Maintaining An Awesome Tour Business Facebook Page:

Online Marketing July 10, 2014

5 Simple Hacks For Tour Operators

Once you cross the first hurdles of launching your tour business Facebook page, building an audience and getting some decent number of likes, the next step is to figure out how to maintain that momentum and cast your net wider.

1. Be active and responsive

This is perhaps the simplest and the easiest thing to get right when doing social media marketing. Respond to all comments without fail and delay. Queries and concerns about your tours, praise, complaints, address them all, pronto.

So, when your customers ask you a few questions or have a couple of opinions thrown up for discussion, be quick to respond. Make sure you do not overlook comments. Another matter of concern is how you respond. Needless to say that you must be courteous, calm and respectful no matter how heated a discussion gets. Remember your page is public and the world is watching.

Here’s an interesting interaction on the Starbucks page. Notice the speedy replies from Starbucks.

Starbucks-page

If you haven’t received any posts on your page from travellers, get your existing ones to review the tours they booked with you. Tour booking systems like Vacation Labs help you automate this, sign up with them for free to see how.

2. Understand the “News Feed Algorithm” and make it work in your favour?

The news feed algorithm, a chip off the old block EdgeRank, decides exactly what appears on a user’s News Feed, by ranking posts based on certain factors. Facebook says that it uses this ranking method rather than chronological listing ‘because every time someone visits News Feed, there are, on average 1,500 potential stories from friends, people they follow and Pages for them to see and most people don’t have enough time to see them all.’ (read about it here).

The News Feed now shows what it believes the user would be interested in, rather than just showing random posts. So, the spotlight is of course on the quality and how engaging a post is. The rather worrying bit, however, is that your posts won’t be seen by all your page fans. According to Facebook, only 16% of your fans see your latest stories. So, if a user likes your page, it is no guarantee that everything that happens on your page will appear in the user’s News Feed. This in a way is great for the Facebook user, but proving to be a steep climb for your social media marketing.

No, you do not need divine intervention to influence the algorithm. All you need to do is, understand a little how it works and how to tame it. Some influencing factors:

3. Take your page to the next level with Page Insights

Facebook is not just a great tour marketing medium but also allows you to measure how well you engage and market your tours & activities. Page Insights is a goldmine of information. How many likes, views & shares for your posts, engagement rate for each post and much more.

Page-Insights

When and how frequently to post

Keep up your slew of amazing posts, some of which we discussed in the last blog-post. You must know that when you post something on your page, there is a good chance that users who are online at around the same time will see your post. So when do you post on your tour business Facebook page? When most of your target users are online. People will naturally log into Facebook at different time frames; some during lunch break, in the evening after work, you could not be all that sure.

Your tour business’ Facebook page come to the rescue here. Go to insights and then posts. ‘When your fans are online’ is a very handy tool that will help you pace your posts to appear at strategic intervals in a day and determine when is the best time to put up your most important post.

Page-insight-best-time-to-post

No re-posting and no compromising on your content quality. So, don’t hesitate to start off with three to four posts a day, as and when you have great content.

Active Travel Asia almost always posts three times a day. While Intrepid Travel, generally have two posts.

Active Travel Asia

Intrepid Travel

Is your content working its magic?

How good is your content on your tour business Facebook page? Do your fans find themselves drawn to your page or do they just scroll past your post? Do some posts work better than others?

Insights has some handy tools to let you analyze how well your posts are working; how many people have viewed your posts be it fans or non-fans and how engaging they are through likes, shares and comments.

‘Likes’ lets you know your page likes as of today, unlikes and Net Likes.

Net Likes

Under ‘Posts’, you will find a list of posts published and how they’ve performed, in terms of reach and engagement. Reach can be obtained in terms of fans/non-fans or organic/paid. Similarly, you can examine the engagement in terms of likes, comments, shares or spams, hides, unlikes or engagement rate itself, by clicking on the arrow next to ‘Engagement Rate’.

reach and engagement

‘Post Types’ shows the average rate of engagement with each post type whether it is a status, photo, video or link.

Post types

‘Reach’ gives you post reach that is the number of people who have seen your post and also the total reach of your entire page and everything in it.

Reach

What type of content works?

Keep varying the type of content you put up. See what clicks the best with your fans – interesting links you shared or offers & deals or images of scenery and exotic food that left people drooling. ‘Post Types’ under Posts, helps you gauge each post type by average rate of reach and engagement. Understand what type of posts people like the best.

Best post type

Who is your audience?

The best part about Facebook’s page insights, is gauging your audience. ‘People’ provides age, gender, geographic and language demographic data w.r.t your fan base, people reached and engaged. This of course helps you identify, construct and focus on your target segments through your social media marketing campaigns.

People data

4. Get a grip of Facebook Terms and Policies

Familiarize yourselves with Facebook’s terms and policies.

Earlier, promotions could only be administered through apps and not through posts or likes, to collect entries from participants. However, last year they got rid of it, with one restriction still in place, “Personal Timelines must not be used to administer promotions”. Another tip you would need to know – your cover photo should not contain more than 20% of text. So tread carefully when you’re trying to advertise on your cover.

fb terms

Not complying with their rules may have repercussions like having your page shutdown. So, run a constant check on what is changing. Play safe. Don’t end up on the wrong side of Facebook and your social media marketing will be fine.

5. Keep pace with constantly evolving Facebook ecosystem

Stay updated on what is happening in and around Facebook and what you can use to your advantage. Visit Facebook for Business page frequently.

Facebook has over a billion users. All you have to do is reach out to them. Yes, paid advertising means a more guaranteed reach. But that’s not to say, you don’t have a shot at going viral the organic way.

In fact, it would be most prudent to first get the foundations of your page right. Establish a steady frequency of posting consistent good quality content, and keep an eye out on how people are responding. This way you will know who your audience is, what draws attention (read likes), and how best to approach them. It is vital that you get your bearings straight before you even think of paid advertising.

To go the extra mile for increased online publicity and higher booking chances, get in touch with the tour booking system experts at Vacation Labs.

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