a highly engaged audience that is actively seeking out and participating in conversations about travel and vacation planning. It also adds another social media feed that requires content planning, publishing, monitoring, and measuring.
Early adopters of the platform include power-house publishers like National Geographic, Travel Channel, Business Insider, goop, GoPro, and more, so the bar for quality and quantity has in many ways already been set. If you don’t already have a fairly robust content marketing strategy, this may not be the platform for you.
That being said, beta versions of the platform were also offered to prominent influencers in the travel space, which opens up an opportunity to test the waters through a strategic partnership with an influencer or brand that has already built up a bit of momentum. If content shared on an influencer profile — be it an article, a video, a photo, or a curated Trip — receives the response you’re looking for, that’s an indication that similar content produced by your brand alone could also fare well with this audience.
Appropriate Content
This platform provides the perfect space to share guides, insider info, travel tips, and the expert knowledge about your hotel or destination that only you possess. If you’ve invested in video guides, informative infographics, or insightful blog articles, TripAdvisor’s new platform is worth considering as a content distribution tactic.
Publishing Frequency
The platform’s infancy means that it’s hard yet to determine how much you should be posting on your TripAdvisor page, but as is always the case, it’s quality that counts.
Audience Size
Another thing that remains unclear in this early stage of the new platform is how many average people will actively engage with the platform on a regular basis. Despite significant followings at this early stage, even large brands such as Four Seasons are receiving low engagement on the content they share.
TripAdvisor seems confident, listing the 661 million reviews and opinions posted monthly by more than 456 million monthly active users as a sign that the community is ready and willing to engage in this new, hyper social way.
Should You Be On It?
Every travel brand should be on TripAdvisor in some capacity — the booking and review tool is valuable for everyone and studies prove time and time again that travelers rely on friend and peer reviews when booking vacations.
Posting to the feed is best suited for:
Brands with multiple locations or destination marketing organizations: These types of brands would be well suited to regularly create TripAdvisor exclusive ‘Trips’ for destinations near their various locations featuring their partner brands.
Brands with an existing content strategy and calendar: With the platform being so new, it best exists for content distribution and to encourage users to visit your own site to read more. The TripAdvisor feed is an opportunity to share assets that are already being created for your own channels like videos, blog posts, and infographics.
If your brand doesn’t fit in to either of those categories, plan to spend some time on the platform on a regular basis, but continue to dedicate resources to more valuable platforms over the TripAdvisor feed. In this case, it can be used to share compelling photos and videos from your destination, interesting resources and content from partner brands, and as a tool for building rapport with influencers and publications in your niche.
The platform is still in its infancy, so it’s hard to determine whether the social aspect will take off and become a big player amongst other social platforms or if it will fade away into a distant memory like so many social media sites before it.
At this stage, use it as a distribution channel, pay attention to the platform and work to slowly build up a profile displaying your best content, and ensure that it’s current and up-to-date. Time will tell if this is a platform that will require a dedicated strategy and exclusive content.
Alex and Kate work with the social team at VERB Interactive— a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.
