Online Marketing • June 24, 2014 • Bonny Philip
In our previous post we discussed the best practices for setting up your Facebook business page. What next? The next step is to start building your audience and keeping them engaged. Here are some simple steps to help you do just that.
Your aim undoubtedly is to drive traffic to your Facebook business page and eventually to your business. Click on Build Audience, upper left on your admin page, to import contacts from your existing accounts and invite your Facebook friends to come visit. Increasing your likes is, of course, a nice goal to have but the main focus should be to tap into that set of people with travelling interests. You may be able to generate a good amount of likes but the odds are that a sizeable number of those visitors are not really interested in your tour or worse still, hate travelling. You are then fighting a losing battle!
Start out by building brand advocates, mainly clients who have already experienced your incredible tours, probably by booking through your holiday system. You can use the review feature on your page. Get clients to post their reviews and ratings as part of your tour social media marketing. Send emails requesting them to do so. You should look to increase and improve your ratings more than ever since prospective travellers have come to rely significantly on online reviews. Reviews by fellow tourists can make or break travel plans.
You could also provide a link to your Facebook page on your website. Allow people to share, like, post or comment from your website. Facebook has quite a few plugins you could use for this.
This is perhaps the most important question. Targeted activity (posts, events etc.) not just helps in keeping the existing followers interested, it also helps in building new ones.
Let’s put your Facebook business page activities into 2 broad buckets:
Let us discuss both.
The first thing is to know who your audience is. Once you know that, your goal is to post stuff that they are interested in, something that will keep them engaged.
While posting images of your tour is a no-brainer, you can still spice it up. Your tour marketing imagery should give your audience a virtual experience. Post enticing photos of locations, scenery, buildings, trails, eateries and everything else on your tour. You could add historical tidbits or fascinating facts along with these images. Throw in a few interesting well-made videos of what your clients have to say about you, funny incidents, or experiences.
While this is the very least that you must do, you can also engage your audience in much more ways. Here are some examples:
Here are some other cool tips for your tour social media marketing :
A Facebook business page also allows you to create custom tabs. This helps users know the kind of content you have and helps the user navigate your page easily. Visit developers’ page to get started.
These will be less frequent than your timeline posts and should be aimed at building excitement and participation on your page as well as tour booking platform.
There are a number of things that you could do – contests, special deals and offers, sweepstakes etc. Here are some nice case studies of businesses using events on their Facebook page.
Lay’s (the wafers brand) in its attempt to crowdsource a new flavour, started an extensive campaign, encouraging people to submit their flavour ideas to win a whopping $1 million prize money. The contest has already seen over a million entries and the results are to be announced at the end of this July 2014. Final four flavours will be selected and made available at retail stores, after which the public can vote for them. The last time this contest was conducted, votes were registered on the Facebook page and comments on the flavours were encouraged. The finalists also took to Facebook to reach out to their friends and contacts. Lay’s thus effectively used their Facebook business page and gained the personal connections of contestants. Social media marketing at its best.
The ongoing Traveler photo contest open till 30th June 2014, has seen some amazing entries, all of which are posted on Facebook. National Geographic travel with two million likes, looks to expand its popularity through this contest and encourages people to rate photos, based on which, the viewer’s choice winner will be decided.
Page Yourself has a few interesting apps to put up quizzes, deals, etc. on your Facebook page. You can check it out for ideas for your own tour marketing. And, for the management of all the tours that come in through this channel, you can use the Vacation Labs booking engine.