An introduction to Social Media for beginners. My talk from Traverse 14, conference for travel bloggers on social media for brands and bloggers.

2. @TheTravelHack
0 It’s all about me, me, me
0 Reasons why people are reluctant to use social media
0 Why should you use social media?
0 Social media: Back to basics
0 How not to use social media
0 How to use your following when working with brands
0 10 tips to increase your following
0 Analysing your social media channels
0 Bloggers who are using social media awesomely
0 My final top 10 tips

3. Monica Stott
0 I’ve worked as a social media manager/specialist
/executive/guru/expert for 4 years
0 I began in journalism but through my blog I discovered a love for the
online community
0 I was responsible for incorporating Flight Centre’s social media
strategy with marketing campaigns. I basically had to use social media
to sell more flights.
0 I’m now a freelance social media specialist. I help small businesses and
travel brands use social media to:
1. Increase sales through promoting products
2. Increase brand awareness
3. Communicate with customers
4. Deal with complaints
My main task is to grow their following because the larger the
following, the more potential customers/readers

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Why should you be using
social media?
Attract a new audience and readers
Drive traffic to your website
Connect and engage with your readers
People don’t comment like the used to –
so social networks are the best way to
chat to your audience
You can ask your audience what they
want
Social media helps search rankings (G+)
Highly targeted marketing
Network with like-minded people
Ask for advice, inspiration, support – use
social media as a resource
Highlight your expertise
Monitor brand awareness (Business)
Brands want to work with bloggers with
a strong social following

5. Back to basics
0 Make sure all your networks are the same. Same name,
same picture.
0 Profile Picture – Make sure it’s bold and memorable.
Change it as little as possible. Make sure we can see your
face. Being an individual and letting your personality
shine is what makes your different to a travel brand and
why brands want to work with you.
0 Profile description – Descriptive but interesting
0 Have social media badges on the homepage of your blog
– preferably above the fold
0 Have sharing buttons in each post with Twitter linked to
your profile.

6. Reasons people don’t use
social media
0 It’s time consuming
0 It won’t benefit my blog
0 My audience aren’t on social media
0 It’s complicated
0 I can’t track the results
0 It’s annoying
0 People are finding my blog anyway
0 Social media is just a fad
0 People will use it to make complaints (Business)

7. How NOT to use social media
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Don’t ask – Your content should be so good that people want to share it
Don’t play the follow and unfollow game
Don’t overshare
Don’t share just your own content
Don’t share shit
Don’t use more than 2 hashtags on Twitter
Don’t share anything personal
Don’t be a creeper
Don’t bitch or moan about any brand you’re working with
Don’t argue
Don’t ignore your followers
Don’t use your social media or online influence to complain
Don’t think you’re an expert

8. Facebook
0 Lots of people moan that their engagement and referral
traffic is low. It isn’t Facebook’s fault. It’s yours.
0 To increase referral traffic you need to increase engagement.
To increase engagement you need to increase likes,
comments and shares.
0 Ask questions and use great photos
0 Posts with text only are actually seen by more people than
photos.
0 Post once-twice a day and be consistent. More than twice can
be annoying.
0 Facebook advertising can be a really effective way of
attracting your initial audience.
0 Guest post and make sure the site shares your content on
Facebook.

9. Google+
0 Use the communities
0 Share valuable content in communities and interact
0 Write long messages on G+ and then tweet the link
0 Treat it like a microblog – long updates, more details, constantly
sharing.
0 Be as active as you possibly can

10. Twitter
0 More tweets = more followers
0 As long as what you’re sharing is interesting
0 Use a combination of casual conversations, links and photos.
0 Photos on Twitter perform well because they take up more
space in the steam.
0 Respond to people’s random musings and also tweet things
and ask questions that people want to respond to.
0 Make Twitter lists to organise your followers and get noticed
0 Create a list of influencers and tweet them regularly

11. Instagram
0 Best advice for Instagram: Post great photos. And lots of
them.
0 Hasgtags to use:
0 Hashtags that cover your destination, activity, mood, food,
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weather.
#naturelover #Beautifuldestinations #Worldplaces
#Landscape_specialist #top_landscapes #Landscapehunter
#jaw_dropping_shots #Thebestshooter
#instatravel #mytravelgram #instapassport #bestphotographers
#picoftheday
Great apps:
Camera+, A Beautiful Mess, PicLab, iMotionHD, Flipagram, Qwiki
Pictures in frames never do as well as individual images

12. Awesome Travel Bloggers
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Instagram – Young Adventuress – 14,000
Posts about 3 times a day
Every single picture is amazing
Each picture has a separate comment with
6-10 relevant hashtags
0 Great selfies – use a tripod and timer app
0 Experiment with apps to create something different – iMotion HD, Qwiki, PicLab
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Twitter – Matt from @LandLopers – 45,000
Matt is a prolific tweeter. More tweets = more followers
He seems to respond to every tweet
He gets involved with Twitter chats
He is constantly sharing other people’s content
He shares travel news and interesting things
If you @mention someone at the beginning of the tweet, it isn’t sent out to everyone

13. More awesome travel
bloggers
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Facebook – Dave and Deb from Planet D
Proving that you can successfully schedule!
Shareable quotes and lots of questions increase engagement
Their engagement rate is 39.4%! Average is around 2-3% even for travel brands that
invest a lot of money in advertising.
0 Pinterest – y Travel Blog – Over 4 million!
0 Lots of images with text over them to encourage click-throughs to their website
0 G+ - Paul Dow – Over 11,000 followers

14. Quick tricks for social media
0 Schedule
0 Use Tweetdeck to set up search streams for particular
topics/favourite bloggers
0 Instagram – put phone in flight mode and edit a batch
of photos
0 Use apps like A Beautiful Mess and PicLab to edit
photos and add text for Pinterest
0 Read tweets on the train and favourite the links you
want to read

15. How to grow your following
0 Post things people will share
0 Post regularly and consistently
0 Share people’s content
0 Social pop-up boxes
0 Consider Facebook advertising – For new likes and
promoted posts
0 Promote your channels via each other
0 Look outside your niche - #lbloggers #bbloggers
0 Consider competitions where the entry mechanism is a
follow – especially in the early stages
0 Twitonomy – Detailed and visual Twitter statistics
0 Pinterest – Use a business page for analytics

16. Curating Content
Feedly
Tweetdeck

17. Tools to analyse and monitor
0 Tweetdeck – Set up search streams for your
‘competitors’
0 Hootsuite – Run reports for your popular tweets
0 SocialBro – Best time to tweet, who has unfollowed
you, who doesn’t follow you back, people you follow
who are inactive
0 Flitter – Find relevant people to follow on Twitter
0 IFTT – Automatically deliver content

18. How to use social media when
working with brands
0 Whoever you’re dealing with, that person will need to
report to someone – make their job as easy as
possible.
0 Writing blog posts – tweet your posts
0 Screenshot good feedback
0 Use a hashtag and run a TweetReach report
0 Don’t underestimate the the value of your following
0 Offer extras – Hotel stay – Do a live Twitter chat

19. Final 10 tips
1. Be natural
2. Be consistent and active
3. Be informative and useful – give people a reason to
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follow you
Be entertaining
Be yourself
Be patient
Be analytical
Be sociable
Don’t be everywhere
Be ahead of the game

20. @TheTravelHack
Monica@thetravelhack.com