Social media

We often say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but how often do we actually use the right photos to convey key points? 

Most businesses have something they need to tell their visitors or need to stand out somehow. A single photo might do the trick. 

Have you thought about the key messages you're trying to convey and then made sure you're using photos that tell that story? 

Years ago I advised a hotelier, Dave, who ran a small hotel in an area that was notorious for dirty and run-down …

Social media is an essential part of tourism marketing. It’s free and can be incredibly effective.

It can also feel overwhelming and stressful. Here are a few ideas to help:

1. Create, then consume. Social media is useful when you use it to post, not just to scroll. So stop scrolling, think what you want to post, post it, and then if you have time, take a peak at the rest of your timeline. Being deliberate about how you use social media definitely helps.

2. Decide why you want to be on social…

Social media is a funny thing. It’s free and easy to use. It can help you reach millions of potential customers. But when most people talk about it, they mention negatives!

Yes! it can be useful for business and marketing but…

It takes up so much time. It’s hard to know if it’s really working. It’s hard to come up with ideas. It’s hard to keep up. All of these things can be true. They’re also relatively easy to solve. Sometimes, the problem isn’t the one we think.

There are a few mistakes eve…

Have you tried letting your visitors do your marketing for you? 

The 'normal' ways to do this is through word of mouth recommendations. I'm suggesting going a step further with four different ways to encourage your visitors to help promote your business - without being pushy.

First of all, you can encourage word of mouth recommendations through social media, simply by suggesting people follow you or asking happy customers to post photos of their visit. 

The second way is to think about offeri…

When you write a social media post, are you an expert sprinkler of #hashtags or are you still mystified by the random-seeming words after the # sign?

It doesn’t help that each social media channel uses hashtags in different ways. And that some guidelines and algorithms have also recently changed. Here’s a quick overview.

First of all, what are hashtags?

They’re the short words or phrases that follow the #, that help perform the sorting process to decide which posts get seen, and when. Not all…

When your marketing budget is limited, there's an easy way to add power to your promotions: piggyback. Piggyback marketing essentially means using someone else's marketing budget to benefit your business. 

Obviously I don't mean actually using their money, but rather harnessing the power of their activity and piggybacking on the awareness they're able to create. It's a bit like riding in the slipstream of a more powerful vehicle. 

Read on for some ideas for current trends you can easily piggyb…

I'm not very musical but every now and then a song gets stuck in my head. For some reason I've got Bob Marley's words singing in my head: let's get together and feel all right. 

It really does feel like it's time for us all to work together. Tourism can be affected by so many different factors (Floods, Brexit, Coronavirus) which we can't control. We can however make everything feel better.

Community. Collaboration. Kindness. None of them cost anything, yet they have enormous power. Visitors lo…

You might have noticed on social media and in the press that it's Something Day or Week almost every day? Whether it's Dry January, Black Friday or Take Your Pet to Work Day, there's always an 'awareness day' with a hashtag trying to grab attention.

You might have even tried to use one of these hashtags to give your own social media a boost? I've put together a few ideas to help you use awareness days more successfully. 

First things first.

What are 'awareness days'?

For decades we've used …