Paper presented at the CAUTHE conference. Gold Coast, Australia

1. Measuring The Success of
Tourism & Event
Queensland’s ‘Instameet’
Campaign
Darryl Woodford & Katie Prowd
@dpwoodford | @katieprowd

2. STRUCTURE
● About Us
● Value of Social Media
● About the Campaign
● Methodology
● Instagram around the world, and in QLD
● The TEQ Instameet campaign
● Imagery & Reactions
● Long Term Impact & Value for Tourism
● About Hypometer

3. VALUE OF SOCIAL MEDIA - ELECTRONIC WOM

4. AND THE RESULT...

5. ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN
● “World’s Biggest Instameet” - 4 Oct 2014
● 89 Separate Meets
● Goals:
○ Bring attention to QLD as a tourism destination
○ Generate imagery that can be used for promotional
campaigns
● Meetups hosted by paid photographers / influencers
● Campaign focused on Instagram

6. METHODOLOGY & TECHNOLOGY
● Gathered data that used official hashtags (#instameet,
#thisisqueensland, #queensland) on Instagram, as well as
before-and-after data on the TEQ account followers on
Twitter & Instagram.
● While <1% of Tweets are geotagged, >50% of Instagram
images are.
● Utilises analytics technology developed in-house:
○ for content
○ for follower growth (‘accession’)

7. INSTAMEET AROUND THE WORLD

8. ...AND IN QUEENSLAND
● Two forms of location data:
○ defined Instagram locations (e.g. Abell
Point Marina, Currumbin Wildlife
Sanctuary)
○ geotagged tweets, with exact latitude
and longitude
● Expected concentrations in Brisbane, Gold
Coast, Sunshine Coast, and
Cairns/FNQ/Whitsundays.
● Some participation from outside official events

9. SITUATING THE CAMPAIGN
● An undoubtedly successful campaign
● #thisisqueensland was the primary hashtag
used on the day, with 4,662 images. This
was a jump from <500 before and after the
event.
● #queensland saw a small spike on the day
(1,344 images), however also saw spikes on
weekends before and after.
● #instameet was also used for 1,657 images.
These are not included in the graph for
scaling, as international instameets (e.g.
USA) saw much higher volume.

10. THE CAMPAIGN ITSELF
● 3,000 of the images were posted
before 9am.
● Sunrise and Sunsets were the
most common time periods for
photos on #thisisqueensland
(promoted at official meetups).
● Other hashtags rose steadily
throughout the day.

11. IMAGERY
Most popular image of the day‘Image Wall’ @ 11pm, 4 October

12. INTERACTIONS
● Both Likes & Comments followed
a long-tail distribution, which is
fairly standard for social media
content.
● Most popular image received
>9,500 likes, while over 90% of
the images had less than 10.
● Only 41 posts (0.6%) had >50
comments, while 5,535 (83.8%)
had less than 5.
● Should allow TEQ to determine
the most impactful images.

13. LONG TERM IMPACTS
● We developed a way to determine (within a
few hours) when user x followed account y.
● Thus able to map growth other time.
● Instameet campaign led to over 6k new
Instagram followers for TEQ, a large
proportion of which can be expected to
continue to follow beyond the campaign.
● Increases reach of TEQ, but whether that
converts to increased tourism numbers has
yet to be seen.

14. VALUE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR TOURISM
● Optimise the experience of guests through their social
media interactions
● Monitoring and evaluating the short and long-term success
of social media campaigns
● Marketing/Building Narratives: “The Gold Coast is the most
talked about tourist destination in QLD”

15. A BRIEF PLUG FOR HYPOMETER

16. A BRIEF PLUG FOR HYPOMETER
● Hypometer has been featured in/on:
○ ABC News 24 & Channel 7
○ The Australian, Sydney Morning
Herald, The Age & Brisbane
Times
○ Pacific Magazines
○ 4BC Brisbane & ABC National
Radio
○ MusicFeeds
○ FasterLouder
● Happy to discuss uses of technology
after this session

17. SUMMARY
Darryl Woodford & Katie Prowd
dp.woodford@qut.edu.au | k2.prowd@qut.edu.au
Twitter: @dpwoodford / @katieprowd / @thehypometer /
@socialmediaQUT