Tourism Marketing Q&A: Your small business social media questions answered

Small business social media is sometimes a little hard to crack. That’s why we here at Booking Boss brought in the big guns to teach you, our loyal tourism clients and friends, how to nail it.

Earlier this month we ran a #TourismTakeaway webinar with tourism marketing social media strategist Holly Galbraith. Holly walked us through 8 simple steps to boost your social media game.

Unfortunately, we encountered a technical glitch and Holly couldn't see all of our attendee’s questions. But never fear, we teamed up with her again and she’s kindly helped us to answer your questions in this blog.

The Questions

How do hashtags work? Where do people find them later?

Great question and one that gets asked often. Holly wrote a blog post called What is a hashtag? which explains it in depth. But in short, a hashtag is a set of words or numbers that are preceded by a #. “Hashtags are mainly used to aggregate or group similar topics of information,” Holly says.

They make it easy to follow along with a topic and listen into what people are saying about it. In the tourism industry popular hashtags are #BeachThursday and #TTOT. Holly’s monthly tourism podcast uses the hashtag  #TourismTweetup.

Do you think it's important to respond to positive TripAdvisor reviews?

Absolutely. It shows appreciation and delights customers. Read more here: 5 key ingredients of a great Trip Advisor page.

Are there any industry norms around using othere people's images on your social channels? Eg. Profressional photographers, other travellers.

The lines are becoming very blurred when it comes to image attribution and social media. This article outlines how creative commons attribution works, but it’s fair to say most internet users do not follow these rules.

Due to the lack of policing and enforcement of creative commons attribution, it’s best to handle each image you use on a case-by-case basis.

At Booking Boss we held a large-scale photoshoot with a number of our clients, and we use paid stock images where we don’t have an original to use. However, sometimes we take screenshots or use other images in our posts. We always attribute to the original creatives where possible.

Let’s look at two common examples in the social media realm.

1. A traveller takes an image at your tour/attraction business and puts it on their social channel with a hashtag linking back to you. There are no problems to share or re-post this image with credit to the original photographer. Social media is social after all, and sharing the image and tagging them increases brand loyalty and encourages others to do the same. If you want to use this image for other marketing purposes (like on a brochure) it’s important to ask them for permission.

2. You find a random image you love and you want to share it, make your best efforts to find the owner and credit them. Google reverse image search is an excellent way to find the original photographer. The Youtube clip below walks you through how to do a reverse Google Image search.

How can we best list our social media details on our booking confirmations. Your thoughts as to where would help. Should this be in other info?

Booking Boss has the ability to add start and ending paragraphs to confirmation emails. This is the perfect place to encourage customers to like and follow you on social media. Holly says toward the end is the best. The most important part is to give people a compelling reason why they should connect or follow you!

What are your thoughts on Periscope?

For a fun and creative way to connect with customers and show off what your tourism business has to offer, Periscope is a great way to do it. If you have a big Facebook fan base, the platform released its own live streaming service late last month. The alternative service should roll out to Australia in the coming weeks. Much like Periscope it’s easy to use, just click live stream from your status update box.

Tourism Victoria was one of the first tourism brands to take Periscope for a run in their digital campaigns. They offered digital tours of Melbourne’s CBD with a focus on the city’s creative and innovative vibe via the app with great success. Check out the video of their campaign below.

Love some of the tips for creating photo opportunitis. Do you have more?

Creative social media photo opportunities need to be given some thought as they should be incorporated into your overall branding strategy. Not every idea is going to work for every brand. But we’ve listed a few ideas below to help you get started and make your images more shareable!

Note: Encouraging your visitors to take images at your attraction or on your tour is a fantastic idea, but it’s important to remember to tell them how they can share the images! Give them a hashtag, your user name and which social channel so they can share it to their followers and yours.

Here are a few creative images we’re fans of:

• Scarborough Winery got creative with their larger-than-life frame that perfectly captures their stunning vineyard.
  
  
  
• If you have or visit any spectacular views, point it out to your guests and get images. More ideas can be found in our How to create a more memorable tour blog.
  
  
• Instagram frame. Not just fun at people’s 30ths and weddings - they can also be used at your destination! People love them. If you’re in Australia you can purchase them here.
  
  
  
  
• Here are some props of commonly used social media emoticons you could get guests to use in their images: You can purchase these off Etsy.
  
  
  
  
• If your tour company owns a bus - why not paint an ‘Instagramable moment’ on the side of it and ask your travellers to take an image in front of it?
  

Don’t forget if you missed the webinar you can re-watch and download the 8 social steps to create the biggest social impact for your business webinar on demand.

Also, if you have any social media tips that have worked for your tourism business we would love to hear about them, please tell us in the comments below.

Booking Boss is an online booking system for tour operators and attraction providers. Trusted by many in the tourism industry, Booking Boss is about getting you out of the spreadsheets and into the sun. We provide free education resources for operators like you, to make your business the best it can possibly be.