Sometimes it seems like everybody is glued to their phone or tablet. And what is it that they are doing on their phone or tablet? Probably getting their daily intake of social media. Most of us are guilty of this obsession. To make sure you catch your audience’s eye, you need to ensure you have a social media campaign as part of your Vacation Rental Inbound Marketing Campaign. If you don’t have a social media campaign, you’re missing an opportunity to reach the 86% of American adults who use social media according to Pew Research Center . How do you create a successful social media campaign when there is so much competition for social media users’ attention?
Goals
As with every part of your inbound marketing campaign, start with determining your goals. I’m not just talking about getting heads in beds on this one. Your goals for social media marketing should be things like lead generation, brand awareness and engagement, learning about consumers, and funneling traffic to your landing page .
Focus
You could try to have a presence on every social media platform in existence, but think quality over quantity. Whether it’s fantastically or poorly managed, your social media presence is how people on a platform are going to think of your properties. An effective social media campaign uses the platforms that have the best return on invested time and resources. You might be asking me which are the best platforms for my vacation rentals to be on – here are the top performers for our clients: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. We do have them using Google +, but this is for SEO only.
Branding
Your social media presence is the first contact many people will have with your vacation rental. Everything you put on your profile page, from your logo and cover photo to your posts and interaction in comments is your social media branding. This needs to be in line with the branding on your site. Be approachable. Maintaining your brand throughout your social media campaign helps it be more recognizable and keeps your message consistent.
Schedule
Lack of consistency can dry up your following. You also don’t want to post so much people get annoyed and unfollow you. Setting a schedule for posting and being mindful of engagement, is a sure-fire way to avoid pitfalls.
Visibility
Social media uses algorithms similar to Google’s. Sales-y words in posts receive a mild form of the Google slap and visibility increases with more consistent posting, likes, follows, and engagement. On the most widely used platform, Facebook, you have many options for increasing your visibility. Here’s the top three: you can pay for a boost to your content, you can ask an influencer to recommend your page and the last, most common, you can ask everyone you know to like and share your page. Also, another very successful approach is running Facebook ads. There are several options to choose from, it just depends on your goals, time and of course budget.
Incentives
How do you get likes or followers for your page, shares, engagement with your content, and click throughs to your website? You may get some response just for having awesome posts, but the response can always be improved by offering incentives. Whether your incentives are content based or a discount, keep them brand centric rather than offering generic options. You want your incentives to increase prospects’ experience of your service rather than someone else’s product.
Pulling it all together
In the end, you need to pull all these steps together and put it into an easy to follow document. This campaign should serve as living document, in the fact that you will want to note changes to it as well as what was going on to make certain changes. One last tip, when looking at your guests’ behavior, keep in mind that as the seasons change so does your audience’s’ habits and activity. A well-built, responsive social media campaign is a great lead generation tool when used correctly.
