Facebook Offers highly recommended tourism businesses - not only does it present a fantastic opportunity for you to spotlight your business, it also has simple-to-use yet powerful targeting features. Through Facebook Offers, you can build brand awareness amongst new visitors (through existing fans 'sharing' the post), and entice dormant fans to return for your products and/or services.
Ooh, I'm listening - I want to learn more about Facebook Offers!
Facebook Offers are a fairly new feature on Facebook. These work in a similar way to voucher sites like Groupon, Groupy, TreatMe, and others, except Facebook Offers are only available within Facebook. Facebook Offers require a budget to go live. The extent of reach (how many people see the offer) is based on how much you...
As a tourism operator, you may have been advised that in addition to giving the best possible service to your customers and ensuring that you love up your agents, you also need to ensure your online presence is attractive to both your clientele and Google. Just how important Google is to most businesses is interesting, a bit scary and is about to become even more significant.
An accommodation provider has a long to-do list to promote themselves online.
Get an attractive website that guests like and ensure it is properly built to please Google.
Add an online booking engine and integrated channel management to ensure that you are listed on major OTAs.
Spend time on your website each month to optimise it so Google ranks you well.
Finally, businesses are catered for on the popular image-based social media site, Pinterest!
Pinterest's premise is to provide an online space where users can curate their own pin boards of things they love, places that inspire, destinations they want to go, anything that's important to them that they want to share.
For the tourism business, this is great news. As a tourism product is experiential, images and video are what inspire and resonate with potential guests.
Some of the specific features for businesses which have been released previously include 'pin it' buttons, which you can add to your website allowing people to 'pin' their favourite content from your site. Awesome tours, stunning destinations and beautiful accommodations can all be pinned from your site to...
More and more tourism businesses are coming to grips with the reality that Social Media is an important component of their brand and customer engagement.
One of the best ways to do this is using Facebook and adding 'apps' to your page which showcase products and get people talking about your brand.
Two handy Facebook apps for the tourism business:
Tour Radar
If you run a tour company, this great Aussie-born App is ideal. Tour Radar provides the ability to sell tours, offers a platform for travellers to meet each other prior to the tour starting and share qualified reviews - all on your Facebook page. Another very attractive feature of Tour Radar is the all-important Facebook Competition. Tour Radar has a competition component that can dramatically increase your...
For the last two years, Tourism New Zealand (TNZ) has been leading the parade celebrating the emerging markets for tourism businesses. Of these new markets, the spotlight is brightly shining on the Chinese traveller.
At numerous conferences and AGMs, a speaker will tell us what we need to do to prepare: including cooking Congee, preparing special teas, creating a Chinese website and being active on the Chinese social network, Weibo. They tell us that without creating a suitable environment for Chinese tourists to book and experience New Zealand, we'll miss out on the 'golden goose of tourism'.
Last week, I attended Tourism New Zealand's all day workshop on the Chinese and Halal market along with two others from the Tomahawk Team.
Curious about how many people are viewing your site on a mobile phone? You can easily find out using Google Analytics.
You'll need to have analytics installed on your website first, which is totally free and just requires a Google email address for you to create the account.
If you've got Google running, log in and head to "Audience" and then select the "Mobile" option. The "Overview" and "Devices" dropdowns will appear.
On "Overview" you'll be able to see the number of people viewing on a mobile device vs. a desktop, find out how many pages they look at and how many of those visits "Bounce" which means they look at one page, and then exit the site:
