“How to create a comprehensive plan, prepare material and monitor it without huge time expense?”
Honestly you get out what you put in. Using AI can speed up creation of a social media plan and copy for captions, but identifying your audience, understanding their interests and how to communicate with them, and testing content, does require a time investment, but it also creates better results.
"How to avoid being repetitive but still give audiences value?"
- Create content targeting the 5 Stages of Travel, and across content buckets relevant to your brand. For example: inspiring, educational, behind the scenes, and products. Or inspiring, educational, user generated content, services and team.
- Break FAQ’s, services/products and educational content down into bite-sized, saveable and shareable pieces so you can get more content from a single topic.
- Share similar content in different formats eg. As a single image post one month and a reel the next.
"What are your Social Media Marketing plan recommendations at various stages of Product & Audience lifecycle"
- We recommend using "The 5 Stages of Travel" as a guide for your social media content.
- You can create content plans that target your audience/s at each of the stages: Dreaming, Researching, Booking, Experiencing & Sharing. Find out more about the 5 Stages of Travel here.
- Our golden rule is to ensure that 80% of content is about being inspiring, educational and entertaining, with 20% about selling what you offer to gain bookings.
"How do you deal with negative comments (racism, bullying and plain stupid questions), would you suggest deleting them or hiding them? What's the benefit of hiding the comments, people can still see them and interact with them?"
- If a comment is hate speech, bullying, a rude reply to another audience member’s comment, or completely irrelevant to your business, it’s fine to delete these.
- When it comes to questions, it’s good to remember that while things may seem obvious to us, there are no stupid questions – if one person is asking them it’s likely at least a few more are thinking it, so be as patient as you can, answer them, and move on. If the question has nothing to do with you, but isn’t causing any issues then just leave it.
- If it’s a bad review of your business, it’s better to acknowledge it and try to move the conversation to private message or email to resolve the issue, as people will often get louder about their complaints if they see their comment has been deleted.
- The difference between hiding and deleting comments is that hiding a Facebook comment will keep it hidden from everyone except that person and their friends. They won't know that the comment is hidden, so you can avoid potential fallout.
"Do the captions have to be a part of the video or does it have to be a part of the platform such as YouTube or Vimeo?"
As discussed on the webinar, it’s better to add the captions in the platform, but adding them on the video before uploading is better than not having them at all. Adding them on the video prior to uploading will mean you aren’t benefiting from the preference platforms give to native content. It will still make your video more accessible, but depending on how you add them it may not have the same SEO benefits.
"How do you increase SEO on a TikTok video? Does putting keywords on the video using text and hiding it to the side work?"
I haven’t seen this done but I wouldn’t recommend it. If viewers can see it this would look strange, and could be seen as keyword stuffing which could actually hurt your SEO ranking. Things that will increase your TikTok SEO:
- Knowing your audience and researching what they’re searching for on TikTok
- Incorporating relevant keywords into your video file name, titles, post caption, audio and video closed captions. Including a keyword in your video script means it shows up twice, once audibly and once in the closed captions.
- Use 3-5 highly relevant hashtags – you'll identify these during your audience research.
"What is the advantage of applying for the blue tick on Instagram - if any, and what are the requirements for applying, how do you do it? Thank you."
The blue tick will verify an account as authentically representing a notable brand, business or person. It's intended to be used by celebrities, public figures, and global brands or organisations. As a business the main benefit would be to protect your brand and proves your account is authentic. It's probably not an issue for most businesses and not all applications are approved. It can be applied for from your account settings and you have to provide document proof for authenticity to confirm your notability.
"When people share stories /posts and you re-post these would you recommend adding to them, e.g music or captions or would you leave them as they are?"
For the most part you would simply share user generated content with a comment of your own on your post rather than adding music/captions to their content. This keeps it authentic and the person who posted it will be chuffed you shared it!
"What is the best way to promote items from your retail store?"
This will depend on your products and audience so it's a matter of analysing that first to come up with the best approach. There are ways to integrate your ecommerce products into social media pages using eCommerce platforms like Shopify.
"In the era of AI and machine learning, how can we integrate these technologies into our social media strategies to predict and adapt to changing travel trends and consumer behaviours in real-time?"
You can integrate AI and machine learning tools like "sentiment analysis algorithms" to gauge user reactions to travel-related content, which allow for real-time behaviour. Another area to look into is using "natural language processing" (NLP) models to monitor online conversations about destinations or more specific tourism sectors, which can help to identify emerging travel trends.
There is still a lot to learn in this area so we will be interested to see how it all evolves and integrates into day to day social media strategies.
