Meet The Managers: Mina Dinic, Culture Trip

For the third instalment of our #MeetTheManagers series, we caught up with Culture Trip’s Social Media Manager, Mina Dinic.

Culture Trip is a global start-up operating in experiences and travel, media and entertainment, and has won many accolades for its inspirational content. Culture Trip also helps people turn inspiration into reality with curated collections of experiences and stays that can be booked online. It has been named by Forbes as one of the fastest-growing companies to watch and has been selected as App of the Day by Apple in the US and the UK.

Mina has been working as a Social Media Manager for over five years, having previously worked at NBC Universal running the accounts for hayu. Mina joined Culture Trip in 2018 and has gone on to double the number of organic followers on their Instagram channels in under 12 months.

1. In your eyes, what makes a piece of social content great?

A great piece of social content speaks two languages — that of the brand, and that of the audience. As a Social Media Manager, you’re the glue between the brand, and all those people that follow and engage with it. We’ve all had those moments of, ‘I really hoped that post would get more engagement than it did’, or, ‘I can’t believe that was the best post of the month!’ But when a post or campaign has embraced your brand’s vision and mission, and it brings strong engagement from your audience — you’ve got a winning piece of content.

2. Can you break down the process you go through from concepting content ideas to posting on your channels?

Culture Trip’s mission is to inspire people to go beyond their cultural boundaries, and as the Instagram manager, my job is to do this both proactively (with our own content), and reactively (taking inspiration from our IG community). The reactive part is in sharing UGC (user-generated-content). We get inspired by all the wonderful photography shared by our community all over the world, and when we love it, we share that inspiration (with permission), with our followers who often share the same interests and passions. The proactive process requires long-term planning and collaboration with other teams in the business. An example is the “Advent-ure Calendar” we promoted last December. This all started with one person’s idea to create Culture Trip’s own spin on the traditional Advent Calendar, which was followed by creative input from our design studio on the look and feel, illustrators who brought that look to life, and content suggestions from our writers — all of which led to 25 daily Instagram Stories. Each day started with a ‘door’ representing a specific location around the world. Once opened (by tapping right on the IG Story), it revealed a curious fact or local travel tip for that location.

3. What one trend do you think should be on everyone’s radar over the next 12 months?

Instagram Reels! With TikTok’s growing popularity, we’ve been eagerly waiting for other channels to up their game when it comes to short-form video content. With the launch of Reels, brands that aren’t on TikTok have got an opportunity to play around with UGC content and reach new audiences. We’ve seen some great Reels already from our community on Instagram and are looking forward to seeing how it plays out in the coming year and trying out this new format for ourselves.

4. Name one tool you could not live without when it comes to managing Culture Trip’s social media channels.

I couldn’t live without Dash Hudson — they’re Instagram’s best friend! This tool does everything from scheduling content, to sourcing photography, to analytics and reporting. With their Likeshop feature, we can use Instagram to drive our audience to the content on our website — adding up to seven links per post. Beyond being visually inspired, our Instagram audience loves to explore places and cultures, and to plan and book experiences and trips. And so, linking a photograph of London, for example, to an article on ‘A Local’s Guide to London’, or, ‘The Best Boutique Hotels in London’, allows us to take our audience beyond visual inspiration and into trip planning mode.

5. What is the one piece of social media best practice that you swear by but rarely see followed?

Community management. A simple reply to a comment can go a really long way. When you run a social media channel, you are essentially the voice of that company — and it’s important that you use that voice not only to speak to your audience, but to listen and engage with them. With a large social following, it’s simply not possible to engage with everyone, but it’s important to set aside some time to read as many comments as possible and reply to questions and queries as quickly as possible.

6. Can you give an example of a social media crisis that you’ve had to handle, and how you went about it?

Sometimes a ‘social media crisis’ for us is a big development or change that’s out of our hands, and requires an immediate response. As a travel company, Culture Trip’s mission is to inspire people to explore the world, meet people from different cultures, and take part in new experiences. When the pandemic hit and the world went into lockdown, we needed to change our strategy — fast. Our followers from all over the world were relying on us to provide them with daily updates on COVID-19, and how it was affecting both their home country, and anywhere they had booked a trip to. We had to be really on top of global news, and make sure that our content and communication across our social media channels was informative and accurate, inspiring our audience to connect with the world around them, whilst not encouraging them to travel.

Working with lots of other teams, we came up with a campaign called #StayHomeStayCurious, during which we shared how people could explore the world — virtually. We wanted to be there for our users and provide value as their needs changed day on day, location by location. We were really proud to be able to do this by thinking creatively about how we could remain their social “travel companion” at a time when travel was restricted. Amongst other things, we shared cooking recipes from all around the world, we hosted our very own culture-packed virtual Quiz Night, and we created travel-inspired, downloadable colouring pages.

Once lockdowns slowly began to lift, we reacted again and adjusted our campaign to #StaySafeStayCurious, inviting people to explore and experience places, cities and countries — and to get outdoors where possible — in line with local restrictions.

7. How do you navigate unrealistic expectations or requests from colleagues who might not necessarily have the strongest grasp on social?

With data, communication and collaboration. We work with a lot of different teams, and everyone has brilliant ideas. Sometimes though, even a brilliant sounding idea isn’t necessarily fit for a specific channel’s audience. So it’s important to a) be able to show, with data, what historically works or doesn’t work and what our audience is interested in, and b) communicate and collaborate. An example of this is our weekly meetings with Culture Trip’s editorial team in which we talk through one another’s learnings, and align them. To ensure our efforts are complementary, we tap into current events and key dates together, in a timely way, and then post the produced content on the relevant social channels.

8. What’s the one piece of advice you’d give a Social Media Manager with limited resources?

Use your social platforms to do a little market research — this can help shape channel strategies. There are really simple, yet effective ways of doing this: create a Facebook or Twitter poll, ask questions via the Instagram Stories question sticker, use your captions to ask questions, rather than just make statements.

9. And last but not least, what’s one of your favourite accounts to follow on Twitter (or Instagram), and why?

Innocent Smoothies on Twitter. They’re smart, funny, educative, proactive, reactive, you name it!

A big thank you to Mina for these great tips. If you do have any questions feel free to reach out to the Social Misfits Media team at info@socialmisfitsmedia.com.

Here at Social Misfits Media we support our clients, friends and partners by offering practical and tangible advice on how to run their social media communities successfully. We do this through our publications, our #MisfitsLive events and now through our new #MeetTheManagers blog series.

In this series, we’re connecting with the Social Media Managers responsible for running the online communities of globally recognised organisations. We’re asking them to share their top tips and tricks to help those managing communities of smaller organisations, who may not have the same resources and budgets.