How to Use Social Hubs for Tourism Marketing

Summer is here, which means the high season is upon us. Even more of a reason to maximize your tourism marketing efforts to increase visitors and generate more revenue for your destination.

With a majority of social posts centered around travel, creating a social hub is a simple and efficient way for tourism organizations to leverage this content for marketing, advertising, and overall outreach efforts.

What does a social hub look like for a tourism company? A social hub pulls together various social feeds like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. into one place. Whether user-generated or promoted content, potential visitors frequently check social media to make travel decisions, plan their itinerary and find local businesses and restaurants to visit.

Here are the best social hub strategies to maximize your exposure, promote positive user recommendations, increase overall visits and contribute to your tourism marketing efforts:

1) Integrate Authentic User-Generated Social Content on your Website

On the vast interwebs, the rule of thumb is that the easier you are to find, the easier it is to draw customers to your website or social. In your social hub, you can add all of your social media accounts and associated #hashtags to streamline your promotional efforts. (i.e. frequently visited local monuments, museums, nightlife, events). In addition, you can aggregate location-tagged content and display them around your website so visitors can get excited from all the social buzz around specific activities or venues!

By curating your hub, you can serve as their social travel agent without the hard sell. Here, Visit Florida has curated all of the #loveFL that tourists have experienced on their latest trip. Utilize positive content generated by your users to expand your marketing and help increase conversions.

With built-in analytics, you can also see what types of content and social networks are the most popular to successfully engage users. This is important because you have audiences on all social networks, and the last thing you want to do is not engage with them properly and lose out on potential customers. In addition, you can target your influential contributors to partner up with them for future marketing efforts.

2) Run a Hashtag Contest

When customers are incentivized, they are more willing to participate in your social media efforts, providing more content to use for outreach campaigns. For example, Travelocity's #iwannago campaign encouraged users to post the places they want to visit to eventually win a trip to that exact place.

As a result of this campaign, Travelocity was able to generate over 33M social impressions, hundreds of thousands of pageviews, and over 25k posts submitted from Twitter, Instagram, and Vine. For future contests, they will know the source of their users so they can better promote and get even higher engagement. With all this social content, they can then leverage it further by displaying them on any website, any mobile app, TV screen in visitor centers, or even digital billboards as an advertisement to engage their potential visitors!

3) Sell Ad Space on Your Social Hub

While a social hub is great for increasing traffic onto your website and tourist leads, it can also be used to generate additional revenue from advertising. Many local restaurants, businesses and events also want to take advantage of the increased levels tourism and tourists need recommendations. Why not sell space on your social hub to promote local business?

VisitLondon can monetize their social hub by selling ad space to a hotel or a local amusement park. Their social hub will attract a lot of eyeballs, and a social hub will allow you to even specify every 10th post will show the ad in the hub.

4) Repurpose Content for Marketing Collateral

Creating content is expensive. It takes a lot of planning, time, resources, and money. Social networks today have made it very easy for users to create content. If you utilize the strategies above for your social hub, you will incentivize your audience to create user generated content for you and have a library of genuine social content in the palm of your hands. In the spirit of efficiency, you can leverage this content by asking for user rights of these content/photos for future marketing initiatives, promotional campaigns, brochures, presentations and more!

Visit Scotland below is aggregating #brilliantmoments from their tourists of what best represents Scotland. Whether it be beautiful scenery photos to friend photos at the local pub, this tourism bureau can now ask for permissions on these photos and repurpose it for their marketing brochures. All it took is one social hub, one webpage, one hashtag, and a social call out to use the hashtag. The result? A ever-growing library of over 18,000 posts to use!

Just to recap, here is how you are going to get more people engaged, get more trips booked and generate additional revenue:

• Generate web traffic: Bring together authentic social content to increase awareness
• Hashtag Contest: Incentivize customers to participate and engage other users
• Monetize: Sell ad space for local businesses for additional revenue
• Repurpose Content: Utilize past content to use for future marketing initiatives

Take advantage of all destination-based content out there and give your tourism marketing efforts a boost this summer!

Talk to our content experts to launch your social hub today!