This presentation discusses how new travel businesses can use social media to boost their marketing. It recommends choosing social media platforms based on the target audience and setting goals for follower growth and engagement. It also provides tips for social media success, including regularly posting valuable content, engaging with others, capitalizing on trends, scheduling posts in advance, maximizing popular posts, posting at optimal times, asking questions to involve followers, treating each platform differently, and using images. The overall message is that social media can help build brand awareness, credibility and traffic if used strategically.

1. Boost your new travel
business with social
media
This presentation was originally used as part of an international project run by GTTP
(Global Travel & Tourism Partnership) and was presented to students in Russia and United States.
Presentation by Bruce Martin, Managing Director, Ginger Juice Social Media
www.gingerjuice.co.uk

2. Getting Started
 Great! you’re launching a new travel
company! You have the product, you
have the business plan – now how should
you market it?
 Social media is now an important part of
the travel marketing mix with most travel
companies having some kind of social
media presence.

3. It’s a Crowded
Market
But with over 200 social media
platforms to work with and 1.6
million other travel & tourism
companies fighting for the
same global business…
How do you stand out and get
a slice of the 5th biggest
industry in the world?

4. Getting Started
 The first step is to think about WHY you
are going to be using social media
 What is the point?
 What is your goal?

5. Getting Started
Social media can be used in a number of ways:
 direct sales
 brand awareness
 build customer loyalty
 show your expertise
 customer service
 lead generation
 drive web traffic
 sharing funny cat pictures

6. Choosing the right social platform
 Choosing the right social platform is very important
 Which one is the right social media platforms for your audience?
 Think about who you want to reach and where in the world
 Do you want to reach a domestic or global audience?
 What age group / sex does your product appeal to?

7. Set goals
Once you’ve decided on your platforms and content you will need to set yourself some clear
goals. Examples:
 How many followers do you want to gain in 3/6/12 months?
 What % of your followers should be domestic vs international
 How many likes do you want to be getting per month?
 How many views of your videos?
 How many retweets?
 How many blog subscribers signed up?
 How many web visits as a result of social media?
 What % of web visits should be from social media?

8. What will you say?
 You will need to agree a content strategy
 What exactly will be posting? What is your message?
 Think about social media as a party. No-one wants to
listen to big head, bragging about themselves and
trying to sell you stuff.

9. What Will You Say?
 Social media marketing will not deliver a huge
amount of business from selling direct
 However, it will help you expose your brand, build
credibility, drive web traffic and underpin your existing
commercial activity

10. The 70 / 20 / 10 Rule
A sensible approach to social media content
is something called the 70/20/10 rule:
 70% of your posts should add value; be
interesting, helpful & fun
 20% should share other people’s ideas
 10% can be direct sales messages
70%
20%
10%
Add Value Share Promote
A good mix of posts

11. Build Your
Audience
There’s no point creating
great content if no-one
sees it
It’s like shouting through a
megaphone in a field

12. Going Live
OK, you have your strategy, now it’s time to take action

13. Build Your Audience
 Spend time making sure you build your audience.
 Follow, mention and engage with relevant profiles to increase
the potential audience for your content
 Make sure that it is easy to follow your profiles. Place your
social media icon in a good place on your website
 Add social media links to all your email communications.
 Every little helps!

14. Advertising
o Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & YouTube all allow you to promote your
business via their platforms
o Facebook has a great advertising tool. You can create targeted
adverts and get ‘likes’ for your page for as little as $0.1 each
o If you have budget available then you can support your organic (free)
activity with some paid-for advertising

15. Blogging
o Blogs are a really important part of any company’s marketing
o A recent report by Hubspot said that 79% of businesses with a blog had a
reported positive a return of investment
o The same report claimed that nearly half of all businesses had acquired
customers because of their blog

16. Blogging
o Blogging is great for business as it helps boost your ranking on Google
o Blogging also helps build credibility, generates leads and helps promote your
company news

17. Mobile Friendly
 Remember that that vast majority of people will see your
social media post via a smart phone or tablet
 It is vitally important to make sure your posts look good
on phones and tablets
 Use fabulous images and accompany them with short,
pithy text and one simple call-to-action

18. Measuring
Success
 It is important to measure how you are doing in
relation to your goals
 There are 100’s of different things you can monitor
and 100’s of different websites that will claim to
help you monitor things. It can get confusing
 Keep things simple to begin with and just monitor
things like:
• Audience growth
• Engagement (how many times your content is shared,
liked or commented on)
• Your activity – how often YOU post things

19. Smart Social Strategies
OK, so you’ve set up your social media profiles and you’ve started to post. Now what?
Here are some hot tips on making the most of social media:

20. 1. Be regular
 Many travel companies make the mistake of starting too many
social media channels
 Many websites show 6 or 7 social media icons. This looks impressive
but if you look closer, you will not see much activity on them
 Start off by making sure you post one great post a day on your
social media channels
 Then step-up your regularity by posting about 4 posts a day

21. 2. Share Great Content
Finding things to talk about can be a challenge
There are lots of ways to find great content to share:
 Follow other interesting accounts on social media
 Set up Google Alerts to send your emails interesting news stories
 Use Feedly - it collects lots of news stories in one place for you
 Sign up to interest travel blogs
 Create your own images, infographics & blogs

22. 3. Be Proactive
o Scheduling post is great but natural, human engagement is better
o Take time to monitor social media to dip into conversations where you can be
helpful, appreciative or just funny
o Consumers share lots of things online - use this to your advantage!
Here’s an example. This person tweeted
about how she was frustrated with booking
a holiday online…
This would be a great opportunity for a local
travel agent to tweet her to ask if they
could help!

23. 4. Global Trends
o Keep an eye on popular topics
o Sometimes you can use a trending topic
your advantage by creating content
which fits the trend AND your brand
o Oreo’s famously created this tweet
during the 2013 Superbowl electricity
blackout which gained over 30,000
shares & likes in the first hour

24. 4. Global Trends
o You don’t have to try to create content
in real-time either
o Smart brands made the most of the
recent cold weather in the US by
creating the right kind of content to
connect with people

25. 5. Plan Ahead
 Some events come around every year. Valentines Day,
St. Patrick’s Day etc
 You can also look out for more obscure (funny) days
too like World Pillow Fight Day
 Use websites like http://www.daysoftheyear.com/ to
find them!
 There are often great ways to create content around
those days which support your brand

26. 6. Maximise your best posts
o If you’ve created some content and it’s been well received then consider
reposting later on
o Not all your followers would have seen it first time and it’s quite acceptable to
repost things now and then.

27. 6. Maximise your best posts
o If you’ve posted something on Facebook and it’s
getting more likes than usual, then consider
paying to boost the post to more people
o This free post was performing well so we knew it
would be worth paying $10 to boost the post
o For just $10 we gained nearly 100 likes and a
reach of nearly 16,000

28. 7. Post at the
right times
• Make sure you are posting at the
right time for your target
audience
• Lunchtimes, evening and
weekends are often the best
time to reach people
• Don’t fall in to the trap of posting
at times that suit you

29. 8. Ask Questions
 People love being asked for their opinion
 Social media is a great platform to get
people to provide opinions and feedback
about your products and ideas
 Consider caption competitions or polls

30. 9. Treat each platform differently
 Create posts optimised for each platform
 Avoid having your Facebook account
tweet for you – it doesn’t look great
 If you are going to maintain a Twitter
page, it is best to treat is as an
independent platform; not a Facebook
add-on
Cyprus Tourism – showing what happens when
you try to tweet from Facebook

31. 10. Use More Images
 Social media loves images. More images = more engagement
 And…the tourism has the best images – so use them!
 Try to include an image in EVERY single post
 People scroll through their smart phones at high speed
 You need to be creating posts that are ‘scroll-stoppers’

32. Thank you!
 Bruce Martin, Ginger Juice Social Media
@BruceMartin
@GingerJuice
www.gingerjuice.co.uk