Social media refers to the coming together of people within a community (whether that’s an actual online community or simply a section on a travel or media Web site dedicated to giving consumers a voice) to actively participate in the creation of new and/or the management of existing content.
This could mean allowing users to post their own photos or videos, to rate and review trips and travel experiences (http://www.tripadvisor.com), to create tags for content, to write or respond to blogs, to change existing content (like wikis such as http://www.WetPaint.com), and more.
Social media has allowed travellers to feel empowered and in charge of their Web experiences, but it can be far more than that for marketers of tourism. When marketers harness social media elements, they can use the ” wisdom of the crowds” to great advantage to increase sales and to generate goodwill among visitors.
Optimization using social media is a way to allow your visitors to influence what you show other visitors. When done correctly, it offloads the work of determining relevanc to visitors. Other visitors essentially take care of the work for you.
There are several simple ways to allow your guests to engage in social media:
- Reviews – In travel, customer-written reviews have been a clear value to consumers. The key with reviews is participation — the more coverage your travel products have, the more effective the reviews will be.
- Ratings – Ratings include stars, thumbs up and down, and a myriad of other forms. Travellers register their level of approval, and the product’s rating becomes based on some form of average of responses. This type of consumer feedback is incredibly useful for optimization because it is easily rankable.
- Digg/Reddit – Social sites provide a clearinghouse for user responses. The most well-known, Digg, allows sites to put up an icon on articles that lets the reader “Digg” the content. More “Diggs” and the article shows up higher on Digg.com, a central site. Reddit is done in a similar fashion. This is cheap, but useful primarily for editorial content. It is easy to be irrelevant and undiscovered here.
- Sharing media – images, video and more, tagged with keywords can also expand the visibility of your brand. Encouraging visitors to give favourable reviews to this content can also boost exposure on sites like flickr.com and youtube.com
Optimization using social media is perfect when you have a very broad product set — for example, a travel site that may represent literally millions of combinations of locations, properties, and services.
It would be impossible for a single travel company or tourism association to build up its own database to help customers make decisions — in other words, to offer recommendations based on behavioral targeting — but by allowing consumers to do the work for you, others still get the benefit of recommendations.
Social optimization only works when travellers are willing to participate. Promoting the fact that you have recommendations and ratings when nobody has actually recommended or rated anything is as compelling as entering an empty restaurant on a Saturday night. Having nothing may, in fact, be better. Even small populations of participants can be risky, as individual negative and positive reviews can skew recommendations in a sub-optimal way.
With this in mind, perhaps the best thing we can do is refer our ideal guests to the gathering places already frequented by travellers and encouraging them to make their preference for our services known there.
